The Hildebrandt murder

 It was a cold February evening in 1898 when Jonas Staats answered a knock at the door of his Chatham, N.Y.  farmhouse. He didn’t recognize the scruffy-looking man at first, but soon realized who was standing in his doorway.

“My God, It’s Joe,” he exclaimed, ushering the man inside. It was John Schmidt, an accused murderer who had been on the run for more than five years.  

That night after supper, Schmidt, in his broken English, admitted to the farmer that he had killed his stepson, William Hildebrandt, on the evening of Sept. 12, 1893, along the train tracks in nearby Philmont. He claimed that when he cracked the 19-year-old in the head with a hammer it was an act of self-defense.

Staats listened to the man’s story without much in the way of commentary, and allowed the alleged murderer to spend the night and made him breakfast the next morning.

The farmer had known Schmidt for about 15 years, having met him in New York City. Staats brought him to work on his Columbia County farm just after Schmidt arrived from Bromberg, in what was then called Prussian Poland. Schmidt remained at the Staats’ farm for about a year and a half. He then began working for a farmer in Ghent, John Coburn, with whom he stayed on and off for several years.

In 1891 Schmidt met Dora Sophia Johanna, a German immigrant five years his junior. The couple moved in together on Coburn’s property, but soon began a rootless life of travel, going from Columbia to Dutchess County to New Jersey and then Baltimore. When the couple returned to Ghent in 1893 Dora’s teenage son was with them. Schmidt had made enough money to pay the lad’s passage from Germany and now the family was back in Columbia County to work the fields of yet another local farmer.

Sept. 12, 1893

Schmidt and his 19-year-old stepson spent the day working in the field helping to bring in the corn crop of a Ghent farmer. After knocking off for the day they returned to the house. After dinner Schmidt insisted on walking into Philmont to pick up some meat for the family and invited Hildebrandt to go along.

A few hours later Schmidt returned home alone, his clothes bloody and with a leg wound — and without any meat.

He told Sophia that Hildebrandt had been arrested after they brawled with some rowdies in town and that he had escaped arrest by running off. This was just one of several versions Schmidt told of that night’s events. Early the next morning, the couple went to Ghent to catch a train to Hudson, where Hildebrandt would have been taken if arrested. The couple took the train into the city and walked to a building that Schmidt said was the courthouse. He went in alone and came out a few minutes later. Dora was crying and asking where her son was, but Schmidt told her a convenient lie and they headed back home. Later in the evening when the farm boss came around Dora overheard her husband tell the man that Hildebrandt had gone to visit his relatives in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, the crew on a freight train on the Harlem railroad noticed what appeared to be a drunken man passed out along the train tracks in Philmont. He was lying on his back with a leg cocked up, his cap hanging from a nearby tree. It wasn’t until the next morning, on the return trip, that the workers realized the man wasn’t a drunken hobo, but was in fact a corpse.

It wasn’t long until authorities determined young Hildebrandt had been killed by a blow from a hammer that was found near the body, a hammer belonging to Schmidt. He was arrested that afternoon and shipped off to Hudson.  But the constables in charge of the prisoner were drunk and when Schmidt made his escape, they were unable to keep up with him and he disappeared into the night.

For five years Schmidt evaded capture. He traveled widely from New Jersey to Michigan and Minnesota, working on farms and performing odd jobs. And then one evening he appeared on the doorstep of the man who had first taken him in when he arrived in  America.

Why he returned after more than five years as a fugitive is unknown, but Schmidt did say that being on the run and in constant fear of arrest had been hard on him both mentally and physically.

It is unclear whether Staats told authorities at the time about the conversation he had with Schmidt that night or whether he revealed that the fugitive was back in Columbia County. It would be another four months before Schmidt was taken into custody. While sitting in jail awaiting trial he allegedly confessed to two jailers that he had killed his stepson because the teen was having an incestuous relationship with Schmidt’s wife. Later, at trial, the testimony of the two men was called into question by the defense attorney, who told the jury that the jailers might have misheard Schmidt, because his English was so poor. Both witnesses stuck to their stories.

During Schmidt’s trial in Columbia County Court in Hudson, a two-week affair in May and early June of 1899, he told the jury a similar story to the one he had told Staats on that cold February night a year earlier, but in this version, he said he and the teen weren’t on their way to purchase meat, but had instead been trapping along the railroad tracks. Hildebrandt wanted to set a trap, Schmidt told the jury through an interpreter, but when it snapped on his finger he got angry and punched Schmidt.

 “I will give you more, yet,” Schmidt alleged the teen told him before pulling out a knife and taking a swing at him.

“(H)e stooped down and got the hammer and he raised the hammer and struck him,” the interpreter told the jury. “He says he didn’t want to strike him.”

