The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (31 page)

Peter Kürten

In his own words, Peter Kürten aspired to become “the most celebrated criminal of all time.” He didn’t quite make it—other criminals are more famous, including his role model,
Jack the Ripper
.
Still, though Kürten fell short of that goal, he can lay claim to another distinction. In a century that has produced a slew of sadistic lust killers, Kürten, in the view of many experts, may have been the most appalling of all.

The household Kürten grew up in—a single room occupied by ten family members—was a hotbed of depraved sex. His father was a vicious drunk who habitually forced himself on his wife in front of the children and was jailed for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter. Kürten, too, engaged in sex with his sisters.

Young Kürten’s favorite form of sexual activity, however, wasn’t incest but bestiality. A neighbor who worked as a dog catcher taught the boy how to torture and masturbate animals, forging an early link in Kürten’s already twisted psyche between sadistic cruelty and sexual release. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, he committed countless acts of bestiality with pigs, sheep, and goats, deriving particularly intense pleasure from stabbing the animal to death while having intercourse with it.

At fifteen, Kürten—already a habitual thief—was arrested and jailed, the first of a long string of prison sentences. Altogether, he would spend more than half of his forty-seven years behind bars. Between 1899 and 1928, during those periods when he managed to remain at large, he may have committed as many as three murders, though none was ever pinned on him. A raging pyromaniac, he also derived sexual satisfaction from torching barns, another of his favorite pastimes.

Kürten took a wife in 1921, winning the consent of his bride-to-be in an unconventional (if characteristic) way: he threatened to kill her if she refused to marry him. Until Kürten himself confessed to the unspeakable truth, his loyal, long-suffering wife remained completely unaware that she was wed to the infamous “Monster of Düsseldorf.”

Kürten earned that nickname in 1929. During that year, he unleashed an unprecedented torrent of violence, attacking twenty-nine people between February and November. This blood spree came to an end with the strangling and frenzied stabbing of a five-year-old girl, Gertrude Alberman. A few days later—in emulation of his idol, Jack the Ripper—Kürten sent the police a letter. In it, he directed them to the savaged remains of the Alberman
girl, as well as to the body of another of his victims, a housemaid he had stabbed twenty times and sodomized after death.

For more than a year, the citizens of Düsseldorf lived in terror. The police did everything possible to track down the killer, questioning nearly a thousand suspects and following hundreds of leads. But Kürten was hellishly difficult to track. Most lust killers prefer a single kind of weapon and a certain type of victim. But Kürten used axes, scissors, hammers, knives, and his bare hands to kill the young and old, male and female alike.

In May 1930, Kürten mysteriously let a young woman go after attempting to rape her. Seventy-two hours later, he was under arrest. In custody, he spilled out his unspeakable story in amazing detail. Among other facts, authorities learned that—besides his other perversions—Kürten was a
Vampire
, who drank the blood of various victims, and he had once experienced an ejaculation after cutting the head off a sleeping swan and guzzling the blood from the neck stump. Convicted of nine murders, he was guillotined in July 1931.

“In the case of Ohliger, I also sucked blood from the wound on her temple, and from Scheer from the stab in the neck. From the girl Schulte I only licked the blood from her hands. It was the same with the swan in the Hofgarten. I used to stroll at night through the Hofgarten very often, and in the spring of 1930 I noticed a swan sleeping at the edge of the lake. I cut its throat. The blood spurted up and I drank from the stump and ejaculated.”

From the confessions of Peter Kürten

L
ADY
-K
ILLERS

The conventional image of a serial killer is someone like Norman Bates—a guy so nice and harmless-looking that you’d never suspect he was a homicidal maniac. Clearly, this is a popular misconception. There have been plenty of scary-looking serial killers: hard-bitten losers like Henry Lee
Lucas
, wild-eyed madmen like Charles
Manson
, Mephistophelian creeps like Richard “Night Stalker”
Ramirez
. Still, stereotypes often possess a kernel of truth—and there have, in fact, been a number of serial killers who look not just normal but downright presentable. Unlike such psychotic dweebs as David
Berkowitz
and Edward
Gein
—who couldn’t get the time of day from a woman—these debonair sociopaths are highly attracted to the opposite sex. They are genuine lady-killers—in more ways than one.

