Episode 125: Paper Trails

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He stood naked at the edge of the river.

It was morning, but the July sun had already warmed the stones beneath his bare feet.

His clothing was piled up behind him, a suicide note held down by the weight of his silver, personalized pocket watch.

As he stepped into the cold water of the Ohio River, he brought nothing with him except a small burlap sack.

Holding it up above the surface of the water, he turned northward and walked against the current, heading a good distance upstream.

And as he did, his thoughts were consumed with the loss of his wife, Caroline.

Her illness had arrived suddenly, and before anyone was able to help, it had snuffed out her life.

They had married in April of 1895, and yet two months later, Caroline was gone.

So now, with no reason to stay, Johan was making his own dramatic departure.

Upstream he found a pile of stones, clearly man-made, and against them rested a small wooden boat.

Inside it, a pile of freshly folded clothing waited for him on the small seat.

After placing the small sack inside, Johan climbed in, dressed himself, and then began to row into deeper water.

After a few moments, he stopped and emptied the contents of the sack into the dark water, letting the river carry it away.

Then he grabbed the oars and did the same with himself, moving the boat into the stronger current, which slowly put distance between himself and the small town of Wheeling, West Virginia.

The men who would find his pocket watch and suicide note would assume Johan had been successful in his dark task.

Caroline was in her grave, and now her husband was gone as well, drowned by the river and his sorrow.

Life can sometimes be hard and bitter, but every now and then, things aren't what they appear to be.

In an age when starting over involved little more than packing up and moving on, it's amazing what some people managed to get away with: con jobs, insurance fraud, and all manner of lies designed to fool the innocent.

But Johan's fake suicide wasn't the only deception he had committed.

And sadly, it wouldn't be his last.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

Johann was born John Schmidt in Strasbourg, Germany in 1860.

He was also born five years earlier in Horweiler, Germany, only there he was known as Jacob Schmidt.

And honestly, there are more names and dates, 25 surnames, almost as many first names, and a whole list of hometowns, which makes it almost impossible to nail down the real Johan.

And I suppose that was the point.

Over the years, he would do a lot of moving around, and not just in Europe.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, so let me back up.

The first wedding we have on record for Johann was in 1881.

He married a young woman named Anna in the Austrian city of Vienna.

Two years later, though, she passed away, and no one was sure what the cause of death was.

But Johan wasn't the type to sit around grieving.

Months later, he married his second wife, a wealthy young woman named Christine Ram, and this marriage seemed to be the one.

They had four children together and shared roughly four years.

But in 1891, Johann skipped town, boarding boarding a steamship bound for America.

While on the ship, he met a poor young immigrant woman and the pair were married right after docking in New York.

But two months later, his new bride passed away.

Cause of death?

An unknown illness.

And again, rather than mourn her loss, Johann packed up and moved westward, finally settling in Chicago in 1892.

During his time in Chicago, between 1892 and 1895, he married at least six more times.

Most of them passed away within months of their wedding day, always tragic and unexpected to poor unlucky Johan.

But not all of them.

Sometimes he would simply disappear in the night, change his name, and go on to marry someone else.

And in early 1895, one of those abandoned brides came back to haunt him.

Janet Spencer went to the police with her story, claiming that Johan, under the new alias of C.A.

Calford, had eloped with her, then stolen hundreds of dollars of her own money before deserting her a short while later.

Johan was arrested, but somehow managed to avoid any charges.

Once he was released, he packed his bags and headed east, finally arriving in the bustling town of Wheeling, West Virginia, which might sound familiar from the beginning of today's story.

It was there that he met Caroline.

fell in love and married her in April of 1895.

And then, of course, she passed away two months later.

And the month after that, Johan staged his dramatic fake suicide, fooling everyone into thinking that he had drowned himself in the river.

Well, not everyone.

Local minister Herman Haas hadn't cared for Johan from the moment he laid eyes on him.

When he saw the man take an interest in Caroline Hoke, a wealthy young widow in his church, Pastor Haas was said to have warned her.

Caroline, as we already know, didn't listen, and the pair were married a short time later.

