Peter Kürten

Peter Kürten (police photo from 1931)

Peter Kürten (born May 26, 1883 in Mülheim am Rhein , today in Cologne; † July 2, 1931 in Cologne ), called "The Vampire of Düsseldorf ", was a German serial killer . The brutality of his murders and the hysteria that it triggered in the Rhineland made the search for him the most widely noticed criminal case in the Weimar Republic and also sparked international interest. The nickname that the press gave him at the time was due to an incident in December 1929 when Kürten in the Düsseldorf Hofgartenkilled a young swan and drank its blood. Police and court records show that he drank or tried to drink from the blood of his victims in some cases.

Life

Youth and first offenses

On May 26, 1883, Kürten was born in Mülheim am Rhein , then a booming industrial city near Cologne . Here, Kürten grew up as the third oldest of 13 siblings in modest living conditions. The father, a sandformer , was an alcoholic who beat his wife and children. At the age of five, Kürten, accompanied by a dog catcher, discovered his pleasure in killing while drowning two puppies in a stream. In his youth he injured numerous animals with knife wounds. When the father had attacked his mother again, Peter ran away at the age of eight. He stayed on the street for three weeks with minor thefts before he was found by the police and taken back to his parents. The mother was able to prevent subsequent admission to a welfare facility. Later he also attributed some past deaths of children and young people on the banks of the Rhine in Mülheim, although it remained unclear whether Kürten, who was nine at the time in question, was actually the perpetrator.

In 1894 the family moved to Düsseldorf . Peter attended elementary school in Gerresheim until 1897 and then began an apprenticeship in sand shaping in the Düsseldorf factory, where his father was also employed. Corporal punishment of the apprentices was still the order of the day there. The father was sentenced to a year and three months in prison that same year for molesting the eldest daughter. In the same year, Peter choked a girl in the Grafenberg Forest . A little later he embezzled 100 marks in wages, went to Koblenz and made a trip to the Rhine with a prostitute . Back in Düsseldorf on June 6, 1899, he was sentenced to two months' imprisonment for embezzlement , which he served until August 1899. Because of spending the night outdoors, he had to serve another two-day sentence.

After his release from prison, he stayed in Düsseldorf without a permanent job. He was now 16 years old and got to know the much older Ms. M., with whom and her 16-year-old daughter he moved into an apartment. There were various sexual practices with Ms. M., in which he hit and choked the woman with her consent. The unequal couple separated after protests from residents. Kürten, however, did not give up on Ms. M. and climbed into the apartment through a skylight to threaten her and rob her of her keys. For this he was sentenced on January 2, 1900 to twelve days in prison. After entering the woman's home again and threatening her, he was sentenced on February 16, 1900 to an additional seven days in prison. For dodging , burglary and theft , there were three more prison sentences up to October 1900. He then lived briefly with his mother, who had since separated from his abusive father, but then went to Rheydt , where he committed several thefts, for which he served a two-year prison sentence in Derendorf prison until January 1903.

In the spring of 1903 he was in contact with his former classmate Elisabeth Brenner in Düsseldorf. After being expelled from the apartment by the Brenners, he terrorized the family by breaking windows with stones and an ax and firing several shots at Father Brenner and the apartment over a period of several days. A little later he was sentenced to one year and three weeks in prison for this. After the end of his imprisonment, he stayed with his mother, but was soon taken back by Ms. M. He made a living from burglary.

In the autumn of 1904, Kürten developed a great passion for arson , using fuses and matchboxes to light haystacks and barns and then watching the fire brigade's efforts to extinguish the fire. At the time of the fires, no suspicion fell on him. When he was arrested, around 24 arson attacks were found, although the number of unreported cases is probably much higher. Also in the autumn of 1904 he was drafted into military service with the 98th Infantry Regiment in Metz , from where he left on the first day to hide again with Mrs. M. After his capture on New Year's Eve 1904, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for desertion , serious theft in 34 cases and attempted theft in a further 12 cases . He served this prison sentence in Munster . He then lived with his mother again, at times in a rented room in Düsseldorf, and lived on from burglaries.

More offenses followed in quick succession. A maid with whom he had a relationship broke up with him for abuse. After harassing a woman in a restaurant, he shot guests and a security guard who came to help, for which he was imprisoned for another six months. During a break-in on May 18, 1913 in Düsseldorf, he severely abused a 16-year-old who was found in the house, but was able to flee undetected.

First murder and subsequent crimes

Christine Klein

On May 25, 1913, he committed the first murder clearly attributable to him . His victim was nine-year-old Christine Klein, whom he found late in the evening asleep while breaking into the apartment of an innkeeper in Mülheim. He cut her throat and was able to escape unnoticed without having found any valuables. The victim's mother, who was still working in the inn on the first floor, noticed the crime a few minutes later when she was about to go to bed. The day after the crime, Kürten returned near the crime scene, where he spent hours listening to the angry guests talking about what had happened in an inn. No fingerprints were found at the crime scene, but Kürten had left behind a blood-stained handkerchief marked with his initials. Since the house owner and father of the girl, Peter Klein, had the same initials, he was initially suspected. After Peter Klein was able to prove his innocence, his brother Otto Klein - the victim's uncle - was suspected. He was incriminated by a witness who had seen a man come out of the house in a suit like the one Otto Klein owned. There was also an inheritance dispute in the Klein family, which served as a reason for the burden. There was a hearing before the jury , but Otto Klein was acquitted for lack of evidence. He fell in Russia in 1915 , without his innocence having been proven by then. Peter Kürten, however, was never suspected of the crime.

