He
is the king of sexual delinquents, he unites nearly all perversions in one
person, he killed men, women, children and animals, killed anything he found.’
Those were the chilling words used to describe Peter Kurten, the Vampire of
Dusseldorf, at his trial in 1930. They came not from the judge, nor the
prosecution, but from defending council, pleading for a verdict of insanity.
But Kurten, 47, did not escape the execution his reign of terror so richly
deserved, because the court agreed with the verdict of one of the same time a
clever man and quit a nice one. Psychopaths ran in the Kurten
family, and young Peter, the fifth child in a family of 13, saw the exploits of
one at first hand in his home at Cologne Mulheim. His father would arrive at
home drunk, beat the children, and sexually violate his unwilling wife in front
of them. He also committed incest with his 13 year old daughter, and Kurten
followed his father’s example with her. From the age of nine, he also had
another teacher. The local dog catcher initiated him to torturing animals.
Kurten was an enthusiastic pupil, and progressed from dogs to sheep, pigs,
goats, geese, and swan. What excited and aroused him most of the sight of their
blood. He frequently cut the heads of the swans and drank the blood that
spurted out. Soon Kurten switched his
attentions to human victims. As a boy he had drowned two playmates while all
three swam around a raft in the Rhine. By the
age of 16, he was living with a masochistic woman who enjoyed being beaten and
half-strangled. She had a daughter of 16, and all three enjoyed sordid
co-existence, interrupted only when Kurten’s attempts at theft and fraud landed
him in prison. He was later to claim that the inhumanity and injustice of his
treatment in jail led to his blood-soaked career as a Killer. In fact prison
provided him with another outlet of sadism. He deliberately broke prison rules
to gain solitary confinement, where he indulged his erotic reveries. I thought of myself causing
accidents affecting thousands of people,’ he was to recall in court. I invented
a number of crazy fantasies such as smashing bridges and boring through bridge
piers. Then I spun a number of fantasies with regard to bacilli which I might
be able to introduced into drinking water and so cause a great calamity. I
imagine myself using schools and orphanages for the purpose, where I could
carry out murders by giving away chocolate samples containing arsenic. I
derived the sort of pleasure from these visions that other people would get
from thinking about a naked woman.’ When he was freed from prison,
Kurten began to turn his daydreams into nightmares reality. He became an
arsonist –‘the sight of the flames delighted me, but above all it was
excitement of the attempts to extinguish the fire and the agitations of those
who saw their property being destroyed.’ And he began to attack defenceless
women and children. His first attempt at murder was
unsuccessful. He admitted leaving a girl for dead after assaulting her during
intercourse in Dusseldorf’s
Grafenburg Woods. But nobody was ever found. It was assumed that the girl
recovered enough to crawl away, to ashamed or scared to report the incident.
Eight year old Christine Klein was not so lucky. She was found in bed, raped
and with her throat cut. Her uncle was arrested and tried, and though acquitted
for lack of evidence, the shame charge of the charge stuck to him until died
during World War I. Kurten must have enjoyed that. His own trial was shocked by
the detailed fussy, matter- of-fact way he related what had really happened, 17
years earlier. It was on 25 May, 1913,’ he
recalled in the clipped, precise tone that only made his deeds seem more
ghastly. I had been stealing, specializing in public bars or inns where the
owners lived on the floor above. In a room above an inn at Cologne-Mulheim, I
discovered a child asleep. Her head was facing the window. I seized it with my
left hand and strangled her for about a minute and a half. The child woke up
and struggled but lost consciousness. I had a small but sharp
pocketknife with me and I held the child’s head and cut her throat. I heard the
blood spurt and drip on the mat beside the bed… The whole thing lasted about
three minutes, then I locked the door again and went home to Dusseldorf. Next day I went back to Mulheim. There is a café
opposite the Klein’s place and I sat there and drank a glass of beer, and read
all about the murder in the papers. People were talking about it all around me.
