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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hi everyone and welcome back to Into the Dark with Peyton Moreland. Now before every episode of Into the Dark, we start with something called my 10 seconds and it's just a little bit of time where I talk about something not true crime related. It just starts us off on the right foot and
and gets us going. And again, if you listen to my main podcast, Murder With My Husband, done with my husband, Garrett, he has his own 10 seconds on there and it was just requested to kind of follow through on here. So here we go. My 10 seconds today. So,
I just ordered DoorDash and I like bagels. I just really like bagels, you guys. And I eat bagel, doesn't matter, breakfast, lunch. That's basically what I eat every day. So I ordered this bagel and it's,
the, on DoorDash, I have it like, just leave it at the door. You don't have to hand it to me because most of the time I, well, I'll be honest. I just, it's just easier that way. And, um, this time they rang the doorbell and I was like, what the, what the heck? Like, you know, now Daisy's barking. And I was like, maybe they need something. So I got up and I walked out and they opened the door and our DoorDash account is under Garrett's name.
and he's holding it out to give it to me, and I reach out to grab it, and he pulls it away from me, and I like look at him, and he goes, I have to give this to Garrett, and I was like, and I didn't know what to say, and I go, yeah, I'm Garrett, because I just was like, no, no, I'm not necessarily that I'm Garrett, but that I am the account, like this is the right house, and I go, I'm Garrett, and he goes, you're Garrett, and I was like,
Well, now I'm in too deep. So I just, I just was like, yeah, I'm Garrett. And he's like, okay. And he gave it. And so, yeah, that was my awkward situation with the DoorDash driver. You know, it was funny. I just kind of like fell under pressure and I just started word vomiting. So I'm Garrett. Nice to meet you. Let's get into the episode.
A quick trigger warning, this episode includes discussions of murder, suicide, and the desecration of a corpse. Please listen with care. We've talked about this previously on Binged, but in the past two decades, online dating has exploded in popularity. Over half of all people under 30 say they've used a dating app at some point. And one in five married people under 30 actually met their spouse with the help of the internet.
Now, of course, it can be risky looking for love online. If you've never met someone in person, you have no way of knowing if the things they post about themselves are true. They could lie about their age, occupation, appearance, or even their name. They could say they're Garrett when they're Peyton.
Dating apps and websites are hotbeds for catfishing and financial scamming. But taking a new relationship offline can be even riskier. It's sadly common for people to show up for a first date feeling hopeful, only for the person who seemed so charming in their DMs to be a violent predator in person. But in 1904, apps and dating websites and even the internet didn't exist.
Their equivalent in the early 20th century were personal ads in the newspaper, and Marie Walker would sometimes skim them. Marie was a 46-year-old who'd been married once before. It's unclear what happened to her first husband. The newspapers from the time are kind of contradictory. She either got divorced or her spouse died, but either way, she was single now and had been for years.
Since her marriage had ended, Marie had supported herself by running a successful candy shop in Chicago. The store actually did very well and she was financially comfortable. Marie never had children and she was close to her two sisters, Bertha Sohn and Emilia Fisher. The three sisters lived in the Chicago area and all had roots in Germany.
But Marie's siblings couldn't provide something that was missing in her life. She was lonely. Although her previous shot at a happily ever after hadn't worked out, Marie was ready to love again. So her eyes lit up on December 3rd, 1904, when she saw a personal ad in the paper. It said, "'German, with his own income, "'wishes acquaintance of widow without children. "'Object, matrimony.'"
Marie wrote a reply and learned that the ad writer's name was Johan Otto Ho. Within four days, they met in person.
He agreed to visit Marie at her candy shop, with her two sisters there to make sure he didn't try anything inappropriate. As he walked in the door, Marie decided she didn't mind the fact that Johan was balding. In fact, she barely noticed his hair at all. She and her siblings could hardly look away from his eyes.
Later, they described them as hypnotic. He explained that he was quite wealthy after retiring from a lucrative meat cutting job, but he was also lonely. And as he spoke with Marie, he insisted she might just be the woman he was looking for. Before Marie knew it, she'd fallen in love with Johan. And on December 12th, just five days after she met him, Marie married him. 1904, man.