In the early summer of 1913, Kürten had a brief relationship with a domestic worker. At the second night's meeting in the Grafenberg Forest, he beat and choked her. Since morning was breaking and passers-by were nearby, he let go of her. During a subsequent breakfast together in a restaurant, the woman managed to escape, but she did not file a complaint. Shortly afterwards, Kürten attacked a man in Gerresheimer Park with an ax, escaped unrecognized and, while still on the run, also unrecognized, set fire to a wagon loaded with straw. The following week he again struck down a girl in Gerresheim with the same ax and then set three haystacks on fire. A little later he attacked another girl with an ax during a break-in in Düsseldorf, but was then driven to escape by her father, who again managed to go unnoticed.

On July 14, 1913, he was arrested for further thefts and sentenced to six years in prison. He served his imprisonment in Brieg ; it was extended for nearly two years after he participated in a prison mutiny.

From 1921, Kürten lived in Altenburg , Thuringia , where one of his married sisters lived. In Altenburg he worked in a machine factory, but also attracted attention for various animal cruelties. A violent assault on a girl whom he pushed into a ditch was not reported. In Altenburg he married Auguste Scharf in 1923. She had a criminal record for manslaughter with a gun, and Peter Kürten was proud to have chosen her as a woman. In 1925 he and his wife moved back to Düsseldorf, where they initially lived at different addresses, and then moved into a furnished apartment on Schwanenmarkt. Finally, they moved to an attic apartment in the house at Mettmanner Strasse 71, which they lived in until Kürten was arrested. In Düsseldorf, Kürten was employed by construction companies and machine factories. His wife initially worked in a fish frying kitchen, later in the kitchen of the Café Hemesath on Graf-Adolf-Strasse, where she often stayed late into the night.

For the neighbors, Kürten gave the loving husband who, with a well-groomed appearance, often accompanied his wife to work and picked her up again. Nobody suspected that Kürten could be a dangerous violent criminal or that it was not strict about conjugal fidelity and that it often committed rape crimes. His wife knew of his infidelity because she had talked to some girls to prevent them from filing charges against Kürten. In the summer of 1925, he abused three servants at short intervals in Düsseldorf's Parkstrasse. He gained the girls' trust with forged papers, in which he had made himself ten years younger and taken on a different profession. One of the girls charged him with fraudulent marriage . During the course of the trial, the other two girls were also heard, so that the violence also came to light. However, there was no conviction for rape, but Kürten had to serve several months' imprisonment for falsifying documents .

In 1926 and 1927, Kürten committed a number of other attacks on women and arson, but always remained undetected. In other cases, however, he was sentenced to a total of eight months' imprisonment for threats, insults and attempted coercion at the beginning of 1928, which he served in Düsseldorf-Derendorf until October 1928.

Series of murders from 1929

In the period between February and November 1929, Kürten committed eight murders. Between February 1929 and his arrest in May 1930 he committed more than 20 robberies, most of them with murderous intent.

On February 2, 1929 at around 9 p.m. he attacked Apollonia Kühn in Düsseldorf's Berthastraße and stabbed her several times with scissors. Believing that he had killed the woman, he hid nearby. After the seriously injured woman was able to get to her nearby apartment, he briefly returned to the abandoned crime scene. A few days later he returned to the scene of the crime and involved a woman Werner and her daughter in a conversation about the crime. He later had the scissors used as a tool, the tips of which had broken off and stuck in the victim's head, sharpened. On this occasion he also acquired a dagger . The mentally ill worker Johann Stausberg later confessed to the fact that the case was considered to be resolved. Only after Kürten was arrested could the crime be proven with the point of a scissor on the basis of his confession and circumstantial evidence.

On February 9, 1929, he went from Flingern towards Gerresheim in the evening with a large pair of scissors - so-called Kaiserschere with imprinted images of the imperial couple . At around 6 p.m. on Behrensstrasse, he met 9-year-old Rosa Ohlinger, who was lost. He offered to take the child home and then suggested the direction to the address given by the child. At the height of the Vinzenzkirche , only a few steps away from Kürten's apartment, he stabbed the child several times with the scissors he had taken with him until it was dead. Due to a construction site, the crime scene was relatively hidden from view and was also not illuminated in the evening. Then he went to his apartment, cleaned tools and clothes and left the apartment again to go to the Alhambra light shows, for which he had received a free ticket. After the screening, he returned to his apartment, filled a beer bottle with kerosene and looked for the child's body again. Since there were passers-by nearby, he could not set the corpse on fire, only put the beer bottle at the scene. In the early morning of the next day, he returned to the crime scene, where the body had gone undetected. He doused the body with the petroleum that was still there and set it on fire. He threw the bottle away, it was never found. Then he returned to his apartment. The body was only discovered early in the morning by construction workers. The insane Stausberg later admitted this murder as well. In the following years, Kürten visited the crime scene again several times. In the years that followed, the construction site served him again and again as a hiding place for his murderous tools.

After the murder of Rosa Ohlinger, Kürten roamed the area of ​​the attempted murder of Apollonia Kühn every day. He wore the same clothes as on the previous days and carried the Kaiser scissors with him. However, he initially found no victim in a suitable place. On February 12, 1929, he was just about to return home when he came across the 54-year-old invalid Rudolf Scheer on the Hellweg near the Gerresheim allotment gardens around midnight . He came drunk from an inn and was on his way to his allotment garden . Kürten stabbed him with the Kaiser scissors and, when the victim struggled, inflicted numerous more stings. He also tried unsuccessfully to take up the blood with his mouth. Then he pushed the seriously injured man down an embankment, where he died during the night. The body was found the next day by the same woman Werner with whom Kürten had spoken only a few days earlier about the attempted murder of Mrs. Kühn.

