Damien Seaman's Blog - Posts Tagged "peter-kurten"
Who was the Vampire of Dusseldorf
The so-called Vampire of Düsseldorf was a serial killer named Peter Kürten who operated in Germany between 1913 and 1930. He was also a convicted arsonist and rapist who had spent several years in prison for these crimes, though the authorities had no idea until his capture in 1930 that he was a killer. Most of his murders – eight of them – took place in Düsseldorf between February and November 1929.
What was so unusual about this killer?
Kürten was notable because, unlike most serial killers we know of, he didn’t follow any clear pattern. Some of his crimes seemed well planned while some were spur of the moment. He used different weapons at different times, including two pairs of scissors and two hammers. He was also unusual in that his victims varied. Mostly he attacked young to middle-aged women, but he killed men and children too. This variety of victim and method was one of the reasons he was so hard to catch.
While Kürten’s attacks initially followed the common serial killer pattern of becoming more frequent and more vicious the more successful he became, his later attacks were non-fatal and seemed to decline in intensity even as they became still more frequent; after his final murder in November 1929, he attacked ten more women but didn’t kill any of them.
So is that why we remember him?
If Kürten is known at all to the wider world today, it is probably because he was the inspiration for the child killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s influential 1931 expressionist crime movie M. Celebrated Berlin police inspector Ernst Gennat also inspired Lang’s character Inspector Karl Lohmann; Gennat had played a key advisory role in the Kürten investigation.
Why was he called a vampire? Did he drink his victims’ blood?
No, he didn’t, though his main aim was to make his victims bleed because this gave him sexual pleasure. When using a hammer to strike women’s temples in some of his later crimes, the majority of the victims survived because they’d bled enough to gratify him without his feeling the need to kill them.
It’s unclear when exactly Kürten got lumbered with the name Vampire of Düsseldorf, but it almost certainly didn’t happen until after his trial in April 1931. The two most reliable sources from the time don’t mention the phrase at all. One of them, a contemporary account by British journalist Margaret Seaton-Wagner, even says that Kürten was instead called the Düsseldorf Ripper, and her book refers to him in its title as the Monster of Düsseldorf. As her book came out in 1932, this suggests the Vampire tag still wasn’t common to describe Kürten at that point.
So if he was so hard to catch, how did they get him in the end?
He gave himself up.
What, just like that?
Well, not quite. Kürten was about to be arrested for the rape of a young woman who had led police to his apartment, and he decided to come clean about being a killer as well. He confessed the whole thing to his wife and then got her to go and tell the police. Later he said this was so his wife could claim the reward money. He gave himself up at the Catholic Church of St Rochus, having arranged through his wife for the police to meet him there.
So Frau Kürten wasn’t in on it?
Apparently not. The killings seemed to come as a total shock to her. She ended up getting 4000 Reichsmark as a reward – roughly $14,000 in today’s money.
What happened to Kürten in the end?
At his trial, Kürten was found guilty of nine murders. He was executed by guillotine in Klingelputz Prison in Cologne in July 1931. Despite the Prussian state government being ideologically opposed to the use of capital punishment, public outcry over Kürten’s crimes was so great that they executed him anyway.
Guillotine? I thought that was a French thing.
Yep. Prussian too.
So how can I find out more about the Vampire of Dusseldorf?
My crime novel The Killing of Emma Gross is based on the case and contains a timeline of the investigation from February 1929 onwards that runs to over 20 pages. If you want more detail than that, most available second-hand accounts are of dubious quality. The best thing to do is seek out the two most reliable English language sources. The first is Margaret Seaton-Wagner’s book The Monster of Düsseldorf: the Life and Trial of Peter Kürten. The second is an account by forensic pathologist Karl Berg, who performed several of the autopsies on Kürten’s victims during the investigation and later carried out lengthy interviews with the accused as he awaited trial. The interviews formed the basis of Berg’s book The Sadist, which was published in an English translation in 1938.
What was so unusual about this killer?
Kürten was notable because, unlike most serial killers we know of, he didn’t follow any clear pattern. Some of his crimes seemed well planned while some were spur of the moment. He used different weapons at different times, including two pairs of scissors and two hammers. He was also unusual in that his victims varied. Mostly he attacked young to middle-aged women, but he killed men and children too. This variety of victim and method was one of the reasons he was so hard to catch.
While Kürten’s attacks initially followed the common serial killer pattern of becoming more frequent and more vicious the more successful he became, his later attacks were non-fatal and seemed to decline in intensity even as they became still more frequent; after his final murder in November 1929, he attacked ten more women but didn’t kill any of them.
So is that why we remember him?
If Kürten is known at all to the wider world today, it is probably because he was the inspiration for the child killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s influential 1931 expressionist crime movie M. Celebrated Berlin police inspector Ernst Gennat also inspired Lang’s character Inspector Karl Lohmann; Gennat had played a key advisory role in the Kürten investigation.
Why was he called a vampire? Did he drink his victims’ blood?
No, he didn’t, though his main aim was to make his victims bleed because this gave him sexual pleasure. When using a hammer to strike women’s temples in some of his later crimes, the majority of the victims survived because they’d bled enough to gratify him without his feeling the need to kill them.
It’s unclear when exactly Kürten got lumbered with the name Vampire of Düsseldorf, but it almost certainly didn’t happen until after his trial in April 1931. The two most reliable sources from the time don’t mention the phrase at all. One of them, a contemporary account by British journalist Margaret Seaton-Wagner, even says that Kürten was instead called the Düsseldorf Ripper, and her book refers to him in its title as the Monster of Düsseldorf. As her book came out in 1932, this suggests the Vampire tag still wasn’t common to describe Kürten at that point.
So if he was so hard to catch, how did they get him in the end?
He gave himself up.
What, just like that?
Well, not quite. Kürten was about to be arrested for the rape of a young woman who had led police to his apartment, and he decided to come clean about being a killer as well. He confessed the whole thing to his wife and then got her to go and tell the police. Later he said this was so his wife could claim the reward money. He gave himself up at the Catholic Church of St Rochus, having arranged through his wife for the police to meet him there.
So Frau Kürten wasn’t in on it?
Apparently not. The killings seemed to come as a total shock to her. She ended up getting 4000 Reichsmark as a reward – roughly $14,000 in today’s money.
What happened to Kürten in the end?
At his trial, Kürten was found guilty of nine murders. He was executed by guillotine in Klingelputz Prison in Cologne in July 1931. Despite the Prussian state government being ideologically opposed to the use of capital punishment, public outcry over Kürten’s crimes was so great that they executed him anyway.
Guillotine? I thought that was a French thing.
Yep. Prussian too.
So how can I find out more about the Vampire of Dusseldorf?
My crime novel The Killing of Emma Gross is based on the case and contains a timeline of the investigation from February 1929 onwards that runs to over 20 pages. If you want more detail than that, most available second-hand accounts are of dubious quality. The best thing to do is seek out the two most reliable English language sources. The first is Margaret Seaton-Wagner’s book The Monster of Düsseldorf: the Life and Trial of Peter Kürten. The second is an account by forensic pathologist Karl Berg, who performed several of the autopsies on Kürten’s victims during the investigation and later carried out lengthy interviews with the accused as he awaited trial. The interviews formed the basis of Berg’s book The Sadist, which was published in an English translation in 1938.
