The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt

The author of True Crime: Michigan “tells the tale of an alleged World War I German spy and love-ad bandit from Royal Oak who killed to cover up his work” (C&G News).   In the fall of 1916, New York housemaid Augusta Steinbach fell in love with a man she met through a matrimonial advertisement in her local newspaper. She traveled to Detroit to marry her correspondent, but in March 1917, she mysteriously disappeared. What began as a routine search for a missing person turned into a baffling case of deception, bigamy, and murder. Follow detectives as they unravel the tangled web spun by Michigan’s original lonely-hearts killer—a criminal mastermind the Detroit News dubbed “one of America's master outlaws.”   Includes photos