20 Lonely Hearts Killers And Con Artists Who Hid Behind Newspaper Ads

When a farmhouse went up in flames in April of 1908, investigators dug out between 11 and 14 bodies, including several missing men who had answered advertisements written by the owner, Belle Gunness. Between 1900 and 1908, Gunness placed ads in Scandinavian-language newspapers in the Midwest inviting bachelors with money to invest in her farm in La Porte, Indiana. The men never reappeared. The bodies recovered from the fire also included some of Gunness’s children. No one knows whether Belle died in the fire or escaped.

On February 25, 1922, France guillotined Henri Désiré Landru for the murders of ten women and a young man. During World War I, between 1915 and 1919, Landru placed newspaper ads in Paris, pretending to be a wealthy widower. He lured lonely women, victims of the war, to his rented villas in Gambais, where he stole their money and burned their bodies in a stove.

Raymond Fernandez, a swindler of lonely women, met nurse Martha Beck in response to a personal ad. From 1947 through 1949, the pair, posing as brother and sister, preyed on lonely-hearts ads seeking single women. After the murders of Delphine Downing and her daughter in 1949, they were arrested in Michigan. In New York, Fernandez and Beck were tried for a separate murder and found guilty of one; they confessed to three in total and were suspected of 20. Fernandez and Beck were executed at Sing Sing on March 8, 1951.

During the early 1900s, Hungarian tinsmith Bela Kiss placed marriage ads in Budapest newspapers. Women who responded to the ads were tricked into handing over their savings and then disappeared. In 1914, Kiss was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. When Kiss’s landlord entered the property in 1916, he discovered 24 preserved bodies packed in metal drums. Kiss was never captured, and nothing is known about his ultimate fate.

One early matchmaking scam operated from Bishopsgate Street in London. Here, an introduction agency opened in 1825 and promised to connect subscribers with wealthy suitors. It offered five levels of access (tiers or packages, as we call them in the modern day), each more expensive than the last. There was just one rather important problem: an investigation revealed that the wealthy matches were fictional, and agency employees had been writing the romantic letters themselves. The operation eventually disappeared with its customers’ money; luckily, no one was hurt except in the most financial sense.

German-born bigamist and serial killer Johann Hoch used advertisements in German-language newspapers across the American Midwest to target wealthy widows. Under various aliases, he is estimated to have married somewhere between 20 and 50 women. When Hoch couldn’t drain a wife’s funds fast enough, he sometimes resorted to arsenic. Chicago police finally arrested him in 1905 for the murder of Marie Walcker-Hoch, and he was executed for the crime on February 23, 1906.

Sarah Rachel Leverson (better known as Madame Rachel) owned a London cosmetics salon during the 1860s with the wonderfully confident motto “Beautiful For Ever.” Alongside her beauty business, Leverson also ran a matchmaking service. She convinced a widow named Cecilia Borradaile that a nobleman had fallen in love with her, wrote the supposed suitor’s love letters herself, and extracted large sums of money from Borradaile. When Borradaile threatened to expose the scheme, Leverson tried to blackmail her over the letters. Leverson was convicted of fraud in 1868 and sentenced to five years in prison.

English bigamist George Joseph Smith married at least seven women between 1908 and 1914—persuading them to hand over their savings or name him as the beneficiary of their life insurance policies. You have to admire his audacity. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, several of the women were later found dead in bathtubs. Investigators eventually determined that Smith would drown a victim by suddenly pulling up her feet, causing her head to plunge underwater without leaving obvious signs of a struggle. Smith was found guilty of murdering three of the women and hanged on August 13, 1915.

Serial murderer Frederick Bailey Deeming used matrimonial agencies while moving between England, South Africa, and Australia during the 1880s and 1890s. In 1891, he murdered his wife Marie and their four children in Rainhill, England, then hid their bodies beneath a cement floor. He later married Emily Mather, moved with her to Melbourne, and murdered her too. Days later, Deeming was already registering with another matrimonial agency in search of a new wife. Newspapers even speculated that he was Jack the Ripper, although that theory has never been proved. Deeming was hanged on May 23, 1892.

Harry Powers used lonely-hearts correspondence to court wealthy widows, sometimes under the alias Cornelius O. Pierson and through the American Friendship Society of Detroit. He persuaded women to visit his property at Quiet Dell, West Virginia, took their savings, and killed them in a soundproofed chamber inside his garage. In September 1931, investigators unearthed five bodies there, including those of two women and three children. Powers was convicted and hanged on March 18, 1932. Apparently, “come visit my secluded property” has been a red flag for quite some time.