After Caroline took ill, the good reverend did what he did for all of his unwell parishioners.

He visited her at home.

While he was there, chatting with her and offering kind words and encouragement, Johan came into the room.

Haas watched as Johan poured a small amount of white powder into a glass of water before handing it to his wife.

and just assumed it was a medicine of sorts.

But Caroline's death cast that moment in a new light and Haas was beginning to have doubts.

Even though Johan had apparently ended his own life, the minister went to the police and asked them to open an investigation.

And sometime after dragging the river for bodies and coming up empty, someone else noticed another unusual detail.

Caroline's grave had been tampered with.

No one knew why though.

And they wouldn't, at least not for another few years.

Because rather than being dead at the bottom of the Ohio River, Johan had returned to Chicago.

Once there, he married a woman named Maria Steinbacher.

And wouldn't you know it, she passed away as well, just four months later.

1896 was a busy year for Johan.

Over the course of 12 months, he married seven times in five different states.

And while he was doing so, Reverend Haas was back in West Virginia, obsessively digging for any new information he could find.

There was a single witness who claimed to see Johan crossing the river that fateful day in July of 1895.

And while the police didn't believe the man, Haas certainly did.

So he spent a good amount of his spare time reading personal ads from across the country, looking for a clue as to Johan's whereabouts.

Which might require a bit of explanation, so let me fill in the blanks for you.

Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, men and women who were looking for love often placed ads announcing their intentions in the local paper.

Today, all you really need to do is download an app and swipe left or right, but back then it was a different world.

The first known personal ad that historians have been able to pinpoint was published in a newspaper in the late 1600s.

By the time Johan was around, most people didn't think twice about placing or responding to a Lonely Hearts ad.

It was a culture that Johan had been taking advantage of for years, and while it had been wildly successful, it also left a paper trail.

Eventually, Reverend Haas felt that he had enough circumstantial evidence to reach out to the police.

He suspected that Johan had moved back to Chicago, so he reached out to an inspector there named George Shippey.

But Shippey had been chasing the case from the opposite end.

He had a series of mysterious deaths to account for, but no suspect had materialized as of yet.

The letter from Haas provided him with the missing piece.

In 1900, Shippey boarded a train and traveled to Wheeling to meet with Haas in person and extend his investigation.

After talking with the local police, he convinced them that poisoning was the most likely cause of death.

and a simple exhumation of Caroline Hoke's body should settle the matter.

Except, that's when they hit a snag.

Remember how I mentioned that Caroline's grave had been tampered with but no one knew why?

Well once her coffin was opened and her body was visible, everyone knew the answer.

Someone had opened her grave shortly after her death, removed all of her internal organs, and then reburied her.

And the only reason to do that would be to hide the evidence of poisoning.

Whoever did it would also most likely have placed those organs into a small burlap sack, carried them away, and disposed of them elsewhere, maybe even in the river.

And just like that, Shippy knew that Johan was his man.

All he had to do now was find him.

That would be harder than he expected though.

Between 1897 and 1904, Johan married at least 26 more times.

Most of those marriages ended with him disappearing in the night, while at least eight of them ended with the death of his new bride.

So on December 3rd of 1904, Johan found himself once again lonely and looking for love, which is why he placed an ad in the Tribune.

The woman who answered it did so on behalf of her sister Maria.

It seems that Maria was a relatively wealthy owner of a local candy store, and while she was too shy to respond herself, her sister Bertha was more than happy to get involved.

She sent a response to Johan and gave the address and schedule for Maria's store, inviting him to drop by any time he wished.

And Johan did exactly that, just three days later.

He and Maria connected immediately, and soon enough, they were having a meal together in the back room of the store.

That was December 6th.

Four days later, the couple were married, and a week after that, Maria was sick in bed with pain in her stomach and lower abdomen.

Johan played the part of the distraught husband like a pro.

He'd had dozens of chances to practice, after all.

So early on in Maria's illness, he wrote a letter to another of her sisters, Amelia, requesting that she come to visit and help take care of Maria.

But Amelia did more than help.

