Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Dusseldorf, murdered nine persons in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1929 and two others sixteen years earlier. He was executed two years later. Kurten was born in Mulheim on May 13, 1883 and had 12 siblings.
His parents were abusive alcoholics and his father often beat the children and forced their mother to have sex with him in front of them. He spent 18 months in jail for raping one of Peter's sisters, who was 13. Their mother filed for divorce shortly afterward and moved to Dusseldorf. Peter's first violent act happened when he was 5 and tried to drown another child he was playing with. When he was 9, he became an assistant to a local dogcatcher who sometimes tortured and killed the animals he caught and Peter actively helped him in his actions.Peter was beaten by his father on a regular basis and often didn't want to go home from school due to it. He was a bright child who did well in school, but found it hard to focus and concentrate due to his dysfunctional home environment. Peter often ran away from home for extended periods, usually living on the streets alongside petty criminals and other outcasts. He took to thefts in part to support himself. He claimed to have committed his first murders at 9 when he drowned two other boys he was playing with in a river--one of the boys fell into the water and began thrashing around as he couldn't swim, the other dived in to save him, and Kurten then went in and held both of their heads underwater until they drowned. Their deaths were written off as accidental.
He met his first girlfriend when he was 13, but she was unwilling to engage in anything more than foreplay. Kurten resorted to bestiality as a form of sexual release, but found that he was most stimulated by slashing the animals with a knife. At some point he was caught stabbing a pig and stopped doing it. Kurten also tried to rape the sister his father had earlier raped. He left school at 15 and got a job as an apprentice moulder for two years until he stole money from his employer and ran away from home. Kurten moved to Koblenz and for a short period dated a prostitute he claimed was willing to do any debased sexual act he wanted. He was arrested for burglary and jailed for a month shortly afterward.In November 1899, the 16 year old Kurten met an 18 year old woman at the Alleestrasse and convinced her to come with him to the Hofgarten where they had sex, after which he choked her unconscious and left, believing her to be dead. There are no known records from Dusseldorf in the time frame when this happened that support Kurten's claim, so the victim probably survived. However, he claimed the incident proved he could only achieve orgasm via violent acts. Kurten was arrested for fraud a few months later and again later in 1900 while also being charged with several thefts and an attempted murder of a girl with a gun. He received a total of four years in prison.
Kurten finished his sentence, was released in July 1904, and was immediately drafted into the German army. He was assigned to the 98th Infantry and posted in Metz, but deserted in a few weeks. Kurten began starting fires, mostly in barns and haylofts, and was finally arrested on December 31 after committing at least 24 acts of arson. He was charged with desertion from the army in addition to civilian charges of arson, robbery, and attempted robbery, and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Kurten served his time in a prison in Munster; due to his repeated violent behavior and disregard of prison rules, he ended up in solitary confinement. He claimed the harsh discipline he received while incarcerated fueled his erotic fantasies to the point where he could achieve orgasm from merely thinking about them.The first confirmed murder Kurten committed was May 25, 1913, shortly after getting out of prison. While committing a break-in of a tavern in Cologne-Mulheim, he discovered 9 year old Christine Klein asleep in her bed above the inn. Kurten began strangling the girl. She awoke in surprise and began struggling, but was soon choked unconscious. Kurten took out his pocket knife and cut Klein's throat. He masturbated to the sight, then left the inn and returned to Dusseldorf. The next day, Kurten stopped for a beer in a Cologne tavern across from the scene of the murder so he could listen to locals discussing it, which he obtained pleasure from hearing. For a few weeks after Klein's funeral, he also stopped by her grave to masturbate.
On July 5, Kurten broke into a home in Dusseldorf and found 17 year old Gertrud Franken asleep in her bed. He strangled her, masturbated, and left. Both murders had gone with his being completely undetected. On the 14th, Kurten was arrested for several arsons and burglaries and sentenced to another six years in prison. He spent the entirety of World War I incarcerated in a military prison in Brieg and again racked up a considerable disciplinary record which led to his being penalized with two additional years tacked onto his sentence. Kurten was finally released in April 1921, a citizen of the Weimar Republic rather than a subject of the German Empire, which had collapsed during his incarceration.After his release, Kurten moved in with one of his sisters in Altenburg. Through her, he met a 40 year old woman named Auguste Scharf, a former prostitute who had served a prison sentence for shooting her lover to death and had since turned her life around and now operated a candy shop. Kurten claimed he'd served in the war and had been captured and spent time in a British prison camp. The couple married in 1923. They had a normal sex life, although Kurten claimed he could only achieve orgasm by having violent fantasies during intercourse, and that he only had sex when his wife initiated it first.