That day, Marie Walker became Marie Walker Ho. But sadly, Marie didn't get to live in marital bliss for long. Within 24 hours of her wedding, she became sick. Now, the papers from this time don't specify what her symptoms were, but a doctor and nurse who examined her thought she was suffering from kidney disease.
It was so serious, Marie's sisters, Bertha and Amelia, came over to take care of her. They'd periodically take public transit to Marie and Johan's house, tend to their sibling, then head back home at the end of the day. And at one point, Johan accompanied Amelia back to the trolley station when it was time for her to leave. And during their brief trip, Johan admitted that if he'd only met Amelia before Marie, he would have married her instead.
This is a weird thing to say when you're newlywed and when your wife is seriously ill, no less.
It's unclear how Amelia responded to the declaration, but it's safe to say she wasn't pleased based on her later behavior. See, come time later on January 12th, Amelia came back over to tend to her sister again. And while Amelia was downstairs, Johan went to his upstairs bedroom to check on Marie. And when he came down, he told Amelia that Marie had just passed away.
This was a blow, but Amelia wasn't one for sitting around in her grief. She got to work, heading up to Marie's bedroom and cleaning it. And when she came back down again, Johan was waiting for her. He told Amelia that he couldn't stand to be single again, and he was impressed with how Amelia had taken care of her sister in his house, and he wanted Amelia to marry him. To sweeten the deal, he even told Amelia that he knew she had children from a previous marriage who were living in Germany.
Johan promised that after the wedding he'd pay for the children to immigrate to the US so Amelia could see them again. His wife's body literally hasn't even gotten cold yet and he was trying to line up another spouse, her sister nonetheless. Meanwhile, the recipient of his affections, Sister Amelia, was grieving her sister's sudden death. She told Johan it was inappropriate for him to talk this way so soon after Marie's passing.
But this wasn't the end of Johan's tactless marriage proposals. After Marie's funeral, he asked Amelia to marry him again. And when I say after Marie's funeral, I mean right after. He proposed while standing at Marie's grave. Amelia refused, but since she rode to the cemetery with Johan, she still had to get into the carriage and sit beside him for the whole trip home.
And a few days later, he showed up unexpectedly at her house to propose yet again. Up to this point, Emilia had been pretty firm about rejecting Johan every time he tried to woo her. But something shifted this time around. I'm not sure exactly what or how he did it, but that day, Emilia finally agreed to marry Johan. The wedding was a few days later, and I know it might be hard to keep track of the timeline given everything that happened, so let me quickly recap that.
Marie saw Johan's personal ad on December 3rd, and in the next month and a half, Johan met Marie, married her, watched her get sick and die, buried her, and then married her sister. Month and a half.
So Amelia and Johan were practically strangers and also newlyweds. They wanted a honeymoon in Germany, but before they could make travel arrangements, Johan asked Amelia if he could borrow $1,000 to settle down some business matters. Amelia didn't have $1,000 to spare, but she withdrew $750 from the bank and handed it over to her new husband. With the fresh cash in his pocket, Johan headed home with Amelia. They
They were going to pack her things so she could move in with him. Except when they got to the house, one of Amelia's acquaintances was waiting out front. And this person said Amelia's other sister, Bertha, believed Johan was a con artist and a murderer. She was inside the house waiting to confront her brother-in-law and she'd already called the police who were on their way.
Johan grew offended and annoyed. He insisted the story was ridiculous and encouraged his wife, Amelia, to go talk some sense into her sister, Bertha. She went inside to defend her husband, and as soon as she was out of sight, he skipped town.
No clearer sign of guilt than that, especially because he took the $750 with him. And now Amelia realized she wasn't the first person he'd ripped off. Like I mentioned before, Amelia's departed sister Marie had owned a highly profitable candy business.
Soon after Marie married Johan, he promised to help her invest her wealth. She sold the candy store and gave the money to her spouse. He acted like he was doing a personal favor for her, ensuring she'd be financially secure for the rest of her life. Of course, the rest of her life only ended up being a few days. And Johan's investments never materialized. He'd conned both sisters out of their life savings.
Now, Amelia wasted no time in calling the police, but she didn't just tell them about how Johan stole her money. She also added that she thought maybe Marie's death was highly suspicious. She wanted an autopsy. The police granted her request, disinterring Marie and giving her a post-mortem exam.
