Hans Schmidt illegally married, impregnated, and then brutally murdered and dismembered his mistress. For that crime, he was eventually executed via electrocution, and to this day is the only Catholic priest ever executed in the United States. Turns out, the murder he was caught for was only the tip of the iceberg.

Long before The Boston Globe shined a spotlight on an endemic pattern of child molestation in the Catholic Church, the wrongdoings of the clergy often went unnoticed or unpunished.

Except for Hans Schmidt. In the early 1900s, he became the first, and only, priest to be executed in the United States.

His acts were bloody, his list of crimes was long, and his entire tale was laid out for the public by a press eager to show that even trusted religious leaders are capable of being monsters.