All this amount of horror and indignation did me good.’ Kurten was not prepared to use
his sadism on the Kaiser’s behalf when war broke out he deserted a day after
call-up, and spent the rest of the hostilities in jail, for that and other
minor crimes. Released in 1921, he decided to marry, and chose a prostitute at Altenburg as his bride,
overcoming her reluctance by threatening to kill her. He gave up petty crime
and went to work in factory as a moulder. He became an active trade unionist,
and respected pillar of society, quiet, Charming, carefully dressed and
meticulous about his appearance –even a little vain. Those who knew he was
having affairs with other women did not tell his wife. And the women were not
prepared to confide that Kurten was a rough lover, who enjoy beating and half
choking them. But once Kurten and his wife
moved to Dusseldorf
in 1925, blood lust again got better of him. Though his relations with Frau
Kurten remained normal, his assaults on his mistresses became more vicious. He
was attacking innocent strangers with a scissors or knives, aroused by the
sight of their blood. As he escaped detection, he stepped up the rate of
attacks, varying his style to cover his tracks. By the summer of 1929, the town
of Dusseldorf
was in the grip of terror. Police had pinned 46 perverted crimes, including
four killings, down to someone who seemed to have vampire tendencies. But they
had not clues as the monster’s identity. On the evening of 23 August, two
sister left the throng at the annual fair in the suburb of Flehe to walk home
through nearby allotments. Louise Lenzen, 14 and five year old Gertrude stopped
when a gentle voice sounded behind them. Oh dear, I’ve forgotten to buy
cigarettes,’ the man said to Louise. Look would you be very kind and go to one
of the booths and get some for me? I’ll look after the little girl.’ Louise
took his money and ran back to the fair. Kurten quietly pick up her sister,
carried her into darkness behind a stand of beanpoles, and efficiently slaughtered
her, strangling her cutting her throat with a Bavarian clasp knife. When Louise
returned, he pocketed the cigarettes, accepted his change –and did the same to
her. Twelve hours later, a servant
girl called Gertrude Schulte was stopped by a man who offered to take her to a
fair at nearby Neuss.
As they strolled through woods, he attempted to rape her, but she fought him
off. He produced a knife, and began stabbing her to the ground, the knife
snapped, leaving the blade in her back. Gertrudewas lucky her screams alerted a passer-by and
she was rushed to hospital. But Kurten had escaped again. The news papers
continued to report his exploits with mounting hysteria. In one half hour, the
Vampire attacked and wounded a girl of 18, a man of 30 and a woman of 37. Later
he bludgeoned serving girls Ida Reuter and Elizabeth Dorier to death. And in 27
November he slashed five-year-old Gertrude Alberman with a thin blade,
inflicting 36 wounds on her tiny body. Gertrude was the last victim to
die, but the attempted murders and vicious attacks continued through the winter
and early spring, attracting headlines across Germany. Maria Budlick, 21 year old
maid, had read the stories while working in Cologne,
30 kilometers away, but when she lost the job, She boarded a train to Dusseldorf, her
desperation for employment outweighing any fears about the vampire. It was 14 May, 1930 when stepped
on the platform at Dusseldorf,
and was soon approached by a man who offered to show her the way to a girls’
hostel. She accompanied him happily through the streets, but he turned into the
trees of VolksgartenPark, she drew back. The
man assured her she had nothing to fear, but she refused to be placated. As
they argued, another man emerged from the shadows and asked: Is everything
alright? Maria’s escort left, and she was left alone with her rescuer –Peter
Kurten. Convinced that he had saved her
from the fate worse than death, or death itself, Maria agreed to go with him to
his home for a meal. Kurten gave her a glass of milk and ham sandwich, then
offered to take her to the hostel. They boarded a tram –but for second time in
less than an hour, poor Maria was being misled. Her rescuer led her straight
into Grafenburg Woods, on the northern edge of town, then lunged at her, gripping
her throat and attempting to rape her against a tree. Maria struggled, but the
man was too strong for her. Then, as she was about to pass out, he let go of
her, and asked: do you remember where I lived in case you ever need my help
again? Maria gasped:’No.’ Kurten escorted her out of the woods and left her. Maria had remembered where he
lived, but surprisingly she did not go to the police. Instead, she wrote about
her ordeal to a friend in Cologne.The letter sender. An alert official realized
the implications of its contents and contacted the authorities. Next day, plain
clothes detectives took Maria back to the street home of her assailant. She
also saw Kurten, but he vanished before she could tip off her police escort. Kurten had also seen Maria, and
realized that the net was closing in on him. He went to the restaurant where
his wife worked, and confessed everything to her. He had never felt guilt for
his crimes, and even admitting them now did not affect his appetite. He ate not
only his own meal, but the one his shocked wife could not touch. On the morning
of 24 May, Frau Kurten went to the police, and told them she had arranged to
meet her husband outside a certain church at 15.00 armed officers surrounded
the area, and when Kurten arrived four rushed at him, revolvers pointing at his
chest. He smiled and offered no resistance, saying: ‘There is no need to be
afraid.’ The trial when it opened in a
converted drill-hall at Dusseldorf’s
police headquarters on 13 April, 1931 was almost a foregone conclusion.