After the boy fell to the ground and didn’t move, Schmidt said he stood there for about 10 minutes and cried, before pushing Hildebrandt’s body further down a culvert. He told the jury he didn’t think Hildebrandt was dead, merely stunned and figured he would wake up and come home. Before leaving, Schmidt left the teen’s cap hanging from a nearby tree. He tossed the hammer down the culvert, took his traps and headed home.

The jury deliberated for close to nine hours before returning a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. After an appeal and a determination of insanity by a special panel appointed by the governor, Schmidt was electrocuted at Dannemora Prison in January 1902.

As a strange side note, during the hullabaloo surrounding Schmidt’s capture, he told his jailers that his wife had murdered her former paramour, a man named Gruber with whom she had been living before she and Schmidt got together. Police discovered the headless remains buried in a cellar on the property of the Ghent farmer John Coburn, whose home was known as “Broadstairs.”  Dora denied the killing, telling police that she came home one day to her residence, which she and Gruber had been sharing with Schmidt, to find Gruber gone. Schmidt allegedly told her Gruber had left her. Dora quickly took up with Schmidt and they were married a few months later.

There have been ghostly encounters reported at the residence since that time.

The Greenport Christmas murder

Willis Van Wormer calmly read through the letter just handed to him by Warden George Deyo. The message sent by attorney J. Ryder Cady — who had represented Willis and his two brothers, Burton and Frederick, at trial — reported that all attempts at a stay of execution had failed. It would be the chair for the Van Wormer boys.

Two years earlier, on the night of Christmas eve 1901, it was a cool, but not exceptionally cold night. There was still snow on the ground from a recent storm.

Peter Hallenbeck sat reading while his wife, Margaret, sewed nearby in their farm house in Greenport, N.Y., a small town two hours north of Manhattan. Peter’s mother Almina was also home that night while Peter and Margaret’s son and his family attended church down the road.

Margaret, looking up from her handiwork, saw a wagon with two men walking behind pass by the window heading towards the church.

“They must be chicken thieves,” said Peter, watching them pass out of view. A few moments later there was a knock at the door and Peter got up to see who was there.

That’s when the shooting started.

Four men, two wearing devil masks, the others false whiskers, their coats turned inside out, rushed into the room. The sharp report of pistols rang out mixed with the screams of the two women. Margaret rushed to her husband’s side, but Peter yelled at his wife and mother to run to the attic. As Margaret fled a shot was fired over her head.

As the men continued to fire, Peter stumbled toward the stairs where his shotgun hung.

“For God’s sake get out of here. He is after his shotgun,” yelled one of the men, as they turned to flee.

Neighbors who heard the commotion ran over and soon the alarm was given that Peter Hallenbeck had been murdered.

By the next evening, Christmas Day, four men — the Van Wormer brothers and their cousin Harvey Bruce — had been rounded up by Sheriff Harry J. Best and his deputies and thrown in the Hudson jail, charged with murder.

Dec. 29 saw the start of an inquest in the case by County Coroner Edward Lisk and by this time the story had become a national sensation, with extensive coverage by the New York Times and the Associated Press, along with local media, including the Hudson Republican newspaper.

Judge D. Cady Herrick came down from Albany to preside over the grand jury proceedings on Jan.18, 1902.

Cady, the former judge from Hudson, was named as counsel to Willis and Burton Van Wormer, and to act as general counsel in the case. Alonzo H. Farrar was assigned as counsel for Fred Van Wormer and George M. Daly was appointed as counsel for Harvey Bruce.

According to the Hudson Republican, at the reading of the grand jury indictment for first-degree murder, the accused “appeared indifferent.”

They were arraigned and pleaded not guilty.

District Attorney Alfred B. Chace asked New York state Gov. Benjamin B. Odell Jr., to call an Extraordinary Session of the Supreme Court to try the case. The governor agreed.

It wasn’t long before Bruce turned state’s evidence, admitting to the killing and laying the blame with his cousins.

According to Bruce, who was 21 at the time, his cousins Fred, 26, Burton, 23, and 20-year-old Willis had made plans for that night, buying masks, renting a horse, and in Burton’s case borrowing a gun from a friend. He went on to say that on the way to Hallenbeck’s they had stopped by the Greenport Church to make sure that their cousin Charles wouldn’t be home when they went to the farmhouse.

Once there Bruce told of how the three brothers immediately began shooting when their uncle opened the door. Bruce said he had only shot into the air.

Afterwards when he asked his cousins why they had shot Hallenbeck they told him to “shut up.”

This, paired with the circumstantial evidence — shoes that matched the footprints in the snow around the house, testimony that masks had been bought prior to the murder by the Van Wormers in Kinderhook, wagon wheel tracks matching the get away vehicle and the unpersuasive testimony of the Van Wormer boys themselves — led to a guilty verdict in the case.

The testimony of the Van Wormer boys rang hollow with the jury.