In March 1929, Kürten made the acquaintance of a single mother, whom he imagined living in divorce. After closer questioning, he admitted to having lied about his living conditions and assaulted the woman physically.

In July 1929, Kürten was regularly out and about in the zoo , where he spoke to women several times. Once, when he had already chosen a victim, he met his wife, who ironically spoke to him about his companion. Kürten, who had his scissors with him, left both women standing and took off. Another time he persuaded a woman to visit the fair in Heerdt together . He choked her on the way back, but she escaped before he could pursue the scissors.

On August 8, 1929, he met the maid Maria Hahn at Hansaplatz and arranged to meet her on an excursion the following Sunday. On that Sunday, August 11, 1929, they met again at Hansaplatz and took the tram and train to the Neandertal , where they spent the day on a long hike and stopped at several restaurants on their way. On the way back to Gerresheim, Kürten lured his victim with a ruse to a secluded stretch of meadow, where he first choked Maria Hahn after initial tenderness and then stabbed Maria Hahn with the emperor scissors he was carrying. This time he drank the victim's blood, but soon vomited it again. He put the body in a drainage ditch and then went home. His dirty and bloody clothes aroused the suspicion of his wife, but Kürten had excuses. Nevertheless, he feared that he would be associated with the murder if it became known, so that he returned to the scene the evening after the crime and first made sure that the body was still in its place. He then went back to his apartment to get a shovel, which he used to go to the crime scene again that night and dig a grave nearby where he hid the body. His wife had noticed that he was out at night, but he was able to appease her again with excuses. In the following period he returned frequently to the grave site - initially to camouflage it even better, and later to satisfy himself in the vicinity.

On August 20, 1929, after work, Kürten went to the fair in Lierenfeld . He carried the recently acquired dagger with him and spoke to several women that evening about unsuccessfully. At around 2 a.m. he followed two girls on their way home to Gumbertstrasse 3, where one of the girls lived. After this had arrived at the apartment, he followed the other girl, the 18-year-old Anna Goldhausen, a few meters and stabbed her with the dagger in the upper body. However, the girl managed to escape, called for help and rang the doorbell of her friend at house number 3, where they opened it quickly, so that Kürten hurried to escape. At around 2.15 a.m. he pressed a woman who was going home alone, 31-year-old Olga Mantel, who initially evaded him, but whom he pursued and who he stabbed several times in the back on Erkrather Strasse. Alarmed by the woman's screams, a porter from the factory rushed up, who was still chasing the perpetrator, but quickly lost sight of him. On his escape, Kürten attacked another man, 30-year-old Heinrich Kornblum, with a stab in the back near the fairground. Kornblum was able to escape and reached the fairground, where he was connected. Kürten hid the dagger near Erkrather Strasse and hung around the fairground for a while to enjoy the excited atmosphere. Then he returned to Erkrather Strasse and watched in the midst of a crowd of onlookers the removal of the seriously injured Frau Mantel. There he met the porter again, who thought he recognized him and asked him where he was from. Kürten was able to deceive him with an excuse, then took the dagger out of its hiding place and went home. The two seriously injured women were able to describe the perpetrator, but the description did not lead to the discovery of Kürten. The slightly injured Kornblum had been attacked from behind and had not seen the perpetrator.

On August 24, 1929, Kürten again went in search of victims with the dagger. At first he looked unsuccessfully for girls at the main train station . Then he took the tram to Flehe , where there was a shooting festival. He spoke to a woman in vain on Aachener Strasse and then watched the fireworks at the shooting festival. He then followed 13-year-old Luise Lenzen and 5-year-old Gertrud Hamacher, who left the shooting festival on a dirt road. He spoke to the girls and asked the older one to get cigarettes for him. When she was out of sight, he choked the remaining 5-year-old into unconsciousness, carried her into a bean field and cut her throat there. Then he ran towards the returning older girl, whom he also choked and dragged into a leek field, where he also put the dagger at his throat. The girl struggled and at first managed to escape, but Kürten soon caught up with her in the field and stabbed her with several dagger stabs. He left the children's bodies and went home. The bodies were found the next morning.

On the morning after the crime, Kürten went back to the area of ​​the crime scene and delighted in the excitement surrounding the location of the bodies. He then drove to Oberkassel , where he spoke to the 26-year-old domestic worker Gertrud Schulte at the tram stop on Luegplatz, pretended to be the local post office worker under a false name and stole the woman's trust. He persuaded them to visit the fair in Neuss , where they did not stay too long. On the way back with the tram to Oberkassel, he insisted on walking the last part of the way. The two got out at Heerdter Rathaus, but instead of the shortest route, Kürten chose a route to the Rheinbogen near Lörick . The local Schulte followed him in good faith to the Rhine meadows, where Kürten sexually harassed the woman. When she struggled, he stabbed her with the dagger. A particularly hard stab in the back broke the tip of the dagger and got stuck in the victim's vertebrae. The woman's cries for help had alarmed some young people nearby. As they approached, Kürten moved away from the crime scene and threw away the broken dagger. On Leostrasse he searched the woman's handbag, kept a watch and threw away the bag and the rest of its contents. At Lueg-Platz he waited for the alarmed attack squad to drive past and then went home. The victim survived the crime seriously injured.

On August 31, 1929, Kürten spoke to the domestic worker Karoline Herstrass at the main train station in the evening and managed with a trick that she missed the last tram to Neuss. He offered to find her a room and led her to the bank of the Düssel near Ostpark , where he pounced on her. While the woman stated that Kürten had pushed her into the Düssel, interrogations by the police revealed that she had jumped on her own initiative and had also made the strangling marks on her neck herself. The case remained unsolved.