Kurten found stable employment during this period and also became a trade union official. The couple moved to Dusseldorf in 1925 where he began cheating on Auguste with two housemaids, both of whom were also choked by Kurten during sex; one of the girls claimed he told them "This is what love means." When Auguste discovered his affairs, one of the maids claimed she was raped while the other said he attempted to rape her. He was ultimately charged with attempted rape and making threats, served six months in jail, and was ordered to leave Dusseldorf afterward, although he managed to appeal that part of his release conditions.On February 3, 1929, Kurten stalked a 40 year old woman named Apollonia Kuhn. As she walked behind some bushes, shielding her from view, he grabbed her and ordered her to not yell. Kurten dragged her into a wooded lot and stabbed her 24 times with a pair of scissors. Some of the wounds were deep enough to cut down to the bone, but Kuhn managed to survive. Five days later, he choked a 9 year old girl named Rosa Ohliger unconscious, stabbed her repeatedly with the same scissors, masturbated, gathered up some of his semen, and pushed it into her vagina with his fingers. Kurten hid Ohliger's body under some bushes, then left, came back with a jar of kerosene, set it on fire, and masturbated to the sight. The charred remains of the little girl were discovered the next day. On February 13, Kurten stabbed to death a 45 year old automobile mechanic named Rudolf Scheer in Flingern Nord 20 times with his scissors. After the body was discovered, he gave police a false account that he'd heard about the murder via telephone.
Although the three victims were all considerably different and not the same gender or age range, investigators suspected they were killed by the same individual due to their very similar deaths by stabbing, and there was no indication that he'd tried to rob them. It seemed more likely that he obtained pleasure from the murders.Kurten made four unsuccessful attacks on women over the next few months. One of them was thrown into the Rhine, but all of these individuals survived. His next successful murder happened August 11 when he raped, strangled, and stabbed 22 year old Maria Hahn, whom Kurten claimed was "looking for a husband." He met her on August 8 and agreed to take her on a date in Neandertal next Sunday. They spent a few hours together, after which he lured Hahn into a meadow and strangled and stabbed her as she begged for mercy. After she was dead, Kurten buried her in a cornfield. He came back in early September with the idea of digging up the corpse and nailing it to a tree to shock the public, but her body proved too heavy for him to pull off this act, so he simply re-buried her. Kurten claimed he re-visited the site several more times. In November, he sent an anonymous confession to police with a hand-drawn map to where Hahn's body could be located. They found it there on November 15.
In order to throw police off, Kurten began using a knife instead of scissors to kill victims. On August 21, he stabbed an 18 year old woman, a 37 year old woman, and a 30 year old man in separate attacks. All survived and all claimed he attacked them totally unprovoked and without saying a word. On the 24th, Kurten was at a fairground in Flehe when he saw two girls ages 5 and 14 walking home together. He approached and asked the older girl, Luise Lenzen, if she might buy him cigarettes from the fairground, offering to pay her 20 pfenning for this favor. Once Kurten was alone with the younger girl, Gertrude Hamacher, he grabbed her by the neck, choked her unconscious, cut her throat, and threw her body in a bean patch. After Lenzen returned, he choked her, stabbed her in the chest, bit her, cut her throat, and drank her blood. Shocked locals found the bodies of the two girls shortly afterward. Neither was raped and Lenzen's footprints were found nearby, suggesting she'd tried to flee before succumbing to her injuries.The next day, Kurten walked up to a 27 year old woman named Gertrude Schulte on the street and propositioned her for sex. She indignantly refused, so he told her "Well, die then!" and stabbed her all over her upper body. Schulte survived, but could not provide a clear description of her attacker outside his being roughly 40 years old. Kurten made two more unsuccessful attacks in September before switching to using a hammer as a murder weapon.
