The Vampire of Dusseldorf

“Tell me, after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.” — reported final words of Peter Kürten before his execution

Kürten was born into a poor family, the oldest of thirteen children. The family lived in a one-room apartment. His parents were both abusive alcoholics, but his father was worse. He regularly beat both the children and their mother. Often, he would gather his children together, force their mother to strip naked, and then have sex with her in front of them. He eventually went to prison for eighteen months for raping his thirteen-year-old daughter repeatedly.

At the age of nine, Kürten began working with a local dog catcher, quickly picking up the older man’s cruelty to animals. As they grew more familiar, the man introduced him to bestiality and Kürten found that he quite liked the combination of the sadism and perversion it offered.

At the age of thirteen, Kürten met a girl that he liked. She didn’t mind him undressing her or fondling her but always stopped him short of intercourse. He took his carnal urges to his neighbor’s barns, raping their pigs and sheep and stabbing them as he finished his assault. He only stopped after he was seen stabbing a pig and word got out to others.

At fourteen, his father forced him to quit school and join an apprentice program, but after two years he tired of it. He stole all the money from his home, took three hundred marks from his employer, and ran away, resorting to other petty thefts to support himself while living on the streets. His father was arrested not long after that for the repeated rape of his oldest daughter, who was only thirteen. He was sent to jail for three years.

Kürten also began to run into trouble with the law. He ended up doing a number of short prison sentences for minor offenses. Each stint in prison only hardened him more and increased the level of cruelty he was capable of inflicting on his victims, which had now begun to move away from farm animals to humans.

Back out on the streets between prison stays, Kürten committed sexual assaults on unsuspecting women across the city, but his first documented murder was Christine Klein, age 10. Christine was raped and stabbed in her room on Mary 25, 1913, while her parents worked at the pub beneath it.

Initially, her uncle was put on trial for the attack, but he was found innocent. Kürten was delighted with the shock people expressed when they learned what had been done to such a young girl. He watched the trial of Christine’s uncle with great interest, reveling in the horror and suffering he had created.

His crimes were cut short for a bit when he was drafted into World War I, but military life didn’t suit him and he deserted, which earned him another stay in prison. This time, he was there until 1921, the longest he’d ever spent in prison. When he was released, he moved to Altenburg and married a woman who used to be a prostitute and had been in jail for murdering her fiancé. Oddly enough, they seemed to live a fairly normal life together. Kürten began working as a molder and became active in his local trade union.

After about four years, the charm wore off and Kürten once again found himself drawn back to Dusseldorf. Once relocated, he resumed his petty crimes, but now he had escalated to arson attacks. From there, he began sexual attacks. One of his victims was Maria Kuhn. She survived being stabbed twenty-four times by Kürten but was unable to identify him.

On February 9, 1929, Kürten attacked Rosa Ohliger. Kürten stabbed Rosa thirteen times, the violence bringing him to climax. Afterward, he dumped her body under a hedge and set fire to her remains in an attempt to destroy the evidence. She was the first of a number of victims that would come to be known as the Dusseldorf murders.

Over the course of the next fifteen months, Kürten’s victims would include girls, women, and some men. Five days after he murdered Rosa, Kürten attacked a 45-year-old mechanic by the last name of Scheer, stabbing him repeatedly until he was dead. Kürten even had the gall to return to the scene while it was being investigated to speak with police as if he were just a curious bystander.

At one point, it seemed like Kürten might get by with his assaults. A learning challenged man named Stausberg was charged with similar crimes and, for some reason, also admitted to all of the murders actually committed by Kürten. He was committed to an asylum and police believed the case was closed. They would soon be proven wrong.

A series of strangulations and stabbings continued, including the brutal murder of two foster sisters — 5-year-old Gertrude Hamacher and 14-year-old Louise Lenzen who were murdered at the fairground. The very next day, a woman named Gertrude Schulte was assaulted by Kürten, but she lived through it and was able to give police a vague description of her attacker. She could only say that he was around forty years old and decent-looking.

Emboldened by his continued ability to get away with his crimes, Kürten’s attacks only became more frequent. The more the German press reported on his monstrous assaults, the more pleasure he seemed to take in committing more of them. Residents of Dusseldorf were panicking as the attacks persisted into the winter of 1929.

Ida Reuter was raped and murdered in September; Elizabeth Dorrier was beaten to death in October. Victims by the name of Meurer and Wanders survived brutal hammer attacks but still, no one could fully identify Kürten. Every description given of him was only in vague terms that police were unable to match to any one individual.

Kürten delighted in it all. The hysteria and horror expressed by the masses and printed by the papers only served as fuel for his attacks. He even contacted one of the newspapers in November and provided them with a map that would lead to 5-year-old Gertrude Albermann, a girl he had stabbed to death before discarding her body beneath some rubble two days earlier.

By the spring of 1930, Kürten’s assaults had become non-fatal in nature. Whether this was on purpose or happenstance, the tales of victims made for good newspaper copy, regaling the city with the harrowing details of their encounter with the man now known as the “Vampire of Dusseldorf,” a name that was given to him by the newspapers due to reports that he liked to drink his victim’s blood from their wounds.

The police were now under the gun, as well. Their continued failure to bring a killer to justice was the subject of much criticism and rebuke but that was about to change. In May 1930, Kürten offered to let a young unemployed woman named Budlick stay with him at his apartment in hopes of having sex with her. When she denied him, he agreed to find her another place to stay and headed to the train station with her.

On the way there, he detoured into a nearby forest and raped her before releasing her. She was the first victim that actually knew the name of her attacker — still, police didn’t know they were about to arrest the man they had been seeking for so many other crimes.

Knowing that he would likely be jailed for her rape, Kürten began preparing for his incarceration. He went home and told his wife about all of his crimes and advised her that he was the one they called the Vampire of Dusseldorf. He told her that there was a large reward and that she should be the one to turn him in so that she could collect the money to take care of herself after he was imprisoned.

On May 14, 1930, Kürten’s wife did as her husband asked. She reported him to the police and then took them to a local church where Kürten surrendered to them peacefully.

After his arrest, Kürten sat down with a psychologist and professor named Karl Berg, giving him detailed accounts of his crimes. Berg would go on to publish Kürten’s confessions in a book called The Sadist. Kürten recounted seventy-nine separate criminal acts. It is believed that he was so keen to give details on every crime to ensure that his wife, who he possessed an odd fondness for despite his crimes, got the full reward for turning him in.

Then again, he may have just enjoyed reliving the terror he had inflicted on so many and the horror that Berg and the stenographers capturing his confession must have felt.

Kürten’s trial began on April 13, 1931. He was set to answer for nine murders and seven attempted murders. He arrived in a well-tailored suit and retracted his original confession, claiming he had only been trying to ensure his wife’s financial security. However, two months of being grilled by the magistrate and the evidence presented against him eventually forced him to admit his guilt. He showed no emotion as he blamed his childhood and his experiences in German prisons for his sadism, showing no remorse for the harm he had done to so many. It took a jury only an hour and a half to determine he was guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to death by execution.

On July 2, 1931, in Cologne Germany, the “Vampire of Dusseldorf” was executed by guillotine.

After his death, his head was preserved and sliced in half. It was believed that a study of his brain might reveal some defect that caused his perversity and sadistic behavior.

Nothing unusual was found.

Kürten’s mummified and split head can still be seen on display at Ripley’s Believe It or Not in Wisconsin Dells. The scar on his scalp caused by a falling piece of iron at the foundry where he once work is still visible after all these years.