During this time, Kürten still regularly visited Maria Hahn's grave. In the course of September 1929, however, he lost interest in it. Much more interesting seemed to him the excitement that would reign upon the discovery of Hahn's body. Therefore, at the end of September 1929, he drew up a sketch of the grave with commentary and put it in the mailbox of the publishing house of the Düsseldorfer Stadtanzeiger. Nothing is known about the whereabouts of this sketch, nor did the newspaper report on it.

On September 26, 1929, he attacked the domestic worker Maria Radusch in Gerresheim and strangled her, but the woman escaped.

On September 29, 1929, Kürten went to Düsseldorf Central Station with a hammer. There he spoke to the 31-year-old unmarried domestic worker Ida Reuter. Together they ran over the Rhine bridge to Oberkassel and from there to the Rhine dam, near the point where Kürten had attacked Gertrud Schulte a month earlier. When dusk fell, Reuter insisted on turning around. Kürten agreed, but after a short stretch of the way back he suddenly struck the woman with a hammer on the temple. He dragged the unconscious from the Rhine dam down into the less visible Rhine meadows, where he killed her with further hammer blows after dark. He took off the dead woman's pants and threw them, weighted down with pebbles, into the Rhine. He then took the same route back as after the attempted murder on Schulte. He stopped again in Leostrasse to search the victim's suitcase that he had taken with him. This time he kept one ring and threw the rest away. Then he returned to the corpse and began dragging it by the feet to the Rhine in order to sink it in the river. When a man with a dog approached, he abandoned his plan and went home. The man, a police officer on patrol, had taken no notice. Reuter's body was found early the next morning. In the course of the morning, Kürten returned to the vicinity of the crime scene and watched the police officers working there.

On the evening of October 11, 1929, Kürten went to downtown Düsseldorf with his hammer and looked for victims among the moviegoers between the movie theaters on Graf-Adolf-Straße. There he met the 22-year-old Elisabeth Dörrier, who was looking for work and a place to live, with whom he first went to a brewery on Oststrasse before she agreed to come to his apartment. But instead of going to his apartment, he led her to a meadow on the bank of the Düssel, where he hit her on the temple with a hammer. He dragged her behind a bush, where he attacked her and wounded her with further blows of the hammer. Assuming she was dead, he left the unconscious woman lying there and threw away her coat, hat and bag on the way back. The victim was found the following morning and taken to hospital, but passed away after 36 hours without regaining consciousness.

Two days after the crime, he returned to the scene and met an officer with a sniffer dog, whom he gave clues about the clothes and handbags of the dead in the vicinity. However, the officer was not suspicious. On the same day, Kürten made another sketch of Maria Hahn's grave and this time addressed it to the Düsseldorf police administration. The sketch was received there the following day, but it was too imprecise so that the police did not initially find a body.

On October 25, 1929, Kürten went to Flingern with his hammer in the early evening. There he spoke to a few little girls in vain before he met 34-year-old Hubertine Meurer in Hellweg. They started talking and walked down Hellweg together. There they also talked about the Scheer murder case, which had happened nearby a few months earlier. When Meurer became suspicious, Kürten hit her on the temple with a hammer. He hit the woman, who was lying on the ground and screaming for help, more blows with a hammer on the head, but then let go of his victim, took his briefcase and left the scene. At Ostpark he threw away the victim's bag, which only contained clothing. At Grafenberger Allee he boarded the tram to Worringerplatz. From there he ran past the main train station to the Hofgarten , where only a few people were still after midnight. After spending some time in the courtyard garden, he walked back to town along the water. Halfway through, the prostitute Klara Wanders spoke to him. Kürten was interested, and both went back to the courtyard garden, where Kürten attacked the prostitute at the Pineapple Mountain with several hammer blows. On the last blow that left the victim unconscious, the hammer handle broke and the upper part with the hammer head flew into the bushes. Kürten left the victim and walked away in the direction of Hofgartenstrasse. From there he could see that the victim, having come to, ran off calling for help and was surrounded by several other women at the Ratinger Tor. He walked an arc over Jägerhof-Allee back to the Landskrone, got rid of the broken hammer handle and returned to the crime scene, where he unsuccessfully looked for the hammer head.

On November 7, 1929, Kürten picked up the Kaiserschere shears again when he was looking for a new victim in Flingern. At the Flingerner Kirche he met 5-year-old Gertrud Albermann, who was playing in front of her aunt's house. He persuaded the child to go with him. Kürten also didn't cause a stir when little Gertrud waved to a well-known family as they passed their house. Two fitters, to whom the man with the child appeared suspicious, speculated whether it might be the murderer he was looking for, but Gertrud's cheerful manner led them to believe that it was a father with his daughter after all. Kürten led the child through the allotment gardens to an allotment garden at the Haniel & Lueg factory and choked him to the point of unconsciousness. Then he stabbed her temple several times with the scissors and tried to drink the blood. He then assaulted the child and stabbed it at random until it was dead. He put the body down in a bush and went home.

The following day he made a third sketch of Maria Hahn's grave and addressed it to the Düsseldorfer Zeitung Die Freiheit , which informed the police. This new sketch also contained a reference to the place where he had put Gertrud Albermann's body. Since this letter got into the hands of the police only a few hours after the body was actually found, they could assume that only they and the killer knew about the crime. Search excavations on November 12, 1929 initially brought no results. After a farmer had remembered that he had found a lady's handbag and a bunch of keys during harvest work last August, Maria Hahn's body was finally recovered on November 15, 1929.

Hofgarten at the Düsseldorf Parkhotel : This is where the "Vampire of Düsseldorf" fell on a swan.