Thousands surrounded the buildings to try to catch a glimpse of the man who had
admitted 68 crimes, apart from those for which he had already served time,
while being questioned. He was charged with nine murders and seven attempted
murders, and the prosecutionhardly
needed to produce any evidence to gain a conviction –Kurten admitted everything
coldly, calmly, and in astonishing detail. Sleekand immaculate, he confessed to being sex
maniac, a rapist, a vampire, a sadist, an arsonist. He gave chapter and verse
about his bestiality, his jail fantasies, and how he had strangled , stabbed
and clubbed women and children to death. He admitted drinking blood from one
woman’s cut throat, from a wound from a man’s forehead, from the hand of
another victim. He described how he enjoyed about Jack the Ripper, and how he
had visited a wax works Chamber of Horrors, and promised himself: I’ll be there
one day.’
A shoulder-high cage had been
built round the accused man’s stand to prevent him escaping. Behind him were
the exhibits –the knives and scissors he had used to kill, the matches he had
used to burn property, the spade he had used to bury a woman, the skulls of the
strangers he had butchered for the sake an orgasm. The judge treated her
gently, guiding him carefully though the catalogue of appalling crimes. There
was no need to be tough, Kurten wasa
mild mannered and courteous as his unsuspecting neighbors had always known him.
But by the time it came to the prisoner’s final speech, even the hardened judge
was sickened.
Incredibly, Kurten who had
blamed his childhood and prison for turning him into a killer, now began
preaching puritanically about the behaviour of others. He said: My action as I see them today are so
terrible and horrible that I do not even make an attempt to excuse them. But
one bitter thing remains in my mind. When I think of two Socialist doctors
accused recently of abortions performed on working class mothers who sought
their advice, when I think of the 500 murders they have committed, then I
cannot help feeling bitter. The real reason for my
conviction is that there comes a time in the life of every criminal when he can
go no further, and this spiritual collapse is what I experienced. But I do feel
that I must make one statement: some of my victims made things very easy for
me. Man-hunting on the part of women today has taken on such forms that …. The judge could stand no more
unctuous rhetoric, and angrily banged his desk for silence. The jury took 90 minutes to find
Kurten guilty on all accounts, and he was sentenced to death nine times. On 1
July 1932, he chose veal, fried potatoes and white wine for the traditional
last meal, and enjoyed it so much that he asked for the second helpings. At
06:00 next morning he marched to the guillotine in Cologne’s Koingelputz prison, and was
beheaded after declining the attorney general’s offer of a last wish. But the twisted mind of Kurten
had had one final wish. He asked the prison psychiatrist, minutes before he
left his cell for the last walk, ‘After my head has been chopped off, will I
still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood
\gushing from the stamp of my neck? As the appalled official sat stunned in
silence, Kurten smiled and said: ‘ that would be the pleasure to end all
pleasure to end all pleasure.’
SOURCE: Chancellor Press of Octopus Publishing Group LTD.