Apparently she and Johan did a lot of flirting and she later mailed him a photograph of herself which he claimed would never leave his breast pocket.

Amelia returned in January of 1906, and the morning after a nasty argument between Johann and Maria about her jealousy over Amelia's presence, Maria was dead.

The next day, as Amelia was helping the newly widowed Johan remove his dead wife's bedding, he proposed to her.

Because he was either insanely charming and charismatic, or entirely absent of a single ounce of tact.

Either way, I can't help but cringe at the thought.

Amelia turned him down, but three days later, she changed her mind.

They were married on January 21st, just three days after Maria's funeral.

But I have to believe that Amelia saw the warning signs.

There was nothing normal about her marriage to Johan, and there were a whole lot of questions surrounding her sister's death.

It would have been impossible to be completely at peace.

And yet, when Johan asked her to withdraw the modern equivalent of $20,000 from the bank and just give it to him, she played along.

Which might have been why her other sister, Bertha, the one who had set up Johan and Maria just weeks before, stepped in and told Amelia what she suspected.

That Maria had been poisoned and Johan was the killer.

At that moment, everything clicked for Amelia.

She gathered whatever evidence she might have had and prepared to confront him that very day.

But that opportunity never arrived.

Johan did what he was so very good at doing,

he escaped.

In the end, the thing that made Johan Hoke who he was turned out to also be the thing that got him captured.

He was a predictable criminal who left a very public trail behind him.

Newspaper advertisements, marriage certificates, and sometimes even dead brides.

It was the very nature of his criminal life that made it easier to chase him down.

After Johan slipped away from Chicago, the police there started to use that against him.

They sent his photo to newspapers across the country and had it posted with a warning and request for information.

It was the equivalent of an incriminating video being passed around on social media, just a century before that was a thing.

Which is why Catherine Kimmerly caught her breath while she was reading the morning paper in late January of 1905.

The man who had arrived just days earlier to rent a room from her, The man who had flirted incessantly and made a marriage proposal the day after they met.

That man was staring back at her from the page.

Catherine sent word to the police in Chicago that the man they were looking for was in her New York home.

Within days, he was captured and arrested, and his possessions were searched.

Among his few belongings was a fountain pen that seemed suspicious to the investigators.

When they opened it, they discovered it contained a white powder.

Arsenic, to be exact.

Johan Hoke was brought back to Chicago where Inspector George Shippey interrogated him for information about his past.

Johan wasn't completely forthcoming, but they did manage to get some names from him.

15 ex-wives that were still alive, all of whom claimed that he had tricked them out of a small fortune.

To make matters worse for him, later that same January, the police managed to have Maria's body exhumed, probably after getting permission from her sister Amelia.

What they found confirmed their fears.

Maria's stomach showed traces of arsenic, and because she had been embalmed with chemicals that did not contain that particular substance, the police were able to connect Johan to her death.

The trial that followed took almost four months to complete.

During the proceedings, witnesses in the courtroom claimed that Johan looked almost happy to be there, whistling and humming as his crimes were presented and deliberated over.

Naturally, the press had a field day with it, and word spread about the infamous lady killer.

In May of 1905, the jury delivered their verdict.

Johann Hoke was found guilty of the murder of Maria Walker.

Sadly, the police were never able to tie enough evidence of the other murders to him, like that of Caroline Hoke in Wheeling, West Virginia, so those were left unaccounted for.

But Inspector Schippe had to be pleased in the end.

He'd caught the killer, and justice was going to be served.

But...

Not so fast.

Even though his execution was scheduled for June of 1905, there were more complications headed their way, and they probably won't make a lot of sense to most of us.

You see, despite the fact that Johan wasn't the most attractive man to begin with, and that he was now a convicted murderer awaiting execution behind bars, some women still couldn't resist him.

Think about that.

This was a man notoriously famous for killing his wives, and yet as he sat in jail, Several marriage proposals were sent to him by strange women from all around the country.

It's a concept that psychologists refer to as hybristophilia when individuals find themselves attracted to those who have committed violent crimes.

Other well-known criminals to receive marriage proposals include Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy.

