EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (20 page)

Peter Kürten

As they led him to the guillotine that had been constructed in the yard of the Klingelputz prison, Peter Kürten turned to the prison psychiatrist who was accompanying him to the place of execution and asked him whether, after his head was chopped off, would he still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of his own blood gushing from his neck? ‘That would be a pleasure to end all pleasures,’ he added.

A few weeks previously, the crowded courtroom had waited with baited breath. A special, shoulder-high cage had been constructed to prevent his escape and on tables behind it lay the grisly evidence of his awful crimes – skulls, body parts, knives, ropes, scissors and a hammer. At last he appeared, the ‘Vampire of Dusseldorf’, as he had come to be known. The gasp round the chamber was one almost of disbelief. He was not the monster they had been expecting. Rather, he was just an ordinary man, immaculately dressed in a good suit, with neatly parted hair and the air of a successful businessman. He spoke not in the growl they had anticipated before they saw him, but in a quiet, calm, unemotional voice, recanting his confession and entering a plea of not guilty.

Peter Kürten exhibited all the characteristics of the true pathological personality. He was selfcentred and narcissistic, a sadist intent only on satisfying his own needs at the expense of all else, including human life. Above all, he felt no remorse for anything. He killed for his own pleasure, which was mostly sexual and said that he had suffered so much in his life that it had expunged all feelings for others. Asked by the judge at his trial whether he had a conscience, he coldly replied, ‘I have none, Never have I felt any misgiving in my soul; never did I think to myself that what I did was bad, even though human society condemns it. My blood and the blood of my victims will be on the heads of my torturers. There must be a Higher Being who gave in the first place the first vital spark to life. That Higher Being would deem my actions good since I revenged injustice. The punishments I have suffered have destroyed all my feelings as a human being. That was why I had no pity for my victims.’ He described to the court the thoughts he had about devising methods of killing thousands of people in accidents. ‘I derived the sort of pleasure from these visions that other people would get from thinking about a naked woman.’

It is fairly easy to see where it all started. Kürten’s childhood was spent at the mercy of a drunk and abusive father who would rape his wife in front of his thirteen children, of whom Peter was the oldest, and he also committed incest with his daughters. He would, in fact, be sent to prison for committing incest with his thirteen-year-old daughter. Unfortunately, the young Kürten was soon abusing his sisters in imitation of his father.

Bereft of love and friendship Kürten was flattered by the bond he formed with a dogcatcher who lived in the same building as the Kürtens. This man taught him to masturbate and instructed him in the best ways to torture dogs.

Around this time, Kürten claimed, he committed his first murder when he drowned a school-friend with whom he was playing on a raft on the River Rhine. When another friend dived in to try to rescue the drowning boy, Kürten pushed him under the raft until he drowned. Their deaths were treated as accidents.

His killings were inextricably linked to his sexual urges and his perversions knew no bounds. He committed acts of bestiality on sheep and goats in stables close to where he lived, learning that the experience was made all the more intense if he stabbed the creature during the act.

The first of the twenty-seven prison sentences he received in his life was for stealing. Over the next few years, he would receive short sentences for the theft of clothing or food. Released from prison in 1899, at the age of sixteen, he moved in with a masochistic prostitute twice his age. He was able to practise his base urges on her and had finally graduated to human beings from animals.

Kürten’s incarcerations infuriated him. He believed it wrong that someone as young as him should be locked up but it had its benefits. He arrived at a position in prison where he could achieve orgasm by imagining brutal sex acts. Intentionally breaking prison rules got him sent to solitary confinement where he could be alone with such thoughts and refine them in his sick head.

Not long after his release from one of his periods of confinement, he tried to kill for the first time. He attacked a girl in the Grafenberger Woods while he was having sexual intercourse with her. He left her for dead, but her body was never found and she was never reported missing which means that she probably survived and was too ashamed to report the incident to the authorities.

The more he was sent to prison, the greater became his sense of injustice. He began to consider his increasingly sadistic attacks to be acts of revenge on society.

His first murder took place on 25 May 1913, when he was twenty years old. He had been breaking into bars and inns where the owner lived in a flat above the premises. He knew they would be busy downstairs, leaving him free to pillage whatever he could from their accommodation. This particular night, he targeted an inn in Cologne owned by Peter Klein.

He broke in and made his way to the first floor of the building but was frustrated to discover nothing of any particular value in any of the rooms he entered. Opening one door, to a bedroom, he discovered a little girl, Christine Klein, aged about ten, in bed asleep. Something clicked in Kürten and instead of quietly closing the door and creeping away, he went over to the bed, grabbed the child by the neck and quickly strangled her as she struggled in his arms. He then inserted a finger into her genitals before taking out the pocket knife he always carried and slitting her throat. In his later confession, he described enthusiastically how the blood spurted from the gaping wound ‘in an arch, right over my hand. The whole thing lasted about three minutes.’

Suspicion for the murder fell on Peter Klein’s brother, Otto, who had unsuccessfully tried to persuade his brother to loan him some money the previous evening. In a violent rage at being denied the money, he had threatened to do something that Peter ‘would remember all his life’, as he had put it. The police could come up with no other reason for the murder to have been carried out and Otto was charged with the murder although he was later acquitted due to lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, the people of Dusseldorf were subjected to a series of axe and strangulation attacks.

