Joachim Kroll
It wasn’t until July 1959 that German police began to recognize the signature of the man they came to call ‘the Ruhr Hunter’, Joachim Kroll. For it was only then that he began cutting strips of flesh from his victims’ bodies to take them home and cook them – and sometimes he couldn’t be bothered to do any butchery at all if they were old and tough. When he was finally caught in 1976, he confessed to a total of fourteen murders over a twenty-two-year period. But there could well have been many more.
For Kroll, though entirely cooperative, was a simpleton with not much of a memory – and what little he had, had to be jogged. He did, though, finally exonerate two men who’d been arrested for his murders and then released for lack of evidence. Of these two, one had been divorced by his wife and had then committed suicide; the other had been ostracized by his neighbours for six long years.
He’d started, Kroll told police, in 1955 at the age of 22. Too self-conscious and nervous for a real relationship – and dissatisfied with the rubber dolls he mock-strangled and masturbated over at home – he’d beaten unconscious, then raped and killed a nineteen-year-old girl in a barn near the village of Walstedde. Four years later, in a different part of the Ruhr, he struck again in exactly the same way, after tracking the movements of another young girl for some days.
A month later, in July 1959, he added the special signature which the police came to recognize after they found the body of a sixteen-year-old with steaks cut from her thighs and buttocks. The signature appeared again on the bodies of two more young girls within six weeks of each other in 1962, and then on a four-year-old in 1966. Kroll went on to rape and kill at least four more women and girls in the next ten years, but it wasn’t until 1976, when a four-year-old disappeared from a playground in Duisberg, that his trademark reappeared in particularly grisly fashion.
The young girl had been seen wandering away from the playground with a mild-looking man she called ‘uncle’. The police quickly started making a door-to-door enquiry, and were told something odd by a tenant in a nearby apartment building. He said he’d just been told by the janitor, Joachim Kroll, not to use one of the building’s lavatories because it was stopped up. ‘What with?’ he’d asked; and Kroll had answered, ‘Guts…’
A plumber was called, and soon found that Kroll had been exactly right: the lavatory had indeed been blocked by the intestines and lungs of a small child. When the police searched Kroll’s apartment, they found human flesh wrapped in bags in the freezer, and on the stove, among the carrots and potatoes of a stew, the child’s hand.
Kroll was a model prisoner. He seemed to think he’d be able to go home after he’d had an operation of some kind. So he readily confessed to all the murders he could remember – and he also told the police about two occasions on which he might have been caught. As for the human flesh, he hadn’t taken it, he said, for any particularly sinister reason. He just thought he’d save money on meat.
Peter Kürten
Peter Kürten, the so-called ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’, was an indiscriminate murderer: he attacked and killed everything – men, women, children, animals – that came his way. Yet he was described by a psychiatrist at his trial in 1930 – where, from behind the bars of a specially-built cage, he spelled out the details of his crimes in meticulous detail – as a clever, even rather a nice man.
That he should have been so is astonishing. For Kürten’s father had been a drunken, pathological sadist, who was sent to prison for repeatedly raping his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter and he himself had committed his first murders – the drowning of two playmates – at the age of nine. At about the same time, he later said, he was inducted by the local dog-catcher into the delights of torturing animals – he sometimes decapitated swans to drink their blood.
By the age of 16, he was a petty young hoodlum and occasional arsonist living in a ménage-à-trois with a masochistic older woman and her teenage daughter. He was arrested and sent to prison twice – first for theft and fraud, and then for deserting from the army the day after he’d been called up. In between these two sentences, though, while making his living as a burglar in Cologne-Mullheim, he committed his first murder as an adult, when he came across a ten-year-old girl in a room over an inn, throttled her and cut her throat with a pocket-knife.
‘I heard the blood spurt and drip beside the bed,’
– he said calmly at his trial seventeen years later.
His second sentence, for desertion, kept Kürten out of circulation, perhaps luckily, for eight years; and in 1921, when he came out, he seemed on the face of it a changed man. He got married in Altenburg, took a job in a factory and became known in the community as a quiet, well-dressed and charming man, active in trade union politics. Then, though, in 1925, Kürten and his wife moved to Düsseldorf – and the opportunistic attacks on complete strangers began.
‘The Vampire’, as he soon became known, attacked people with either scissors or knives, in broad daylight, any time – as if inflamed by the idea and sight of blood. By 1929, he had struck forty-six times and four of his victims had died; and now, far from stopping, he was beginning to step up the rate and violence of his attacks. On the evening of August 23rd of that year, he strangled and cut the throats of two young sisters on their way back from a fair; twelve hours later, after offering to take a servant-girl to another fair, he attacked and stabbed her as they walked through woods nearby. For a while there was a lull, but then he attacked three people, a man and two women, within a single half-hour; later he bludgeoned a pair of serving women to death. Finally, on November 27th, he killed a five-year-old girl, slashing her body thirty-six times.