On December 7, 1929, Kürten killed a swan at night in the courtyard garden by cutting its neck. Then he drank the animal's blood.

On February 23, 1930, Kürten met a young domestic worker with whom he first went to an inn and then to the Grafenberg Forest, where sexual acts took place during which he choked the woman. When asked about it by the woman, he described the gagging as a proof of love. A week later, Kürten met this woman again in his own apartment, but the two were surprised by Kürten's wife, who was returning home earlier.

In March 1930 he lured the ironer Marianne del Santo under a pretext into the Grafenberg Forest, where he began to choke her. The woman managed to escape. A few days later, after a similar incident, he pushed the domestic worker Irma Becker down the slope into the Wolfsschlucht in the Grafenberg Forest.

On April 13, 1930, he met the domestic servant Gertrud Hau, with whom he went to the courtyard garden at night after visiting a café, where he molested her. There was a violent argument and the woman managed to escape.

On April 30, 1930 he went with the domestic servant Charlotte Ulrich to the Grafenberg Forest, where he knocked her down with a hammer blow on the temple and further blows to the head. He initially thought the woman was dead and left, but returned to the scene a few minutes later to make sure. However, the woman had regained consciousness and fled.

Also in April he made the acquaintance of the young widow Körtzinger, whom he introduced himself to as a bachelor willing to marry. He visited the widow several times in her apartment with the intention of murdering the widow and her children with a hammer or scissors if the opportunity arises. However, the widow had frequent visits from relatives, so that Kürten could no longer take action before his arrest.

On May 14, 1930, Kürten was hanging around at Düsseldorf Central Station. He followed the young domestic servant Maria Butlies, who was on the way to the Volksgarten with an intrusive man. Kürten spoke to the couple and was able to get the man to leave Butlies. He then took the girl to his apartment, where he also became intrusive. After the woman protested, Kürten offered to take her to a girls' hostel in the Grafenberg Forest. When he got to the forest, he choked the woman, but then left her and took her near a tram stop. Shortly thereafter, Maria Butlies described the incident in a letter to her friend Brückner in Düsseldorf. As luck would have it, the letter was mistakenly delivered to a Brügmann family on the same street that handed it over to the police.

Investigation and arrest

Peter Kürten attached great importance to a well-groomed appearance.

The investigation into the murders committed by Kürten remained unsuccessful for a long time. The then Chief Public Prosecutor Otto Steiner awarded Kürten satanic luck . His well-groomed appearance and friendly manner did not make him look suspicious, especially when he returned to the crime scenes in public, mingled with the onlookers and sometimes even made contact with the investigating officers. At the same time, these characteristics had the effect that his victims did not become suspicious and that he could win the trust of new victims even after the first deeds became known.

In retrospect, many circumstances of the investigation are puzzling. For example, the fact that Kürten, who is often known to the police, was not suspected when 9-year-old Rosa Ohliger was murdered just a few steps from his apartment. The police's public relations work in the media was also in its infancy, so neither the pieces of evidence found (scissor point and dagger point) nor descriptions of the perpetrators of the surviving victims were communicated to the public. Whether the descriptions of the perpetrators would have ever led to Kürten remains questionable, as all witnesses estimated the perpetrator between 11 and 24 years younger than he actually was. Ms. Kürten later stated that her husband put on make-up to look younger. However, none of the victims noticed any make-up.

The series of robberies and murders was also not recognized as belonging together for a long time. The reasons are partly that the mentally ill Johann Stausberg confessed indiscriminately to the perpetrators of various murders in Düsseldorf; in addition to three crimes clearly committed by Kürten, there were also two other murders based on a different pattern, so that some of the crimes were temporarily considered to have been solved. Finally, the different tools used to commit the crime (hammer, scissors, dagger) and the not always present sexual component of the crime gave rise to belief in different perpetrators. In addition, the police saw in the attacks on Hubertine Meurer and Klara Wanders on October 25, 1929 another perpetrator than in the previous offenses, since the attack on the prostitute Klara Wanders was considered to be an act of envy of competition in the red-light district.

Around 12,000 reports of possible perpetrators were received from the population. There were also at least three references to Kürten. In the course of November 1929, for example, a former inmate of Kürten reported to the police and stated that he had bragged about similar deeds during the joint imprisonment. The police then had photos taken of Kürten in order to show them to the surviving victim Schulte. Ms. Schulte did not recognize the perpetrator in the photos. The police also asked several neighbors of Kürten about his way of life, but they only knew him as the friendly, always well-dressed neighbor.

In Düsseldorf, given the unsuccessful investigation, an unprecedented hysteria spread. Under pressure from the media and the public, the Interior Ministry set up a special homicide commission and had police officers relocated from Berlin to Düsseldorf. Among them was Kriminalrat Ernst Gennat , who later recorded his experiences in the article Die Düsseldorfer Sexualverbrechen. He was the first to coined the term serial killer . The series of murders also caused a stir abroad. The British crime writer Edgar Wallace, for example, offered his help to the Düsseldorf criminal police .

The turning point in the investigation came with Maria Butlies' wrongly delivered letter, in which she reported on her encounter with the perpetrator. The police searched with Butlies for the house where they had stayed with the perpetrator. After a long search, on the morning of May 21, 1930, Butlies thought he recognized the house at Mettmanner Strasse 71. After Butlies had been with a police officer in the stairwell of the house, she was no longer sure whether it was the right house. At midday she returned alone to the hallway of the house, where she reported the incidents to a neighbor. She saw Kürten too, but did not recognize him. The neighbor wrote Kürten's name on a piece of paper that Butlies handed over to the police that afternoon. She was now sure that she had recognized the right house, but she had not recognized the perpetrator in the aforementioned Kürten.

