Hoch was born John Schmidt in 1855, at Horrweiler, in the Grand Duchy of Hesse (present-day Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany).

He emigrated to the United States in the 1890s and dropped his surname in favor of assorted pseudonyms where he began to marry a string of women, frequently taking the name of his most recent victim.

Chicago police would dub him "America’s greatest mass murderer", but statistics remain vague in this puzzling case.

We know that Hoch bigamously married at least 55 women between 1890 and 1905, bilking all of them for cash and slaying many, but the final number of murder victims is a matter of conjecture.

Sensational reports credit Hoch with 25 to 50 murders, but police were only certain of 15, and in the end he went to trial (and to the gallows) for a single homicide.