They found arsenic in both her stomach and liver. Now in the early 20th century, arsenic was a common ingredient in embalming fluid. But just two weeks before Marie's death, her mortician had changed up their recipe using a liquid with no arsenic in it.
Meaning if Marie had died just 15 days earlier, there'd be no evidence at all that she'd been poisoned. But unluckily for Johan, a twist of fate gave detectives proof that Marie hadn't died of kidney disease. She was murdered.
Given what Amelia and Bertha now knew about his cons, Johan became suspect number one. The only problem? Amelia hadn't heard from her husband since he'd left town with all of her money. Nobody knew where he was. But a brief investigation revealed Marie wasn't Johan's only victim who'd paid with her life. He'd had at least three other weddings in the past 14 months, not counting Marie's and Amelia's. And
And all three of those other wives had died. Too many, too quickly, to be a coincidence. So the police released his name and picture to the press as part of a public call for tips. The wanted ads initially appeared in Chicago newspapers, but soon they were printed as far away as New York City. And on January 30th, roughly two weeks after Johan fled with Amelia's money, the police got the lead they were looking for.
Soon after he left Chicago, Johan ended up in a boarding house in Manhattan. He checked in under an assumed name.
Johan Barter. While he was staying there, he actually offered to help out a young woman named Catherine Camerla in the kitchen. They interacted all of twice before he proposed marriage to her. And unsurprisingly, this was way too fast for Catherine's comforts. She shut him down and would have written Johan off as a garden variety creep until she saw his picture in the paper. Who
Who knows? Maybe if Johan hadn't thrown himself at Catherine, she wouldn't have remembered his face well enough to recognize him. But there was no way she'd forget him now. She called the police and let them know she'd found their serial murderer. When the authorities closed in, Johan gave himself up easily. He admitted that he was the same man who'd married Marie Walker and Amelia Fisher in Chicago.
But he claimed the only reason he skipped town was because his ex-wife's sister, Bertha, was unreasonable. She was spreading false rumors about him. According to Johan, that was also the reason why he'd used a pseudonym with the boarding house. He was hiding from Bertha, not police. He hadn't done anything wrong.
However, when the officials searched Johan's room, they found a lot, but not all, of the stolen cash and multiple wedding rings. At one point, those rings had had inscriptions on them, but someone had scraped them off so they were impossible to read.
They also found a weird modified pen in Johan's pocket. They opened it and found white powder in the center where the ink would usually go. Johan claimed it was tooth powder, but when the police were like, "That's fine, we've sent it to the lab to be tested," Johan changed his story. Now he admitted, "Okay, actually it's arsenic, the same poison that killed Marie." But he claimed he didn't want to hurt anyone but himself with it. He had planned on taking his own life with the hidden toxin.
Not that the police believed any of this. They asked him why he'd go to the bother of hiding the powder in a pen if he was just going to take it himself. Johan claimed that when he bought the arsenic at a certain pharmacy in New York, the store gave it to him that way. Unlikely, but the police investigated that claim anyway. They went to the drugstore he described. Not only did they not sell pens filled with arsenic or otherwise, they said they'd never sold the poison to Johan. So the officials had caught him in another lie.
Now they were confident that Johan was a serial murderer who'd killed at least four wives for their money. But they didn't uncover the true extent of his crimes until a Chicago police officer got yet another major tip. He received a letter from a West Virginia minister named Reverend Herman Haas.
In the note, Haas said he recognized Johan's picture in the paper. He was shocked to see Johan because Haas had believed that Johan was dead. And he had reason to think Johan was responsible for yet another murder, which had happened a decade before. Johan's hands were even bloodier than the authorities had originally believed.
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After a lot of investigation, the police learned that Johan Otto Ho's real name was either John or Jacob Schmidt.
But for clarity, I'm going to keep referring to him as Johan in this episode. Just one less name to keep track of. So Johan was born in Germany and married young. I'm not sure how young exactly, but he had a wife and three kids by the time he was 25. At that age in 1887, with his family deep in debt, Johan up and disappeared. It was the first of many times he'd marry a woman and leave her penniless.
After a brief stint in London, he turned up in the United States using another assumed name. Now he was Jacob Hough. And as Mr. Hough, Johan married a woman named Caroline Hawk. They were wedded in 1895, less than a year after they met, and three months later, Caroline died.