Burton Van Wormer testified that they had gone there that night “to have a little fun” and never intended to hurt their uncle.

According to him, when Peter Hallenbeck opened the door he hit Burton in the face several times, a struggle ensued and the gun accidentally discharged.

The sheriff later testified that there were no bruises on Burton Van Wormer’s face. There were also 11 bullets recovered from the victim’s body.

The efforts taken by the defendants to hide their tracks didn’t help their case either. They allegedly drove to Valatie so they could be seen, cleaned their guns and later burned the masks once they got home to Kinderhook.

According to several newspapers, there had been bad blood between the two families for some time before the incident.

While Peter Hallenbeck had prospered, his brother-in-law, John Van Wormer, barely scraped by as a river boatman. He was able to finally buy a small cottage not far from Hallenbeck, who held the mortgage.

After John Van Wormer’s death, Hallenbeck allegedly foreclosed on the property. The remaining Van Wormers, including the three boys, were put out and moved to Kinderhook.

Their attorneys tried their best to persuade the jury it was an accidental shooting.

“They went to their uncle’s house for fun,” Farrar, special counsel for Frederick Van Wormer, told the jury. “They were probably foolish, but they never intended to injure his person.”

He said that “the tables were unexpectedly turned on them” when Hallenbeck pummeled Burton and “a desperate struggle began.” He called the resulting death “a tragedy that no one had anticipated.”

During his summation the defendants openly wept, the first time they had shown any emotion, reported a Syracuse newspaper.

Cady followed on Farrar’s heels, echoing his sentiment saying that in his 30-year career at the bar he had never seen such a tragic, heart-wrenching, soul-wracking case.

He argued that there couldn’t have been any premeditation in the case based on his clients’ actions.

Cady pointed out that they had rented a horse, traveled on public roads and had brought their cousin as a witness.

The jury was unmoved finding them all guilty of first-degree murder.

Judge Alden Chester, who presided over the trial, passed sentence a few minutes later.

“It is the saddest act of my judicial career to be compelled to sentence three young men, three brothers, under a verdict of murder in the first degree,” he said from the bench, sentencing them to death by electrocution.

On Oct. 1, 1903 the brothers went to the electric chair at the Clinton State Prison in Dannemora. Willis was first, followed by Frederick and Burton. Their bodies were taken back to Kinderhook and interred in the Kinderhook Cemetery.

Strangely, the memory of the assassination of U.S. President William McKinley in 1901 seemed to float through the case. The judge who presided over the grand jury proceedings went to Albany Law School with McKinley; Bruce alleged that Burton Van Wormer had bragged that he had “gotten a Czolgosz shot. I shot (Hallenbeck) in the stomach,” referring to McKinley’s assassin Leon Frank Czolgosz who shot McKinley in the stomach during the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo; and the doctor who performed the autopsy on the mens’ remains after they were executed had also performed the autopsy on McKinley’s killer.

Bruce was later found guilty of manslaughter and received an 18-year sentence in prison.

The Canaan Child Murder

Everyone who knew Angeline Brown loved her. The 12-year-old, called “Angie,” was bright — she spoke three languages — talkative and sweet. She had reddish hair, blue eyes and was small for her age. She had moved to Canaan, N.Y. with Joseph and Josephine Brown just a few months before her tragic death in an accidental fire Dec. 5, 1867. At least everyone believed it was an accident, at first.

The truth of Angie’s life and death would soon grip the entire nation and end in the execution of Joseph Brown, also known as Joseph Barney, and the acquittal of his wife for the girl’s murder.

Around 8 p.m. that December night, Walter Gordinier, the Brown’s neighbor, saw the flames licking out from the pantry in the basement where the Browns lived, immediately rushed over and began throwing water on the fire. Soon other neighbors joined him in trying to put out the conflagration. Within a half-hour the men were able to enter the house, and it wasn’t long before they discovered the body. They also discovered the first clue that not all was as it seemed at the Brown home.

“I found a bureau in the house,” Gordinier would later recall, “and a pass book in it with the name Barney upon it.”

The little dead girl, her body badly burned, was brought to Gordinier’s home and soon the Browns arrived from a neighbor’s house where they had gone for the evening. Joseph was hysterical, continually asking to see “his little girl.” At one point he even fainted. Gordinier brought Joseph some rum and a local physician, Asarich Judson, looked in on the apparently grieving father. The doctor would later tell the court that he believed Joseph was faking his behavior. No witnesses recalled if the couple even shed a tear over their loss.

An inquest was held and Angie’s death was found to be accidental. It was very shortly after this that Joseph and Josephine left for Connecticut to bury the girl. But they made one stop first, a stop that would be their eventual undoing.

The couple had taken out a life insurance policy worth $5,000 — about $77,000 today — on the girl from the Travelers Insurance Co., of Hartford, Conn., just before her death. The policy was for three months only and there was less than two weeks left on it when Angie died.