Though Ted
Bundy
is undoubtedly the best known of this breed, he certainly wasn’t the first. A hundred years ago, another attractive young fellow who shared Bundy’s first name—Theodore Durrant—earned nationwide notoriety as one of the most heinous killers of the century. A bright and personable twenty-three-year-old who still lived at home with his parents, Durrant appeared to be a paragon of young American manhood: a
medical student, Sunday school teacher, and a member of the California militia signal corps. He was good-looking, too: tall, trim, and athletic, with fine, almost feminine features. Women found him hard to resist. On April 3, 1895, Durrant lured one of his lady friends into an empty church, then strangled her, raped her corpse, and hid it in the belfry. Nine days later, he dispatched another young woman in a similar way. It wasn’t long before Durrant—who quickly became known as the “Demon of the Belfry”—was arrested, tried, and condemned to death. Public detestation of Durrant was so intense that, after he was hanged, no cemetery in San Francisco would agree to bury him. His parents had to take his body to Los Angeles for cremation.

Durrant’s contemporary Dr. H. H.
Holmes
was also catnip to the ladies. A dapper, smooth-talking sociopath, Holmes had no trouble working his seductive charm on scores of young women, an indeterminate number of whom met their ends in the depths of his infamous “Murder Castle.” A model of Gilded Age enterprise, Holmes found a way to make a profit from his crimes by peddling the mounted bones of his victims to local medical schools.

Ted Bundy; from
True Crime Trading Cards, Series Two: Serial Killers and Mass Murderers;
art by Jon Bright

(Courtesy of Jon Bright and Valarie Jones)

Theo Durrant hauls a victim to the belfry in this nineteenth-century engraving

The twentieth century produced more than its share of lethal ladies’ men. One of the most notorious was the English psychokiller Neville Heath. Tall, handsome, and charming, Heath looked like a Hollywood version of a British war hero. He was, in fact, a military officer who saw action as an RAF bomber pilot in World War II. Unfortunately, he was also a sadistic sociopath whose taste for bondage and flogging blossomed into full-blown blood lust. In June 1946, a part-time actress named Margery Gardner accompanied Heath to his hotel room for a night of kinky sex. When Gardner’s body was found the next day, the condition of her corpse shocked even hardened policemen. Tied up and suffocated with a gag, she had been savagely whipped with a riding crop. Her nipples had nearly been bitten off, and a poker had been thrust between her legs. Not long afterward, Heath murdered and mutilated another young woman he had met at a Bournemouth hotel. Arrested shortly afterward, he pled not guilty by reason of insanity at his trial, but the jury took less than an hour to convict him. He remained suave to the end. On the day of his hanging, he requested a double whiskey from the warden like a gentleman ordering a drink at a hotel bar.

“You
feel
the last bit of breath leaving their body. You’re looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!”

T
ED
B
UNDY
,
on the joy of murder

L
ETTERS

There is some dispute as to whether Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski—the antitechnological terrorist responsible for a string of letter bomb attacks between 1978 and his arrest in 1996—can be considered a serial murderer. Some people say he most certainly was: after all, he killed three people and seriously injured almost two dozen more. Others, however, regard him as a revolutionary zealot who resorted to violence as a way of promoting his beliefs. This question remains a matter of debate, but one thing’s for sure—the guy could write. In August 1995, he sent a letter to the
New York Times,
offering to refrain from violence if the paper agreed to publish his tract, “Industrial Society and Its Fate”—a 35,000-word manifesto that (however crackpot in some of its views) is a model of literacy, clarity, and coherence.

Unfortunately, Kaczynski also put his writing skills to less impressive uses. At the same time that he sent his letter to the
Times,
he also wrote to one of his victims, Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University, taunting the professor as a “techno-nerd.” In this regard, the Unabomber was, in fact, typical of serial killers, a number of whom have taken delight in communicating through taunting missives.

During the height of the “Whitechapel Horrors,” the London police were inundated with letters purporting to be from the shadowy killer. Almost all of these were hoaxes, but one was signed with a sinister pseudonym that would quickly become the most infamous name in criminal history:

Dear Boss,

I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. . . . I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. . . . My knife is nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.