Peter Kürten was named the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’
The city of Düsseldorf was by now in a state of panic. But again, for a while, nothing more was heard from ‘The Vampire.’ Then, on May 14th 1930, Maria Budlick, a young girl looking for work in the city, arrived from Cologne and was picked up at the station by a man who offered to show her the way to a women’s hostel. When he tried to take her into a nearby park, though, she refused on the grounds that she didn’t know who he was – he might even be ‘The Vampire.’ While they were arguing, a second man stepped up and asked her if she was all right. This second man was charm itself, Maria later said, and, when the first man left, he offered her something to eat before taking her to the hostel.
Kurten’s crimes threw Dusseldorf into a state of panic
She agreed, and after a glass of milk and a sandwich at his house, they duly took a tram to the edge of the city. Still believing she was on the way to the hostel, Maria began walking with him through the Grafenberg Woods. Then, suddenly, he said:
‘Do you know where you are? You are alone with me in the middle of the woods. You can scream as much as you like and no one will hear you!’
He seized her by the throat and threw himself on her. She fought back; and then, quite unexpectedly, he let go of her, and asked her if she could remember where he lived. Maria, in fact, could remember, but she said no, she couldn’t. Satisfied, the man then stood up and calmly showed her towards the woods’ exit.
When the police found out about this incident – through a misaddressed letter Maria sent to a friend about it – they located her and asked her to take them to the house she’d visited. She did, and saw the man she’d met – Peter Kürten – going in. Kürten, having recognized her too, must have known immediately that his days of freedom were numbered. For he soon left, went to the restaurant where his wife worked and coolly confessed to her that he was ‘The Vampire’ – she could now claim the reward. A few days later, she went to the police and told them where he was.
The trial was a formality, consisting almost entirely of Kürten’s detailed confessions to the nine murders and seven attempted murders he’d been charged with. Yes, he’d drunk blood. Yes, he was a sadist, an arsonist, a rapist, a vampire. He was sentenced to death nine times. On July 1st 1931, before his walk to the guillotine, he asked the prison psychiatrist whether he’d be able to hear, if only for a second, the gouting of his own blood as the blade cut through his neck. ‘That,’ he said, ‘would be the greatest of all pleasures.’
Henri Landru
Henri Landru was a conman and a fraudster, specializing in lonely widows and spinsters; by 1914, when he was 45, he’d already been in prison four times for swindling and abuse of confidence. In 1914, though, he was in the dock again, and this time for something more serious: business fraud – for which he could expect four years in jail, followed by banishment to a faraway penal colony as a habitual criminal. So he went on the lam and changed his name, and seems to have made one more important decision: from now on, he’d kill his victims, rather than leave them alive to give evidence against him.
His first victim of this new resolution was a thirty-nine-year-old widow and her eighteen-year-old son. Calling himself Monsieur Diard, he moved them into a villa on the outskirts of Paris, where they both disappeared.
Another widow, this time Argentinian, soon followed them, bringing all her worldly possessions. She lasted five days.
By this time Landru had started placing lonely hearts advertisements in the newspapers of Paris, claiming to be a widower of 43, with ‘a comfortable income,’ ‘moving in good society’ and desirous ‘to meet widow with a view to matrimony.’ From this and six other ads which were to follow, he got almost 300 replies, which he recorded meticulously in a black notebook. One of them was his next prey: a fifty-one-year-old ex-governess with a considerable legacy. When she disappeared, Landru, together with her legacy, moved to the Villa Ermitage near the village of Gambais – and this was to be the centre of his operations from then on.
The widows came – and went – over a period of almost three and a half years, leaving not even their identities behind them. But then the sisters of two of Landru’s victims began making enquiries; and both separately wrote to the local mayor about the Villa Ermitage, where both sister-widows had gone to visit a man called, variously, ‘Monsieur Dupont’ and ‘Monsieur Fremyet’. The mayor put the two of them together and a complaint was made to the police. Then, in April 1919, one of the sisters recognized ‘Monsieur Fremyet’ walking, with a young girl on his arm, in Paris’s rue de Rivoli.
‘Monsieur Fremyet’ was arrested and the police found on him, not only his black notebook, but also papers and identity cards belonging to some of the women on his list. In a stove at the Villa Ermitage, they later discovered fragments of human bone amongst the ashes – though they never managed to produce a corpse, however long and hard they dug.
Landru, once he’d been identified, said nothing, except to profess his innocence. His trial, though, when it came, was a sensation. For the police had put it about by then that he’d killed 300 women, perhaps more. He was tried for just ten of them, and for the murder of his first victim’s son, and was found guilty – via circumstantial evidence, proven motive and the evidence provided by the Villa-Ermitage stove – on all counts. On November 30th 1921, still maintaining his innocence, he walked to the guillotine with some hauteur, refusing the ministrations of a priest. But more than forty years later, the daughter of Landru’s lawyer found a confession he’d written and hidden on the back of a picture he’d drawn whilst awaiting his execution.