The Düsseldorf Murders

The case

In May 1930 a letter written by a young domestic servant went to the wrong address and was opened at the Düsseldorf post office. In it she told a friend about a man who had taken her into the Grafenberg woods outside the city, attacked her and then let her go. The clerk sent it to the police. For more than a year the city had been searching for a killer the newspapers called the Vampire of Düsseldorf, and this was the first lead that pointed to a front door.

The attacks had begun on 3 February 1929, when Apollonia Kühn was stabbed on a street in the eastern district of Flingern and survived. Days later nine-year-old Rosa Ohliger was found dead beside the Vinzenzkirche in the same district, and on the night of 12 to 13 February Rudolf Scheer was killed on his way home. Over the summer and autumn the victims multiplied: the housemaid Maria Hahn, who went missing in August; the foster sisters Luise Lenzen and Gertrud Hamacher, killed on 24 August as they walked home from a fair at Flehe; Ida Reuter and Elisabeth Dörrier, young women in domestic service; and on 7 November five-year-old Gertrud Albermann. Many others were attacked and lived.

The investigation became one of the largest in Weimar Germany. The interior ministry set up a special murder commission and sent Ernst Gennat, head of the Berlin homicide squad, to advise. Police received some twelve thousand tips from the public and questioned thousands of people. The weapons changed, from scissors to a knife to a hammer, and the victims ranged from small children to a middle-aged man, so for months many detectives believed they were looking for more than one killer. A mentally ill man confessed to several of the murders and confused matters further. Survivors' descriptions put the attacker's age well below his real one.

The killer himself sent letters to the police and to a local newspaper, with sketch maps. The last of them, posted in November 1929, led searchers to Maria Hahn's grave on the edge of a wood, and it described where Gertrud Albermann's body had been left in terms only the person responsible could know. Graphologists matched the handwriting across the letters, and Gennat became convinced that one man had committed most of the crimes. One tip did name the eventual culprit: a former cellmate told police he had boasted of similar acts in prison. Officers showed his photograph to the survivor Gertrud Schulte, but she did not recognise him.

The young woman had come to Düsseldorf from Cologne in May 1930 looking for work. At the station a man had offered to help her, taken her to his rooms in Mettmanner Strasse and then into the woods. With detectives, she identified the building, number 71. The tenant was Peter Kürten, a 46-year-old factory worker with a long criminal record, a neat appearance and a friendly manner that had disarmed his victims. Seeing that he had been traced, he told his wife Auguste on 23 May that he was the man the whole city was looking for, and urged her to go to the police and claim the reward. He was arrested on 24 May 1930 near the church of St Rochus.

Kürten confessed to nine murders and dozens of attacks, including the killing of nine-year-old Christine Klein in Mülheim am Rhein in 1913. He withdrew the confession in June 1930 and renewed it in August. Doctors who examined him over eight weeks at the Bedburg-Hau asylum found no mental illness. His trial in Düsseldorf began on 13 April 1931, with Alex Wehner for the defence. On 22 April the court convicted him of nine murders and seven attempted murders and sentenced him to death nine times. The Prussian government refused clemency, and on 2 July 1931 he was guillotined in the courtyard of Klingelpütz prison in Cologne. The night before, he wrote letters to his wife, to survivors and to bereaved families.