One of those proposals came from a woman named Cora Wilson who lived right there in Chicago.

She was single and wealthy and wanted to try and save Johan before it was too late.

She requested a stay of execution from the governor, who surprisingly agreed.

She even took the decision to the Supreme Court, but after months of legal battles, Ms.

Wilson's efforts were ultimately shut down.

Johan's execution date was set for February.

In the weeks leading up to it, you might expect that he changed his tune and attempted to leave the world with a clean conscience, but that's not how Johan handled it.

Instead, He sent a message to those involved in his conviction that while he was convinced Maria had been murdered, he was not the killer.

It didn't matter, though.

On February 23rd, 1906, he was led onto the platform in Chicago, where a noose was placed over his head.

After a few formalities and a moment with the priest, the lever was pulled and the trapdoor fell out from beneath him.

There would be no faking it this time.

Johann Hoke

was officially dead.

Johann Hoke was a monster.

I don't think there's any doubt about that.

He used core human needs, the need for community, companionship, and love, to lure in women and take advantage of them.

And the horrifying results speak for themselves.

During his interrogations with Inspector George Shippey, Johan was said to have professed his reasoning behind all those crimes.

Marriage was purely a business proposition, he said.

When I found they had money, I went after it.

He was what some historians have called a professional bigamist, someone who made a career out of marrying as many women as possible in order to steal from them.

A report from the Women's Rescue League in 1905 estimated that more than 50,000 women had been victims of similar crimes up to that point.

Johan Hoke, as far as historians can gather, was personally responsible for nearly 60 of them.

Experts and authorities try to warn people, too.

Way back in 1884, nearly a decade before Johan arrived in Chicago and began his murderous activity, the Chicago Tribune ran a massive five-column article that walked people through how this type of crime worked and how they could protect themselves against it.

The author of the article even placed fake marriage ads in the very same paper and then studied the nearly 40 responses he received.

The results were eye-opening because they showed just how quickly some people ignored common sense when it came to their own search for companionship and love.

Everyone longs to find their special someone.

But not everyone is who they claim to be.

Criminals like Johan Hooke stepped in to take advantage of that naivete, but don't assume that this was a male-only field.

Between 1920 and 1954, Nancy Hazel killed four of her husbands, along with a handful of others who got in the way.

She did it for the insurance money, and it earned her the nickname the Black Widow.

Vera Rensi was a Romanian woman convicted of killing 35 husbands and lovers between 1920 and 1930 using Johan's favorite murder weapon, arsenic.

But the most famous female Lonely Hearts killer in American history might have also been the most local to Johann Hooke.

Belle Guinness followed the same recipe for her own murderous ways.

She placed personal ads in local papers, explaining that she was looking for a wealthy husband and invited anyone interested to come and speak with her.

Many of those unwitting men would eventually disappear, and Belle's bank account would grow a little more.

But here's the craziest part of her story.

Belle Ganesse was married in Chicago in 1884 and was still shown as living there on the U.S.

Census in 1900, which means that for a number of years, Bell and Johan lived in the same town.

Naturally, that makes me wonder, did either of them read the other person's ads?

And if they did, did they ever consider replying?

Or was it far too easy for each of them to see through the lies that had been printed on the page?

Perhaps they occasionally ran across the obituary of another mysterious death and nodded knowingly.

After all, it takes a black heart to do the things that each of them did, and we'd like to believe those types of people are rare.

If history has taught us anything, though, it's that sometimes we get it wrong.

The story of Johann Hoke reveals a lot about human nature, and naturally it captured the attention of a lot of people at the time.

During his trial, the press dubbed him Bluebeard Hoke, a callback to an old French fairy tale.

And if you've never heard it before, it's a story worth repeating.

Stick around after this short sponsor break to learn all about it.

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It's often said that life imitates art, that the decisions we make, the paths we pick, and the mistakes we stumble into are all echoes of something already found in the world of art.

Whether that's universally true or not is open for debate, but in the case of Johann Hoke, we can certainly see the roots of his actions in something much older, the fairy tale of Bluebeard.