Johan inherited all of her assets and collected the payout on her life insurance. He sold her house, pocketed the cash, and apparently faked his own death. Johan left a suicide note, his picture, and all of his clothes on the bank of a river. And it's assumed that he then secretly rode a small boat to safety. Presumably, when people found his personal effects in the note near the river, they just assumed that he drowned himself.
It turns out he'd actually skipped town just in the nick of time. Reverend Haas, the man who later wrote to the Chicago police, was suspicious of Johan from the start. On one occasion, he believed he saw Johan giving a white powder to his wife shortly before she died. The minister thought Johan was acting strange, but for whatever reason, he kept his suspicions to himself until after Caroline had passed away.
When Reverend Haas finally spoke up after Johan's faked suicide, a doctor agreed to perform a post-mortem exam on Caroline, but he never had the chance to do a proper autopsy. After her coffin was exhumed and cracked open, the officials discovered that someone else had beat them to it. She'd been cut open.
All of her internal organs were gone. The detectives were baffled, but they eventually decided Johan must have dumped her innards in the river when he faked his suicide. Now, I have no idea why he'd do this. Maybe it was a way of disposing of the evidence that he'd poisoned Caroline, or perhaps he got some pleasure in robbing his wife one last time of the only thing she had left, her body.
Well, she did have something else left, her name. And he took that too. After the death of Caroline Hawk, he adopted her surname, becoming Johan Hawk. This was a bit of a trend with him. Over and over, he'd scam a wife and then use her surname for his next pseudonym. So if, for example, he married Miss Smith, his next fake name would be Mr. Johan Smith.
But he also seemed to have some affection for the name Johan Otto Haak. He used it several times after Caroline Haak's death. This made it slightly easier for police to piece together his trail of swindles, as did the fact that countless women came forward after seeing his picture in the paper. Dozens of victims announced that they recognized their good-for-nothing former husband. See, he didn't kill all of his marks.
Often, it was easier and quicker to just take the money and run. It's not entirely clear how he chose which wives to murder and which ones to let live, but police identified approximately 15 women who'd died soon after marrying Johan.
It was impossible to say for sure if these were all homicides. Maybe some of those untimely deaths were just coincidences. For example, one of his brides who lived in San Francisco passed away after he abandoned her. It doesn't seem likely that he came back to kill her after making a successful escape.
Instead, the stress of her failed marriage and lost money probably led to her demise. Another two of his wives mysteriously went missing after their weddings. We can't prove that they were murdered, but it seems like a reasonable assumption. Either way, it's thought that Johan may have married roughly 50 women.
It's hard to say for sure because police suspected he had even more spouses who never came forward. They may have felt embarrassed about being scammed. Especially given Johan's usual MO, he intentionally sought women who he thought might be desperate. Women who were older, who weren't conventionally attractive, and German immigrants.
He figured they were less likely to have other options and more likely to leap at the opportunity to marry him when he showed interest. It seems he wanted to invest as little time as possible into his romances. He'd say anything to get his latest wife to hand over her life savings, then just skip town immediately after he got his hands on her money. During one con in Minnesota, he pretended to be the son of a German count.
He convinced his bride to buy tickets back to Germany so he could show her his fabulous land and castles. His wife sold her home and everything she owned to pay the fare. Johan took the cash and promised he'd head to town to buy their tickets and then come right back home. Only she never heard from him again until his arrest.
He tried a similar scam with another wife. The day after their wedding, he said his father, a wealthy German lord, had just died. He needed to rush to Germany to claim his inheritance, and he asked his spouse to front the money for the trip.
She was hesitant, so Johan wrote a will saying he'd leave all of his wealth to her when he died. This was enough to convince the newlywed. She gave Johan all her money. And like always, he vanished without a trace. She was left holding a useless piece of paper. A will's no good if you can't find the person who wrote it or access his assets.
But as time went on, Johan began rushing through his scams. And along the way, he got sloppy. At least once, he exchanged a series of love letters with a long-distance girlfriend named Joanna. He asked her to marry him, and Joanna almost said yes until she somehow got her hands on some love letters from another one of his girlfriends. When Johan showed up in her city ready for the wedding, Joanna refused to talk to him.
On another occasion, a new bride actually caught Johan adding arsenic to her coffee. He was pouring the white powder out of that hollow pen that police later found in his pocket.
