Upon his arrest, Helmuth confessed that he had burned Steinbach's body, but alleged that she had killed herself with poison following his refusal to instantly marry her and a subsequent quarrel on March 11. Fearing that his wife and daughter would return soon from the cinema, Schmidt dragged the body to the cellar, lifted it through a window and then buried it under his porch. Three months after the incident, he claimed that he dug up the body, cut it up with a cleaver and then burned the pieces in the furnace. She was his last known victim. He committed suicide in his jail cell in 1918.