They came to an abrupt stop during the war years, however, as Kürten was sent to prison after deserting the army. Released in 1921, he resolved to start a new life. He moved to Altenburg, found a job in a factory and married a prostitute. He became active

in trade unionism, actually settling down to a

normal life.

In 1925, however, he moved back to a city centre apartment in Dusseldorf where for the next four years he carried out arson attacks and petty crime as well as a rising tide of horrific attacks. People were dispatched with knives or scissors and on one occasion he intensified his experience by sucking blood out of a young girl’s head.

The year 1929, however, was when his bloodlust really came to the surface, taking on a ferocity even he had never known. Between February and November of that year, there was an unparalleled spate of sex crimes, hammer and knife attacks and strangulation. The victims were indiscriminate – men, women and children. The authorities now knew that there was a maniac on the loose and the city was terrified. Elderly people and children stayed home and some even moved out of town until the perpetrator was caught. The newspaper headlines screamed that a vampire was stalking the streets of the city.

It began in early February 1929, when he attacked a woman, grabbing her by the lapels and stabbing her repeatedly. She had received twenty-four stab-wounds by the time he ran off. Kürten later told how he liked to return to the scenes of his crimes. He revisited the scene of this particular crime later that evening as well as several other times. ‘In doing so,’ he said, ‘I sometimes had an orgasm.’

The body of Rosa Ohliger was discovered under a hedge on 9 February, stabbed thirteen times. He had stabbed her in the vagina and semen stains were found on her underwear. He had attempted to burn the body by pouring petrol over it and setting it on fire. He would later describe how he achieved orgasm as the flames caught hold.

He killed a middle-aged mechanic five days later, stabbing him twenty times in a frenzied knife attack. Again, he returned to the scene, entering into conversation with a detective working there.

The police thought they had their killer when they arrested a man named Strausberg who suffered from learning difficulties. He had assaulted two women using a noose and detectives involved in the Vampire case were convinced he must have committed the February crimes. They were, therefore, overjoyed when he confessed to everything they threw at him, almost bringing the investigation to a halt.

They were shocked back into action on 21 August, however, when, with their supposed killer in custody, their maniac went on a knifing binge, stabbing three people in separate attacks. As they walked on a country lane, a man passed and bid them ‘Good evening’. The man, of course, was Kürten, and, as he passed, he lunged at them, stabbing them in the ribs and in the back.

On 23 August, like hundreds of others, Kürten attended the annual fair at Flehe. Two girls, sisters aged five and fourteen, had left the fair to walk home through some allotments. As they walked, a man emerged from some trees, following closely behind them. He stopped them to ask if one of them would go back to the fair to buy some cigarettes for him. One of the girls, Louise, obliged, skipping back the way they had come. As soon as she had disappeared, Kürten picked up the other sister, Gertrude, and strangled her before slowly cutting her throat. When the other girl came back with his cigarettes, he strangled and decapitated her.

The following day, when he encountered a woman and asked if he could have sex with her, she replied, ‘I’d rather die.’ He responded, ‘Die then!’ before plunging his knife into her. She survived, however, and managed to provide a good description of him.

Kürten was now out of control. September saw him committing a rape and murder and he also savagely beat a girl with a hammer. In October the hammer came in handy again when he used it to attack two women. On 7 November, he strangled a five-year-old girl and stabbed her thirty-six times with a pair of scissors. Following this murder, he sent a map to a local newspaper showing them where he had buried her body.

Meanwhile, the police received tip-offs from the public that pointed the finger at thousands of different people. An enormous manhunt was under way and the city was in a frenzy of terror and suspicion.

In 1930, he made numerous hammer attacks in February and March, none of which proved fatal.

His eventual arrest was the result of an accident. An unemployed and homeless domestic servant by the name of Budlick was picked up at Dusseldorf station by a man promising to take her to a hostel. As they walked into a dimly lit park, she remembered the stories of the killer who was on the loose and became reluctant to go any further. They argued, and another man approached asking if she was having problems. The first man took off, leaving her alone with the second man. He was Peter Kürten. She went with him to his room on Mettmanner Strasse but she said she did not want to have sex with him, asking instead if he could take her somewhere that she could find a bed for the night. They took a tram and walked into the Grafenberger Woods where he grabbed her by the neck and asked her to have sex with him. ‘I thought that under the circumstances she would agree and my opinion was right,’ he said later. He took her back to the tram, saying later that he did not kill her because she had offered no resistance to him. He let her go, believing that she would never be able find his flat or him again

On 21 May, he was surprised, therefore, to return to his room to find her there. She had written a letter describing the incident to a friend who had immediately passed the letter to the police. Fraulein Budick did, indeed, remember the location of Kürten’s flat and had led the police to it.

Seeing her, Kürten went into the flat and then swiftly re-emerged, walking out onto the street, but followed by plain clothes detectives. He knew that capture was now inevitable, but reasoned that for the moment, the only charge against him would be one of rape which would mean a sentence of about fifteen years. He was concerned about how this would leave his wife and resolved to tell her everything so that she could take the information to the police and claim the substantial reward that was being offered for information leading to the capture of the Vampire of Dusseldorf.