However, Kürten, who had been unemployed since April 16, recognized Butlies and meanwhile left the apartment. He withdrew 140 marks from his wife's bank account and met her that evening in a café, where he told her that he had once again had something with a girl, that she was now on his track and that he was moving out and not the apartment will enter more. There was a scene where Kürten's wife went home alone while her husband spent the night on the street. The next day he returned to Mettmanner Strasse in the morning, fetched some items of clothing and then rented a room at Adlerstrasse 53, where he slept throughout the day. In the evening he picked up his wife from work, and another argument broke out.

On the following day, May 23, 1930, the police appeared in the morning at Mettmanner Strasse 71 based on the information provided by the Butlies, but no one was to be found there. The officers then turned to Kürten's wife at her workplace in Café Hemesath and returned with her to the apartment. They informed them about the attack on Butlies and learned that Peter Kürten was unemployed and had moved out, but that he wanted to collect his support from the employment office on the same day. The officers left a summons for Kürten and went to the employment office, where they waited for him for the morning without success.

These police investigations were also unfortunate and were later sharply criticized by government and criminal director Willy Gay . Butlies should not have been allowed to return to the house on their own, even if that would ultimately have given the decisive clues to Kürten. Gay also criticizes the fact that the police initially only left a summons for Kürten, although he had been among the suspects for a long time. For Kürten, the summons was formally an invitation to flee.

In the meantime, Kürten had returned to Mettmanner Strasse 71 and had received the summons from his wife. Confronted with the allegations of the attack on Butlies, he confessed to his wife the act: "Yes, yes, I did everything!" Then Kürten left the apartment again. Around noon he met his wife on the popularly known as Seufzer-Allee, took her to an inn for lunch and then went with her to the Rhine meadows, where he made her a comprehensive confession of all deeds that lasted around two hours. He declined his shocked wife's suggestion - if necessary together - to commit suicide. Instead, he wanted to leave Düsseldorf and go into hiding. He arranged to meet his wife for a last meeting next afternoon at Rochus Church .

In the meantime, Gertrud Schulte, who was attacked in August 1929, had been presented with further photographs of Kürten, on which she now recognized the perpetrator. Since Kürten was already in question for two acts, the police intensified the search for him and occupied the apartment at Mettmanner Strasse 71, where they arrested Kürten's wife, who was returning from the Rhine meadows. When she was questioned, she first told the police about Kürten's hiding place at 53 Adlerstrasse, but he was not there. Taken into protective custody because of the risk of blackout, she reported - after she had mentally collapsed - of the planned meeting at the Rochus Church.

The following day, May 24, 1930, Kürten was arrested at the planned meeting at Rochusmarkt. He made no resistance. Two surviving victims, Gertrud Schulte and Maria Butlies, identified him in a comparison, whereupon Kürten made a comprehensive confession on the same day. In addition to the acts that can be clearly assigned to him, he accused himself of three further murders and four attempted murders in the Altenburg area, which later turned out to be false.

Auguste Kürten was very tormented by the "betrayal" of her husband. For this reason she was temporarily housed in the “Grafenberg” mental hospital . She took on a false name, filed for divorce and moved to Leipzig after the trial of her former husband.

Preliminary investigation, trial and execution

In the course of the preliminary investigation, Kürten withdrew his confession in June 1930 and denied all acts resulting in death, but stuck to his confessions about acts in which the victims had survived and also admitted the arson. He justified his earlier confession to his wife with the fact that he wanted to help her to receive the reward for the arrest of the murderer.

After confrontation with other witnesses and the discovery of hidden objects of the murdered girls and some weapons, he returned in August 1930 to a comprehensive confession of all the crimes. He also revealed the hiding places of four other hammers that he had bought in stock at the end of 1929 and praised the properties of these tools, which could cause the victims to become unconscious with a single blow to the temple.

The preliminary investigation also provided certainty that the letters received with references to the grave sites had clearly been written by Kürten.

One of the tasks of the preliminary examination was also the examination of Kürten's state of mind, for which he was admitted to the Provincial Sanatorium Bedburg-Hau for eight weeks and examined there by the institution's director Raether and other doctors, who put over 1,000 pages of examination reports on record. The Bedburg prison doctors and other court and prison doctors consulted unanimously confirmed that there were no symptoms for the presence of any form of mental illness . They attested Kurten a sadistic tendency and a full responsibility for his actions.

He owed his nickname "Vampire of Düsseldorf" to his report that he had sucked the blood from the wound of a swan chick that he had killed by cutting the neck in front of the Düsseldorf Park Hotel (now the Steigenberger Group) in the Hofgarten . According to the stored court and police files, it is certain that he also committed two, possibly three human victims in a similar manner.

The jury trial against Kürten began on April 13, 1931 under the chairman of the district court director Rose. Attorney Alex Wehner from Düsseldorf acted as defense attorney. The interrogation of Kürten took place in camera, but representatives of the press were allowed. Kürten repeated his confession in front of the court. His lawyer asserted the defendant's difficult youth, but also admitted that Kürten had dug his grave with his deeds. In his closing remarks, Kürten tried to place part of the blame on his victims, as they had "made it very easy" for him, but also confessed that they could not escape the death penalty and asked the victims' relatives for forgiveness.

The Düsseldorf jury sentenced him to death nine times on April 22, 1931 for murder in nine cases , and to 15 years in prison for the seven attempted murders. An alleged killing of two boys on the banks of the Rhine in Mülheim in 1893, to which Kürten had also confessed, was not taken into account in the judgment due to a lack of discovery and criminal responsibility.