In January 1900, a New York matrimonial agency advertised the $85,000 fortune and charms of an heiress looking for love. Men who wanted a rich wife sent money to write to and visit the young lady, which the agency kept. The police found that the lady, always very well-dressed and seen only briefly, was a local chambermaid. She had no such fortune to her name, only a wardrobe.

During the 1930s, cousins Herman and Paul Petrillo led a criminal syndicate in Philadelphia that targeted lonely immigrants. Working with local matchmakers, the group arranged fraudulent marriages, secretly took out double-indemnity life insurance policies—which paid extra for certain accidental deaths—on their targets, and then poisoned them with arsenic. When police uncovered the scheme in 1938, investigators estimated that 30 to 50 people may have been killed. The Petrillos were ultimately tied to 12 arsenic poisonings and executed in 1941.

When housemaid Augusta Steinbach vanished after traveling to Detroit in March 1916, a 1917 investigation led police to Helmuth Schmidt and her remains on his property, along with the jewels belonging to other missing women. Schmidt had been placing matrimonial ads in Detroit and New York newspapers and had been corresponding with Steinbach for months. He had been a bigamist. Before he could be tried for the woman’s murder, Schmidt hanged himself in jail on April 23, 1918.

Childhood obsession with romance magazines led Nannie Doss to place a personal ad in an attempt to find Mr. Right, and eventually she married five men between the 1920s and 1950s. Although the first husband simply divorced her, her next four died after consuming food or drink laced with poison. Her fifth husband was the subject of a 1954 autopsy that found lethal amounts of arsenic. She was sentenced to life in prison in 1955, after she laughed through her confession.

The play Arsenic and Old Lace was based on events that happened at the Archer Home for the Elderly, which was run by Amy Archer-Gilligan in Windsor, Connecticut, between 1907 and 1916. Amy would use lonely-hearts ads to quickly marry wealthy boarders, only for the husbands and residents to die shortly after their wills and insurance were transferred to Archer. Over 40 people died during this time, and in 1916 exhumations revealed traces of arsenic and strychnine. Amy was only convicted of one murder, that of Franklin Andrews, one of the home’s boarders.

James P. Watson placed marriage ads with phrases such as “Object, matrimony” in West Coast newspapers from 1910 to 1920. Using aliases, he married more than 22 women and later admitted to killing at least ten of them for their money. Watson was finally caught in 1920 when one suspicious wife discovered a suitcase filled with documents belonging to missing women. He confessed to killing victims by drowning, beating, and strangling them, and revealed burial sites to police in exchange for avoiding execution. Watson was sentenced to life in prison and died of pneumonia at San Quentin in 1939.

In 1938, Marie Alexandrine Becker of Liège, Belgium, was sentenced to life in prison for 11 murders. Her preferred victim was the wealthy widower: she placed ads offering friendship and marriage, would control the victim’s assets, and then poison him with massive doses of digitalis, a foxglove derivative that simulates the symptoms of heart failure and was much more difficult to detect than arsenic in the 1930s. The money she stole funded a dress shop and lavish lifestyle until 1936, when her actions came under scrutiny and a relative’s suspicions landed her in jail.

In 1949, Chicago police arrested 73-year-old Sigmund Engel, who admitted to defrauding over 100 women, without ever having to use violence. In the 1920s and into the late 1940s, Engel placed lonely-hearts ads throughout North America claiming to be rich bachelors or government agents. He would marry or court the women who answered the ads and then flee with their savings and possessions. He was convicted in 1950.

Anna Marie Hahn, a German immigrant to Cincinnati, Ohio, advertised her live-in nursing care for the elderly. From 1933 to 1937, Hahn convinced five wealthy elderly men from the German-American community to loan her money or change their wills to help support her gambling habit, then poisoned them with arsenic and croton oil mixed into their food and drink. Hahn was convicted and put to death in the electric chair in Ohio on December 7, 1938.

Mary Elizabeth Wilson earned the nickname “Merry Widow” after four elderly husbands died soon after marrying her, leaving her their cash, property, and pensions. What really raised eyebrows, though, was her sense of humor. At one wedding reception, Wilson reportedly joked about saving leftover food for the funeral, prompting suspicious neighbors to report her. The bodies of her last two husbands were exhumed in 1957, and tests found high concentrations of phosphorus from beetle poison. Wilson was found guilty of poisoning her husbands in 1958 and initially sentenced to death, though the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment because of her age.

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