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." Tobin Buhk began his true crime research volunteering in a morgue, and the experience motivated him to write his first two books. Buhk is author of True Crime Michigan and True Crime in the Civil War. The Shocking Story of Helmuth Schmidt Michigan's Original Lonely Hearts Killer By Tobin T. Buhk The History Press Copyright © 2013 Tobin T. Buhk All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-62619-017-7 Contents Preface, Part I. The Domestic and the Suitor, Part II. "A Real Queer Case", Part III. The Evil Eye, Part IV. The Web He Wove, Epilogue, Unanswered Questions, Notes, Bibliography, About the Author, CHAPTER 1 Part I The Domestic and the Suitor LOVE LETTERS New York City February 3, 1917 It was a frigid morning in New York when Agnes Domaniecki said goodbye to her best friend Augusta Steinbach. She dreaded the moment when Augusta would leave for Detroit, where she planned to marry a man she had never laid eyes on before. It was the climax of a New World adventure that began three and half years earlier. In the summer of 1913, about one year before Europe plunged into a conflict that would consume the entire continent, thirty-five-year-old Augusta Steinbach boarded a passenger ship — the Kronprinz Wilhelm — en route from Cherbourg, France, to New York. She made the journey across the Atlantic to her new home with a married couple from New York, Charles and Lina Weber. As the ship steamed west, she wondered what her new life in the United States would be like. In the Old World, she made her living as a lady's maid. She began as a domestic in Berlin around the turn of the century, working among Germany's aristocracy alongside Agnes Domaniecki. Later, the two women drifted to Paris, where they worked as domestics until 1913. With war looming, Paris was no place for German natives, so the two decided to change their milieu. Agnes took a job as a lady's maid in Kingston, Jamaica, while Augusta moved to the Big Apple. The Kronprinz Wilhelm arrived at Ellis Island on June 24, 1913. Shortly after her arrival, Augusta found work among New York's elite, eventually taking a job as a lady's maid for the wife of a wealthy New York banker named Edward Heidelberg, who lived on West Fifty- fourth Street. The Heidelberg family adored the shy but bubbly girl from the German countryside. Augusta Steinbach enjoyed life among the affluent and liked to spoil herself with expensive clothes and jewelry, but the one thing she yearned for — a house and family of her own — eluded her. It wasn't as if she had gone unnoticed. She had chocolate-brown hair, blue eyes and a full-bodied figure that some men found irresistible. In April 1914, thirty-year-old Agnes Domaniecki immigrated to the United States and joined Augusta in New York. Even though they didn't work in the same households, they spoke often, usually in German mixed with an occasional English word or two. They giggled about old times, gossiped about New York high society and discussed the war that raged in Europe. Augusta was particularly interested in the news; her four brothers had joined the German military machine, and her sister was a nurse in Constantinople. Although an ocean away from the trenches, New Yorkers were never very far from the war. America remained officially neutral, but the conflict turned New York City into a place of intrigue. When hostilities began in the summer of 1914, imperial German authorities worried that munitions in the United States would go to their enemies. So they set up networks of saboteurs, which often included immigrants already in the German American community. Throughout the spring of 1915, their saboteurs went into action, hitting explosives caches along the northern New Jersey coast of New York Harbor. In July 1916, sabotage on U.S. soil climaxed when German agents blew up a massive cache of ammunition stockpiled on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. American manufacturers used the pier as a munitions dump for shipments en route to Europe. On July 30, the complex contained over 1 million pounds of ammunition. One barge alone carried 100,000 pounds of TNT. The initial explosion, which occurred around 2:00 a.m., caused a tremor that rocked nearby Jersey City, New Jersey, and shattered windows in Manhattan. New Yorkers thought that an earthquake shook the city, but it was the "enemy within." This fear of subversives cast suspicion on all things German, but Agnes