While Kürten had visibly enjoyed the preliminary investigation and the trial, as there was a great deal of interest in his person and he was granted various perks and special requests during his pre-trial detention, he was visibly dissatisfied after the verdict was announced. He was a normal prisoner and no one paid any attention to him. His lawyer he was then a clemency submit.

The spectacular case and the verdict sparked a loud discussion in the press and public that soon went far beyond the Kürten case and dealt with general questions about the death penalty.

The Prussian government rejected Kürten's petition for clemency on June 30th. On July 1st, Kürten was transferred to the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne . There in the afternoon he was informed of the refusal of the petition for clemency and the execution planned for the following morning . Kürten asked for spiritual assistance, whereupon the pastor of the institute was put by his side and his confessor from Düsseldorf also arrived in Cologne that evening. He spent the night sleepless in the company of the clergy and his lawyer and wrote letters to his wife, to surviving victims of his crimes and to their relatives. At 5 a.m. he attended a mass read for him before he was executed with the guillotine by the executioner Carl Gröpler at 6 a.m.

Despite all the secrecy, a group of reporters had gathered in front of the Klingelpütz before the execution . They were denied access to the execution, but a judicial spokesman informed them of the decision made. The execution of Kürten met with an unanimously positive response in the press.

Kürten's body was handed over to some of the doctors present for examination and for taking specimens. Among other things, the scientists also examined the brain for abnormal changes. The body was buried headless. The mummified head came after the Second World War in the United States and is now an exhibit at the Museum or Ripley's Believe It Not! in the Wisconsin Dells .

Artistic processing

literature

Stephen King refers to Kürten in his novel Brennen muss Salem , as does John Katzenbach in his novel Das Rätsel . In 2007, Alisha Bionda and Jörg Kleudgen placed the character Peter Kürten in the novel The Vampire of Düsseldorf , Volume 9 of the Wolfgang Hohlbein series , in a correspondingly vampiric setting. In the detective novel by Jo Nesbø Durst , published in 2017, reference is also made to Kürten.

Film and theater

The film M of Fritz Lang based in part on the case. Gordian Mauggs Fritz Lang - The Other in Us from 2016 deals with the background of the making of the film and deals with the director's research work in longer passages, also lets Kürten (played by Samuel Finzi ) explain the background of his actions in detail.

In 1964, Robert Hossein shot the film Der Mann, whose name was Peter Kürten (Le Vampire de Düsseldorf) in France with himself in the title role.

The story of Peter Kürten is also the subject of the 1991 play Normal - The Düsseldorf Ripper by Anthony Neilson. It deals with the idea that there is a murderer slumbering in every human being.

In the plot of the US film Copykill from 1995, references to the Kürten case are also made.

Slaughter Festival or How I Become a Useful Sacrifice , a play by Thomas Richhardt about Peter Kürten and his wife Auguste, was premiered in July 2000 in the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus .

In September 2008, the chamber play Who is the murderer? by WA Wirringa premiered at the Düsseldorf Altstadtherbst. The text was taken from historical minutes and condensed dramatically.

The Czech-Macedonian film Normal - The Düsseldorf Ripper was made in 2009 and is also based on the story of Peter Kürten and the play of the same name.

The case is also named in the episode blood ties of the RTL series Die Cleveren . In this episode, a grandson of Kürtens commits murders and bodily harm in the same pattern and order as his grandfather.

Music and radio play

The American songwriter Randy Newman , whose first wife Roswitha comes from Düsseldorf , published the song In Germany Before the War on his album Little Criminals in 1977 , the text of which refers to Peter Kürten and describes one of the acts from the perspective of the child murderer:

"A little girl has lost her way, with hair of gold and eyes of gray… We lie beneath the autumn sky, my little golden girl and I. And she lies very still."

The British power electronics band Whitehouse dedicated the 1981 album Dedicated To Peter Kurten Sadist And Mass Slayer to Peter Kürten . The American metal band Macabre dedicated a song to the serial killer called The Vampire of Düsseldorf . The Canadian metal band Dahmer released the song Peter Kürten in 1997 on a split with the band Denak .

In 1999 the French black metal band Namtar released a song on their demo tape entitled The Düsseldorf Vampire , which deals with this topic.

The album Set Sail to Mystery by the gothic metal band The Vision Bleak , released in April 2010, contains the song I Dined with the Swans , which refers to Peter Kürten's act of drinking swan blood. The singer of the depressive black metal band Shining , Niklas Kvarforth, sang an alternative version of the song for the 2-CD special edition.

In 2013 the hochschulradio düsseldorf produced a ten-part radio play series under the name Rheinblut: The Vampire of Düsseldorf .

The Japanese doom metal band Church of Misery makes two references to Kürten on their 2013 album Thy Kingdom Scum . On the one hand, the front cover consists of an edited police photo of Kürten, on the other hand, the twelve-minute, psychedelic play Dusseldorf Monster (Peter Kurten) deals with his deeds.