On September 30, he met 31 year old Ida Reuter at the Dusseldorf train station and convinced her to come with him to a cafe and a walk in the local Hofgarten by the Rhine, where he began beating her on the head with a hammer and raping her. Kurten ignored Reuter's pleas for mercy. On October 11, he met 22 year old Elizabeth Dorrier outside a movie theater. Once again Kurten convinced her to come with him to a cafe, a train ride to Grafenberg, and a walk along the Kleine Dussel River, where he beat her over the head with the hammer and raped her. Dorrier was found a short time later; she died the next day. Kurten made another two unsuccessful attacks on women on October 25, one of which failed because his hammer broke. On November 7, Kurten encountered 5 year old Gertrude Albermann in Flingern, lured her into a vacant lot, strangled her, and stabbed her in the head with scissors. After the girl was unconscious, he stabbed her another 34 times before placing the body in some weeds near a factory building. Albermann was the last person he successfully murdered.The spree of murders in Dusseldorf had by now become a major news story. Since there was no one victim type or M/O, investigators believed it was possibly multiple individuals at work. They received some 13,000 tips by year's end. Some 9,000 people were interviewed and almost a million possible suspects considered. The map of Maria Hahn's grave that was sent to police at this time also contained directions to the location of Albermann's corpse. There had been an earlier letter sent in last month talking about murdering and burying Hahn; due to the similar handwriting, it was concluded that the murders were all done by the same person.
Kurten made ten different hammer attacks during the winter and spring of 1930. All of the people he attacked survived and many were able to provide a good description of him. On May 14, Maria Budlick, 20, was at the Dusseldorf train station when a man she didn't recognize approached. Learning that she was moving to Dusseldorf in search of employment, he offered to show her to a local hostel. Budlick accepted, although she became worried when he tried to lead her through a deserted city park. She began protesting, whereupon Kurten came up and asked if her companion was causing her problems. She nodded and said he was, whereupon the man simply walked off and left. Kurten then invited Budlick to his apartment for food and drinks. Assuming this hospitality wasn't free, she told him she wasn't interested in sex, if that was his intent. Kurten replied that that was fine and he would take her to a hotel, although instead he lead her to the Grafenburg Woods, grabbed her by the neck, and tried to rape her. Budlick's screams made him worry he'd attract attention, so he aborted the assault and released her.Budlick wrote a friend a graphic account of the attack in a letter, but wrote down the address incorrectly. Due to this mistake, a postal clerk opened the letter, read its contents, and gave it to police. The chief of Dusseldorf police thought there was an outside chance that Budlick's attacker was the Dusseldorf Vampire. He interviewed Budlick, who recounted the entire attack and said the assailant only didn't kill her because she lied about being unable to remember his address. She agreed to show police to his apartment on Mettmanner Strasse; the landlady confirmed that Peter Kurten occupied room 71, and Budlick also confirmed it was the correct apartment.
Kurten wasn't home at the moment, but he came back to the apartment complex, saw Budlick talking to the police chief, and left. Believing the jig was up and he'd probably also been linked to the Vampire of Dusseldorf murders, he went to his wife and confessed that he'd attacked Budlick; due to his prior criminal record, Kurten believed he might get 15 years in prison. Auguste agreed to help him rent a room in the Alderstrasse district, where he stayed for nine days before returning home. Once Kurten came back, he confessed to all of the Vampire of Dusseldorf murders and urged his wife to collect the reward for his capture, a total of 4,000 RM. She informed police the next day. Auguste told them she knew of her husband's past criminal history and prison sentences, but was unaware that he'd ever murdered anyone. She added that he'd confessed to her and would do the same to police. Kurten was arrested outside St. Rochus Church the next day.He confessed to police all of the Vampire of Dusseldorf murders as well as the unsolved murder of Christine Klein and attempted murder of Gertrud Franken 17 years ago. In total, Kurten admitted to nine murders and 31 attempted murders. He did them, he said, because he'd been mistreated many times over his life, but added that he did not torture any of the child victims. Kurten also added that he found the sight of blood erotic and that he sometimes drank victims' blood.
While awaiting trial, he was interviewed by psychiatrist Karl Berg, telling him he was turned on by violence and blood. Most of his murders were committed when his wife was at work at her candy shop and the amount of injuries inflicted on victims were proportionate to how long it took him to orgasm. He said that he changed weapons to throw off police, although he attached no special importance to any of the murder implements he used and they were secondary to his main goal of seeing blood. Most of his female victims were not raped and the handful of times he did it was to also throw off police. Kurten also added that many of the victims who survived only did so because he climaxed early in the assault.Kurten would also claim that the main motive for the murders was to get revenge on society for the abuse and neglect he suffered as a child and for the times he was in prison, where he often deliberately broke rules to be put in solitary confinement and have lots of time to have sexual fantasies. He did not deny sexually molesting some female victims, but said sex was not the primary motive. Psychiatrists determined that he was sane, aware of his actions, and fit to stand trial.
