The Bloodthirsty Vampire of Nuremberg.

Throughout history, many crimes have been committed that are strange, bizarre, and weird. Many of them are forgotten soon, while others are etched in memory for decades. The story narrated is of a man who committed murders desiring to become handsome and popular.

In April 1971, police and morgue attendants began comparing notes on a series of bizarre grave robberies which were carried out at many cemeteries around Nuremberg, Bavaria in Germany. At least five bodies were exhumed and gnawed upon. In the case of female corpses, there were signs of sexual attempt, some had been cut with a knife or mutilated and others had been beheaded or had their hearts missing.

The police at first thought them to be separate incidents but when more corpses were found with almost the same treatment, the police suspected it to be the handwork of some mentally disturbed person who would go on chewing, mutilating, and having intercourse with freshly buried corpses. At the last count, the police had noticed some 35 corpses which had been given this type of treatment.

On May 6, 1972, a person named Markus Adler, 24 years of age, and his fiancée Ruth Lissy, 18 years, were found shot dead in their car and the corpses were found to have been given the same treatment as those in the cemeteries. The body signs on the woman indicated that someone had drunk her blood.

The police now began to sequence all the events. It appeared that the criminal had graduated from the defilement of graves to committing murders. Soon another woman was found shot and her grave defiled the same way, and it appeared as if someone had drunk her blood.

The modus operandi was the same and the police suspected it to have been committed by the same criminal, but they were having no luck in getting any clues on the criminal. The scene remained the same for many graves and the person like a ghost was committing these crimes and becoming invisible. The newspaper headlines of the time screamed ‘The Vampire of Nuremberg.’ A lot of pressure was now building on the police to catch the criminal.

In the same month, a strange event took place that would lead to the capture of the criminal. In late May 1972, a morgue attendant by the name George Warmuth was doing his routine job and subsequently took the rounds of the cemetery when he noticed something strange. He could see a figure hunched over and when he reached nearer he was shocked to see a man kissing a corpse that he had just dug up.

The person committing the act was surprised on seeing the attendant; took out his pistol, fired at the attendant, and immediately ran away, vanishing into the darkness of the night. The attendant was lucky that the shot fired missed him and he escaped unhurt.

He conveyed the incident to his superiors and they soon approached the police. This gave police some clues on the appearance of the perpetrator and they began investigating people, according to the description obtained.

Soon they detained a 41-year-old man whose name was Kuno Hofmann and who was a deaf and mute person with a long history of mental problems. He had many times been admitted to these institutions and had a history of escaping a total of 12 times. It was also found out that he had done a stint in prison.

Kuno Hofmann was born in 1931 in Bavaria, to a violent and alcoholic father whose convictions included burglary, child abuse, and attempted murder of a young woman he had raped. During his childhood, he was subjected to extreme cruelty and regularly beaten up.

At age one, he was hung on a wooden window frame and beaten while on another occasion his father shoved him into a sack and threw him away. The beatings were so severe that Kuno lost his hearing and spent all his time in isolation trying to escape the wrath of his father.

With no education, Kuno turned to a life of crime and spent nine years in mental institutions, escaping a total of twelve times. Starting with a gloomy upbringing his life descended into a continuous downward spiral thereafter. He made attempts to work as a shoemaker and as a farm help but his IQ of 70 and weakness in communication led him to be sacked from both jobs. After this, he was not able to find any employment.

Soon he entered the world of crime and spent time in jail for theft. In 1971, he had spent only five years of his adult life without any incarceration. Hofmann went to live with his brother and sister in Nuremberg and used to work occasionally. It now appeared that he was working on a way to get his life on track. But this was not to be and the year was marked by the beginning of a reign of terror in the country.

The authorities themselves were shocked when Hofmann wasted no time and immediately confessed to all the deeds that included the grave robberies and three murders.

He further went on to explain his conduct with the dead bodies, and when it proved difficult to procure bodies from the morgues he found out fresh graves through the death notices in newspapers. He then procured a set of keys to one of the cemeteries and when the corpses did not satisfy him he turned to live victims.

The reply to a question on why he did all this shocked the authorities further. Hofmann while in prison had taken a strong interest in the occult, reading as much as he could concerning rituals, black magic, vampirism, and occult sciences, to make himself stronger and more handsome.

After being released from prison he continued with these studies as he had plenty of time since he could not hold on to any job for a long time. This further led him to loneliness and alienation.

But he was determined to reach his goals of becoming good-looking, popular, normal and had come under the impression that to achieve this he needed to drink blood and perform dark rituals over the bodies. As a start, he began doing this at the graveyards and when he developed a bit more courage he began to try this on living victims whom he claimed had a better quality of blood.

The case soon went on trial and no one was sure if he was sane enough to be held accountable for his terrible actions. At the trials, the defense pushed the insanity aspect but this did not work out as Hofmann was found to be of sound mind and able to distinguish right from wrong.

Through the sign language, he tried to explain everything; insisting he was no vampire but that his extreme loneliness, alienation, isolation, and that he could not experience a normal relationship with a woman, led him to commit the appalling acts. He was sentenced to life in prison and on his part, he admitted that if he had not been caught, he would have continued carrying on with the same things which he was doing.

As if all of this was not enough, while waiting for his transfer to a federal penitentiary, he pestered the jailers with requests for one last sip of virgin’s blood. This remains a very unusual case of a disturbed individual relying on the occult to meet his nefarious objectives.

References

https://congenitaldisease.tumblr.com/post/159870765960

https://moviesandmania.com/2020/03/24/bloodlust-aka-mosquito-switzerland-1976-reviews/

https://historycollection.com/10-remarkable-bizarre-crimes-history-look-modern-day-criminals-look-tame/2/