literature

• Karl Berg : The sadist. Forensic medicine and criminal psychology on the deeds of the Düsseldorf murderer. In: Journal for All Forensic Medicine. 17, No. 1, December 1931, ISSN  0367-0031 , pp. 247-347.
• Karl Berg (re-edited by Michael Farin ): The Sadist. Forensic and criminal psychology related to the deeds of the Düsseldorf murderer Peter Kürten. (The case of Peter Kürten) . (= Splinter. 12). Belleville-Verlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-923646-12-7 .
• Jürgen Ehlers : I went along. A dark time in the history of Düsseldorf . KBV, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-937001-41-7 .
• Bastian Fleermann (Ed.): The Commissioners: Criminal Police in Düsseldorf and in the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area (1920–1950) . Droste Verlag, Düsseldorf 2018, ISBN 978-3-7700-6032-0 , pp. 63–72.
• George Godwin: Peter Kürten. A study in sadism . William Heinemann - Medical Books, London 1945.
• Karl-Heinz Dillmann, Wieland Habel: The big three ??? Criminology Lexicon. Determine from A – Z. Franckh, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-440-05839-5 , p. 147.
• Kathrin Kompisch, Frank Otto: Beasts of the Boulevard. The Germans and their serial killers . Militzke Verlag, Leipzig 2003, ISBN 3-86189-290-1 , p. 99.
• Elisabeth Lenk , Katharina Kaever (ed.): Life and work of Peter Kürten, called the vampire of Düsseldorf . Rogner and Bernhard, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-8077-0024-2 ( Die Bresche 2) (Also: Peter Kürten, called the Vampire of Düsseldorf. (= The other library . 156). Text shortened by a few repetitive passages. Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-8218-4156-7 ).
• Marcel Montarron: Histoire des crimes sexuels . (= Presses pocket 1581). Presses pocket, Paris 1978, ISBN 2-266-00511-1 , pp. 54 ff., 256, 287.
• Hanno Parmentier: The strangler of Düsseldorf. The life and deeds of the serial killer Peter Kürten . Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2013, ISBN 978-3-95400-178-1 .
• Hans Pfeiffer : The compulsion to series - serial killers without a mask. Militzke Verlag, OA 1996, ISBN 3-86189-729-6 .
• Hans-Theodor Sanders: The mass murderer Peter Kürten. In: Archives for Criminology. Volume 90-91, 1932, ZDB -ID 2169801-6 , pp. 55ff., 151ff., 252 (smaller communications).
• Otto Steiner, Willy Gay : The Kürten Case. Presentation and considerations , Hamburg 1957.
• Erich Wulffen : The serial killer Peter Kürten. In: Jürgen Seul , Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen (eds.): Erich Wulffen - Between Art and Crime: Criminal Psychological Articles and Essays. Elektrischer Verlag, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-943889-66-6 .

Web links

Commons : Peter Kürten  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Peter Kürten in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Kürten: "The Vampire of Düsseldorf". ( Memento from May 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) on: nrw2000.de
• The Vampire of Düsseldorf - The Kürten Files : Detailed blog with the elaborations of the project forum The 'Vampire of Düsseldorf' (Peter Kürten) in court - in the press - on the stage of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Winter semester 2010/2011
• Slaughter Festival or How to Become a Useful Sacrifice - play
• Film "normal"
• Photos of the trial: The mass murderer of Düsseldorf, Peter Kürten, in court. In:  Wiener Bilder , April 19, 1931, p. 1 (online at ANNO ).
• Serial killer Peter Kürten: The Vampire of Düsseldorf , in one day (Spiegel Online)
• Peter Kürten - the vampire of Düsseldorf , SWR2 feature from November 18, 2012

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The great criminal cases: 21st case - Peter Kürten, the mass murderer of Düsseldorf (1931) . Documentation on the website erichs-kriminalarchiv (with further references), accessed on August 10, 2013.
2. ^ Richard J. Evans : Rituals of Retribution. The Death Penalty in German History, 1532–1987 . Hamburg 2001. ISBN 978-3-463-40400-4 , p. 714.
3. ↑ Tour of the Hofgarten, point 6 on duesseldorf.de, accessed on October 28, 2014.
4. ↑ Richard J. Evans: Rituals of Retaliation - The Death Penalty in German History 1532-1987 . [engl. first 1996] Berlin 2001, p. 718 f.
5. ↑ Archive signature of the North Rhine-Westphalia State Archives: Courts_Rep 0017
6. ↑ See medical report in the criminal case against Peter Kürten, Prof. Franz Sioli (November 14, 1930), Main State Archive Düsseldorf (HSA Düsseldorf) 17/728, medical report in the criminal case against Peter Kürten, Prof. Hübner (March 26, 1931 ), HSA Düsseldorf 17/730, medical report in the criminal case against Peter Kürten, Dr. Raether (January 2, 1931), HSA Düsseldorf 17/731.
7. ↑ Kürten sentenced to death nine times. The mass murderer's closing speech. In:  Neue Freie Presse , April 23, 1931, p. 9 (online at ANNO ).
8. ↑ Martin Rath: Kürten's head . March 30, 2014 in the portal lto.de ( Legal Tribune Online ), accessed on April 3, 2014.
9. ^ Matthias Blazek: Executioners in Prussia and in the German Empire 1866-1945. Stuttgart 2010, p. 74 f.
10. ↑ Ulli Tückmantel: The "Vampire" of Düsseldorf . ( Memento from May 26, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: Rheinische Post. of May 22, 2010, p. D8.
11. ↑ Peter Kurten, The Vampire of Dusseldorf. In: http://monstrumathenaeum.org/ . Retrieved August 19, 2016 . 
12. ↑ Jan Niko Kirschbaum: Behind bars (5): The last day. In: The Vampire of Düsseldorf: The Kürten Files. Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf , March 27, 2011, accessed on August 19, 2016 . 
13. ^ The Vision Bleak: I Dined with the Swans , article from August 25, 2012 in the YouTube portal , accessed on August 10, 2013.
14. ↑ A radio play with a lot of bite . September 7, 2013 in the portal wz-newsline.de , accessed on December 8, 2013.
15. ↑ Church Of Misery: Dusseldorf Monster (Peter Kurten) , article from December 14, 2013 in the YouTube portal , accessed on August 2, 2014.