But Johan knew how to think on his feet. He told this wife that the powder was a love potion, and she apparently figured he was just being cute and sweet. Afterward, Johan made a second hollow pen and filled it with sugar. So every morning he'd make a big show of putting the safe white powder in his coffee, then slip the toxin into his unwitting brides. Yet another wife did become suspicious. It was just a little too late.
A few months after their wedding, this woman began complaining to her neighbors. She knew she'd been poisoned, but it's unclear if she realized her new husband was the culprit. As she got sicker and sicker, she insisted she was the victim of a murderous plot. But nobody acted on her warnings fast enough. She died four months after her wedding day. And Johan inherited all her property, which he sold for $4,000 before making a clean escape.
Once again, he completed the scam and got out of town right before anyone could put the pieces together. But he couldn't keep this up forever and eventually he had to get caught. So far as Marie and Amelia were concerned, it seems Johan's greed got in his own way. When he met the sisters, he realized they both had assets worth stealing. But he couldn't pull off his typical con. There was no way he could marry a second sister if she knew he'd defrauded the first.
That's why he had to murder Marie and make it look like she died of an illness. It was the only way to prevent Amelia from getting suspicious before she agreed to marry him too. But he didn't account for Bertha seeing through his scheme, and this misstep put him behind bars. Now, as damning as all of this sounds, Johan insisted he was innocent. He basically accused the police of being biased against him.
He said Hawk was a fairly common name and he was being blamed for some other Johan Hawk's wrongdoing. Plus to hear Johan tell it, every woman who'd ever been abandoned by a man was coming forward to claim he was her long lost husband.
and the police took them all at their word due to laziness or gullibility. He insisted he'd only been married three times. The first ended in divorce, the second to Marie Walker ended with her death, which he had nothing to do with, of course, and the third to Amelia Fisher had brought him disaster thanks to her and Bertha's groundless accusations.
when officials asked him why he'd conned and killed so many women he refused to answer claiming the thought of doing such a thing was too disgusting to contemplate but even when he tried to explain himself johan couldn't keep his story straight he contradicted himself when he tried to describe which cities he'd lived in and when his ever-changing accounts weren't persuasive to the detectives or to jurors who found him guilty of marie's murder during his trial in may of 1905
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But then, while he was incarcerated on death row, he went back to insisting he was innocent. He'd tell anyone who'd talk to him that his execution would be a miscarriage of justice. His final night before his death, he didn't sleep. Understandable, given what was waiting for him in the morning.
But all through his restless night, he kept asking the guards to bring him meals, and they accommodated him. Johan ate, and ate, and ate, never admitting he was full. When his guards watched in confusion, he said, "'Now look at me, boys. Look at poor old Johan. I don't look like a monster now, do I?'
The guards couldn't even come up with a response. And as for why he was behaving so strangely, your guess is as good as mine. But if his goal was to draw attention, it worked. 100 people turned up to watch Johan's hanging. He stepped onto the scaffold and yet again announced that he was innocent. Then, bitter, he grumbled, I am done with this world. I am done with everybody.
When the executioner opened the trap door and the noose tightened, Johan died almost instantly of a broken neck. One of his wives offered to handle his funeral arrangements. Apparently, even after everything he did, she didn't want Johan to be buried in a potter's field with other criminals. But every cemetery she contacted refused to take his remains. In spite of her efforts, he was buried in an unmarked grave in Illinois, laid to rest in a graveyard specifically for executed criminals.
Now, Johan Ottohock, or Jacob Schmidt, or whatever he called himself, was certainly a fascinating person. And even now, over a century after his crime spree, there are so many unknowns about his life and all his motives. But I don't want his quirks to allow him to dominate this narrative, because at the end of the day, Johan left a trail of tragedy in his wake. And his victims deserve to be remembered and honored. It's estimated that he married up to 50 women and may have killed 15 of them, give or take.
Many of his spouses were like Marie Walker, lonely romantics who were taking a chance on love later in life. Women who maybe felt like Johan was their last shot at a happily ever after. Who were sick of being rejected and ignored by other men. Their desire for affection made them vulnerable. And sadly, when some of them decided to open their hearts, they paid the ultimate price. Their lives.
And that is the story of Johan's wives. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching and I will see you next week as we go further into the dark. Goodbye.