The couple stopped in Westfield, Conn., and applied to the insurance company for the amount of the policy and then continued on to West Granby, in the same state, to bury the girl.

It wasn’t long before the insurance company began to suspect foul play. Insurance investigators exhumed the girl’s body and also descended on the scene of the fire in Canaan and began questioning witnesses. Their conclusion was quite different from that of the coroner’s inquest.

The insurance investigation revealed there were remnants of a cord wrapped around Angie’s neck with a deep indentation beneath. Their investigation would also show that the girl’s body had been found in a closet, wrapped in combustible materials, the door tightly shut.

The Browns were arrested in Hartford, Conn., transported by train to Hudson under armed guard and held in the county jail to await trial. By this time newspaper readers from coast to coast were eagerly following the story.

Information soon surfaced concerning the Browns and their presumptive daughter. Angie’s real last name was Stewart, she was from Dayton, Ohio, and had been taken from her widowed mother, Mary Ann Stewart. Mrs. Stewart had been the washerwoman at the home where the Browns had been living in Dayton and had agreed to let the Browns take Angie with them on a trip to the East Coast.

“Angie will see more in one month than you will ever in all your lifetime,” Josephine told the woman.

The Browns left Dayton Sept. 17, 1867 and headed to New York. It would be the last time Mrs. Stewart would ever see her child.

The “diabolical and hellish plot” — in the words of Columbia County District Attorney John Welch — had been conceived in Dayton, and predated Angie’s abduction. The Browns’ first choice was another child from Dayton by the name of Coburn. The girl’s mother had initially agreed to let them adopt her, but at the last minute pulled out of the deal.

“I don’t care a damn,” Joseph said. “If I can’t get one I can get another.”

Joseph Brown, or Joseph Barney, as he was known in Dayton was a house painter by trade, or so he said. Back in Hartford, where he had met Josephine, whose last name had been Fox, he owned a house of prostitution. Much ado was made concerning the fact both were divorced, something still uncommon at the time. Josephine told two different stories about when and where they had been married — in either New Haven or New York City — and this was just one of many discrepancies in her story.

Joseph had been born in the United States but grew up in Canada and had a French accent. The 34 –year-old was slim, had dark hair and large eyes. One reporter commented that he had “rather good features” and was “not repulsive,” something that must have been confusing in a time in which physical features were believed to define internal characteristics.

“There was nothing on the surface to indicate the demoniac spirit which the commission of … the murder of this little girl evinces,” continued the reporter.

Joseph was brought to trial in Hudson, and after deliberating for 31 hours, the jury found him guilty and threw him “on the mercy of the court” for sentencing. Judge Rufus Peckham sentenced him to death and on Friday, May 29, 1868, he was hanged.

As he stepped up to the gallows Joseph gave a long and impassioned speech concerning what he considered an unfair trial and especially focused on the conduct of Peckham, who, it seems, was rather stilted toward the prosecution.

“Standing here with a rope around my neck, ready to draw me up when I get through with these few words, I haven’t seen much mercy yet — not much,” Joseph told the 300 spectators. He ended by declaring his innocence in Angie’s death.

After kneeling for a brief prayer he stood and a hood was placed on his head. When the sheriff pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket, the executioner’s signal, Joseph’s body sprang high into the air and into eternity, where, the defendant had told the crowd just minutes before, they would one day learn the truth.

Truth, or at least Josephine’s version of it, would come out after her trial the next year. Indicted as an accessory before the fact, Josephine went to trial April 19, 1869 in a packed Columbia County courtroom, with a large number of “giddy, thoughtless girls” who “snicker at nothing” in attendance, according to one reporter, obviously put out by the ladies’ behavior.

The four-day trial saw many of the same witnesses from Joseph’s trial take the stand, but with a very different result. After a six-hour summation by Josephine’s attorney, Robert Andrews, and 18 hours of deliberation by the jury, she was found not guilty. Almost immediately after her release she told reporters that her husband had asked her to reveal — if he were executed and she acquitted — the truth of the matter: That Joseph had planned Angie’s murder, but that another man had carried out the actual deed. She never said who the true killer was, but swore that the full details had been written in French by Joseph and would be translated. It appears the letter, if it existed at all, was never published.

Josephine’s last appearance in the pages of the nation’s newspapers came two months later. Josephine was by this time living in Pittsfield, Mass., and was involved with a man jailed in Hudson. A confiscated letter from Josephine to her new beau indicated that someone had offered to buy her a brothel and give her the deed. She made it clear that she would share any of her gains with her new lover and that the poor sap in Pittsfield would “soon find himself alone.”

As for Angie’s mother, Mrs. Stewart’s little girl continued to visit her in dreams and “visions.” In them Angie was always crying.