Peter Kurten was a quiet man who held a harmless hobby of birdwatching. He was neatly groomed, impeccably polite and a monster. Behind his innocent mask was a rage thirsting for victims.
Starting in the summer of 1929, Kurten held the city of Dusseldorf, Germany, in a grip of fear, although the residents did not yet know the name of their tormentor. Almost every week a fresh corpse was found, horribly slashed or bludgeoned to death, sometimes sexually assaulted. Most of the victims were young women, although men and children were not excluded.
Months of terror stretched into a year with police searching desperately for the killer. Parents forbade their children to play outdoors, friends distrusted one another, and everyone feared to go out at night.
This unassuming killer sent police friendly letters explaining where undiscovered corpses lie, even going so far as to draw them a map. His atrocities continued for 15 months totaling over 30 murders.
Assault charges brought police to Peter Kurten's door in May of 1930. Standing in front of them was a man, however meek he seemed, with a criminal record spanning for 30 years. Once he was in custody he confessed to the assault and also multiple murders. He spoke telling his listeners, "you will hear many gruesome things from me".
Kurten told authorities he liked to kill, "the more people the better. Yes, if I had had the means of doing so, I would have killed whole masses of people -- brought about catastrophes". He prowled for victims nightly finding sexual gratification in the slayings.
Peter Kurten holds the "typical" syndromes of a serial killer. He was abused by his alcoholic father, developed a taste for tormenting animals and watching houses burn. At nine years old he pushed a playmate off a raft in the Rhine River. When a third child came to the rescue, Kurten submerged them both until they drowned. He recalled from his mid teens, "I found out what pleasure it gave me to try and strangle a girl I took out with me into the woods".
At 16 he was jailed for the first of 17 sentences that would add up to nearly 20 years of prison time for arson and theft. Once out, at the age of 30, he began robbing homes of beer hall owners on busy Saturday nights. During one robbery, he found a barkeep's 10 year old daughter sleeping. He strangled her and cut her throat. The very next day, he lounged in a cafe opposite the beer hall and overhead conversations of the outrageous crime feeling totally satisfied.
Kurten married in 1922 and it seemed to calm him. However, it was only the calm before the storm. In February of 1929, Kurten killed an eight year old girl, stabbing her 13 times, dousing her with kerosene and setting her on fire.
The one way he achieved the ultimate satisfaction in killing was to catch the blood spurting from a victim's wounds in his mouth and swallow it. Hence, Peter Kurten became known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf.
Sometimes Kurten would be satisfied in just maiming or frightening the victim and let her live. That was his pitfall and that's how he was caught.
Peter Kurten was pronounced sane after a year of study by Germany's best psychiatrist. The defending counsel summed up all the experts testimony calling Kurten "a concentrated complex of all sexual abnormalities known, a veritable king of sexual delinquents". Sadism, masochism, fetishism, and pyromania were listed among his disorders. Convicted of nine murders and sentenced to death, Peter Kurten acknowledged no remorse and said he might kill again if he were free.
Kurten was guillotined in Cologne, Germany on July 2, 1931. In his last moments, he said he wondered if he would hear his own blood spurting after his neck was severed.
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