His trial for murder and attempted murder began April 13, 1931. Kurten plead insanity. During the trial, he was kept in a heavily guarded metal cage to prevent the angry relatives of the victims from attacking him. When the presiding judge asked why Kurten committed arson acts in 1929-30, he said he got a thrill from starting fires and watching people try to extinguish them. He said he was not sorry for any of his crimes and enjoyed doing them. He added that he confessed because he still loved his wife despite his infidelities as she had always stood by him and he wanted her to collect the reward money. Psychiatrist Franz Sioli testified for the prosecution and said he believed Kurten's motives were mostly sadism and a smaller degree resentment over his miserable childhood and time in prison. He added that he did not consider Kurten a necrophiliac.Sioli also believed Kurten was fully aware of his actions, was capable of aborting an attack if he sensed he'd get caught, and considered the fact that he remembered all of his crimes in photographic detail. This included his confession to drowning his two childhood companions back in 1892, when he was 9 years old--there was no physical evidence proving Kurten had drowned them, and he had been below the legal age of criminal responsibility when it happened, although examination of contemporary records from when the drownings happened proved his claims to be true and not an invented tale. The prosecution believed this demonstrated Kurten had shown homicidal tendencies since before puberty, although medical witnesses disputed this idea and argued that children do not process or comprehend death the same way adults do. His public defender Alex Wehner argued that he must be insane, for no mentally sound person could be capable of as many sexual perversions as him and that some of his confessions did not entirely match the physical evidence at the crime scenes.
Kurten was found guilty after a ten day trial and sentenced to death. He displayed no emotion when the verdict was read, although he remarked that his crimes were so horrible that he wasn't going to excuse them. Kurten did not appeal his conviction, although he did petition the Minister of Justice, a known opponent of the death penalty, for commutation to life in prison. This was rejected. He spoke with a Catholic priest, wrote letters of apologies to the families of victims, and a farewell letter to his wife.He ate a last meal of Wiener schnitzel, white wine, and fried potatoes. The execution via guillotine was carried out July 2 at Klingelputz Prison by Prussian state executioner Carl Gropler, who would later carry out executions in the early stages of the Nazi regime, and would end up dying a Soviet prisoner in 1946. Before being beheaded, Kurten asked if he would be able to hear his own blood spurting from his neck until losing consciousness, adding that it would be extremely pleasurable to him.An autopsy performed on Kurten's body after the execution found an entirely healthy 48 year old man with no physical abnormalities or underlying medical conditions other than an enlarged thymus. His head was preserved in formaldehyde and brought to the United States during the postwar occupation of Germany, where it is on display at the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.
>>18738328>>18738337>>18738356just an average Dusseldorfer. nothing to see here, really.
Weimar Germany was fucking insane. A lot of serial killers in that period.
>>18738366>Gropler was arrested by the Soviet army at the end of the war on charges that he had executed two German communists in 1933But it was ok for Stalin to kill thousands of fellow communists merely for having a different idea of communism than him, no?
>>18738330is there any serial killer who had a normal childhood?
>>18738328>murder 1watch the videos yikes
>>18738366>He spoke with a Catholic priest, wrote letters of apologies to the families of victimsReminder that according to Christfaggots, this psychopathic killer can tell a priest he's sorry, be absolved of his sins, and go to Heaven while a just, moral atheist who was a pillar of his community will burn in Hell forever when he dies.
https://youtu.be/961M2KAZVkM?is=2wTmTzD71tTVgqNAObligatory
>>18738422IIRC Ted Bundy's mom was very loving and attentive
you can find the pics of his preserved head on Google Images. it looks like a movie prop.
>>18738520no one cares, /pol/
>>18738351>The next day, Kurten walked up to a 27 year old woman named Gertrude Schulte on the street and propositioned her for sex. She indignantly refused, so he told her "Well, die then!"Based.
>>18738418They committed the crime of being wrong, of which Stalin was totally innocent
>>18738510Ted Bundy's mom was pretending to be his sister while he was raised by his grandparents who pretended to be his parents. When he became a teenager he was told she is his mother and moved away to live with her.Certainly not normal.
>>18738500Only god can absolve him of his sins. You don't even know how Christianity works.
>>18738330>Their mother filed for divorce shortly afterward and moved to Dusseldorfi'd have left him too tbqh
>>18738328I miss the time when seriál killers had cool names like The Werewolf of Wysteria. Today you never hear that anymore. The last one was probably The Roslyn Heights Strangler.
>>18738340>>18738334how these psychos consistently get laid is beyond my understanding
>>18739077When you pay for it, its a lot easier. Like the reason that the woman he choked half the death (if he ever did it) wouldn't have called the cops on him is that she was obviously a whore and was probably known for it.
>>18738328he looks like gary oldman
