Sing Sing Prison February 18, 1916.

At 10 minutes to 6, the guards at Sing Sing Prison walked a man down the corridor toward the death chamber.

He wore no cassock, no collar, no vestments of any kind. He had been stripped of those privileges two years prior,

but the man they were about to strap into the electric chair had once stood at the altar of

St. Joseph's Church on 125th Street in Harlem, Manhattan, and placed the body of Christ on the tongues

of the faithful. His name was Father Hans Schmidt,

and in eight minutes he would become the only Catholic priest ever executed in the United States.

The story that put him there began, as these stories often do, with what the river gave back.

On September 5, 1913, two boys were fishing off a dock near Weehawk in New Jersey when they hooked something heavy. They hauled it up and found a bundle wrapped in oil cloth and waited with a chunk of gray-green schist. Inside was the upper torso of a young woman. No head, no arms, no identification. Two days later,

a second bundle surfaced nearby. The lower torso, then a right thigh, the Hudson kept the rest.

Hudson County detectives worked the wrappings. One of the bundles had been stuffed inside a pillowcase

with a factory tag still attached.

The tag traced back to a manufacturer in Newark that sold exclusively to one Manhattan furniture

dealer, George Sachs, on 8th Avenue. Inspector Joseph Farrot of the New York City Police Department

picked up the case from there. Sachacks checked his books. He had purchased

12 of those pillowcases and sold only two. The receipts showed a bed, a mattress, and pillowcases

delivered on August 26th to a man who gave his name as H. Schmidt. The delivery address was a

third-floor rear apartment at 68 Bradhurst Avenue in upper Manhattan,

north of 145th Street.

Farrote put a stake out on the building.

Four days passed.

Nobody came or went.

...