In fact, it's those very same similarities that led the press to refer to him as Bluebeard Hoke, as if it was a modern version of a classic story.

That tale was first written down by author Charles Perrault, who published his collection of French fairy tales in 1697.

The book was called Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals, and it was inside it that many readers first encountered the legend of Bluebeard.

It's said that Bluebeard was a wealthy landowner who could buy anything his heart desired.

Massive homes, golden carriages, works of art, and gilded decorations.

And he held that same attitude about a lot of things, including marriage.

And when we meet him in the story, Bluebeard is on the prowl for his seventh bride.

His nickname apparently came from the fact that he literally dyed his beard blue, something the locals around him found repulsive.

In fact, because none of the people in town knew what happened to the man's previous six wives, they used that blue-dyed beard as an excuse.

Perhaps, they said, it was his ugly beard that frightened them all off.

Soon enough, though, he took notice of the daughter of his neighbor, and after spending weeks to win her affections, she consented to marriage.

If she had concerns about marrying a man who had walked the aisle six times before, we don't know.

All we're told is that this unnamed young woman agreed to be his wife.

Shortly after their wedding, Bluebeard told his wife that he must go away for a short trip.

He tells her she's welcome to explore the house and use any room in it as if it were her own and gives her the master key that unlocks all of them.

The only catch is that one particular room was off-limits and he warned her to stay out of it.

Not long after he left the young bride decided to host a party at the house.

She had married up in the world after all and wanted to show her friends the new wealth she had entered into.

As the evening wore on, her guest asked for a tour of the mansion and she happily complied, leading them from room to room so that they could admire every inch of it.

Except for that one room, though.

She probably made a polite excuse and laughed it off and then walked everyone past it.

But it was hard to ignore the one door in the house she wasn't allowed to unlock.

So after everyone had left the party and the house was empty, she slowly crept back to the room and unlocked the door.

Inside, she made a grisly discovery.

There, in the center of a pool of dark red blood, lay the bodies of six dead women.

Bluebeard's wives had not run away after all.

Instead, they had been murdered and left hidden away behind one door that she was not allowed to open.

Frightened, she dropped the key and then quickly retrieved it from the floor, and then she ran from the room, careful to lock the door after herself lest her husband learn of the discovery.

But there was a problem.

The key had somehow landed in a pool of blood, and it was now covered in it.

She returned to her room and cleaned the key, but after it dried, the blood returned.

Over and over she wiped it clean, and each time she did, the red stain returned to its metal surface, which is when she realized what had happened.

The key was enchanted as part of Bluebeard's way of protecting the locked room.

When he returned the following day, the first thing he asked for was the master key.

His young wife did her best to make excuses for not having the key with her, but he insisted that she retrieve it at once and give it back to him.

Finally, unable to hold him off any longer, she returned to her room, picked up the key, and placed it in his hand.

Immediately, he knew that she had defied him.

You wanted to enter the room, he screamed at her.

Well, madam, you shall enter it and take your place among the ladies you saw there.

But here's where art takes a left turn from real life.

Rather than killing her immediately, he agreed to let her take a brief moment to pray for her soul, something she had to beg him for.

Fifteen minutes was all he would allow though, so she rushed back into her room and then opened her window and cried out for help.

Thankfully, her brothers still lived in her father's house next door and they heard her desperate screams.

Immediately, both of them rushed to Bluebeard's house, knocked down the door, and chased the murderous man down before running him through with their swords.

And then it was over.

She had survived and soon found herself the sole heir to Bluebeard's immense fortune.

Later, it's said that she married again, this time to a good man who didn't tell her what to do or what rooms to leave locked.

And unlike much of real life, she and her new husband lived happily ever after.

In the centuries since the story was published, Bluebeard's name has been dusted off and used countless times to refer to those criminals who love killing more than they love their spouses.

And each time it happens, it makes one thing abundantly clear.

The fictional Bluebeard, just like Johan Hoke, only took part of his wedding vows seriously.

Till death do us part.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Michelle Mudo and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast, though.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want a bit more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn more about both of those shows and everything else going on over in one central place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

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Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

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And as always,

thanks for listening.