The Killing of Emma Gross (12 page)

'You know what Freud says about cigar smoking?' Kürten said.

'No. What does he say about men who masturbate over the corpses of little girls?'

'What are you talking about?'

'Rosa Ohliger.'

'Who?'

'Rosa Ohliger. The eight-year-old girl you killed on the 8
^th
February last year.'

'Who says I masturbated over her?'

'You don't deny murdering her?'

'No, I...' He rubbed the back of his head. His hair was all over the place today, and his stubble was beginning to crowd out his pencil-line moustache. He sighed. 'Rosa. I remember Rosa. I didn't know her name until the papers reported it a couple of days later.'

'She left her friend's house on Albertstrasse that evening. The family there were the last people to see her alive.'

He nodded.

'Tell me what happened, in your own words,' I said. 'Be as specific as you can.'

'It was just after six that night. I picked her up outside St. Vincent's Church. We got talking. She said she wanted to go home.'

Okay, that fit the facts so far. 'Did she tell you where that was?'

'Langerstrasse. I offered to take her, and I led her down the Kettwiger Strasse as far as a hoarding –'

'She didn't notice you were leading her in the wrong direction?'

He smiled. 'It took until we got to the hoarding for her to notice.'

'Then what?'

'I seized her by the throat and put her on her back,' he said. Berg's autopsy report on Ohliger was still fresh in my mind. One sentence leapt to the fore:
Face bloated and livid, characteristic of forcible strangulation.

'With my right hand I drew my scissors and stabbed the child in her left temple. And in the heart,' Kürten said. Berg again:
One stab wound in left temple...Thirteen stab wounds to the upper torso made through clothing. Cause of death internal haemorrhage resulting from one or more of five distinct stab wounds to the heart.

'She seemed to be dead. I went back to my apartment and searched myself for blood stains.'

I held up a hand. 'Hold on, Peter. Ohliger was standing when you attacked her?'

'Yes. Then she went limp in my arms.'

'You stabbed her then?'

'Yes.'

'And you left her in the place where you stabbed her?'

'Well, not exactly, no, or the body would've been found straight away. I dragged her back two or three metres to the hedge under the hoarding. I dragged her with both hands, around the neck, like this.' He mimed the action. 'Her feet dragged through the snow and I covered the tracks as best I could.'

That tallied with the crime scene sketch and description Ritter had put in his incident report. One of Ohliger's shoes had slipped off and been trodden into the snow. Ritter's team had found it when searching the scene after the body had been found.

'Okay,' I said. 'You went back to your apartment after stashing the body under the hedge. You were saying you searched yourself for blood stains.'

He nodded. 'I also cleaned the scissors. There was no blood on my clothing so I went out to the movies.'

I drew deeply on my cigar and took my time exhaling. 'What was the feature?'

'That I don't remember. I don't have a good memory for these new talkies. They pass me by, most of them. And, to be honest, I was still rather excited by the murder.'

Not too excited to spend two or three hours in a dark movie theatre. 'Which theatre was it?'

'That new one on Graf-Adolf-Strasse.'

'What time?'

'It was the seven thirty show. I headed home at ten thirty.'

Okay, something to check on later. It would turn up in the stenographer's notes, but I jotted it down in my notebook anyway.

'What did you do then?' I said.

'When I got home I filled a beer bottle with kerosene. We have a kerosene lamp, you see.'

'Which brand?'

'Kerosene?'

'Beer.'

'Oh...it was an altbier. Schumacher.'

Another tick against the crime scene evidence. 'Okay, what then?'

Kürten chuckled. 'You know what then, detective.'

'I want you to tell me, Peter.' I pointed at him with my burning cigar.

'I went to the murder site with the aim of pouring the kerosene over the body and setting light to it.'

'But?'

'But what?'

'Something stopped you?'

He shrugged. 'Too many people about. I left the bottle propped against a fence and went back home. My wife was due back from work at that time, anyway.'

'So this would have been when?'

'Between eleven and midnight. I got back home by twelve thirty and my wife got home at her usual time, ten past one.'

'So you didn't burn the body?'

'Of course I did. I went back the next morning.'

'This is now Saturday 9
^th
February, correct?' I dropped cigar ash onto the floor.

'Correct.'

'What time?'

'I got up at six am and told my wife I had to go to the WC. I ran quickly to the scene of the crime, found my bottle, poured the kerosene over the body and set it on fire. There and back didn't take more than five or six minutes.' Kürten tapped his finger on the table. 'I felt no sexual excitement and I did not touch the girl. I did not masturbate on the corpse, nor did I even touch the child sexually.'

'Uh-huh. So how come the lab found traces of your seminal fluid on the inside of her panties?'

'How do you know that was mine?'

We didn't, of course. Beyond an approximate time of ejaculation, and confirming the fluid was human in origin, the lab couldn't tell us anything. I leaned in and blew smoke in his eyes. 'Peter, who walks past a young girl's corpse in the middle of a snow-bound night and smears cum on her private parts?'

'No,' Kürten said, shaking his head, 'I did it only to cause excitement and indignation. I set light to her to increase the general indignation.'

'So you did masturbate?'

'No, I mean I did the murder to cause indignation.'

'Indignation?' I said. 'You make it sound so polite. What would you do to get people shitting their pants?'

'You tell me, Thomas,' he said. 'You seemed to find my little stunt yesterday quite effective in that regard.'

I rubbed my hands over my face. Coffee. It was time for coffee. I waved to get the stenographer's attention.

'Time for a break, okay?' I looked at my watch. 'Interview suspended at ten thirty-five am.' I brandished the two letters. 'When I return, we're going back over the Albermann case and you can tell me more about these.'

Kürten nodded and smiled and tugged at his dirty collar. He scratched his shirt where it covered his stomach and I had no idea whether he was making fun of me or whether the scratch was genuine. I got up and headed for the door.

The stenographer finished typing up the transcript. He tore it from the typewriter and handed it to me. Last one, thank God.

Q: Okay, we now move to the events of the 28
^th
February 1929.

A: You're being very demanding this afternoon, Thomas.

Q: We're almost done. Tell me when you met Emma Gross. And where.

A: All right, all right. She was there on the street corner, waiting for business.

Q: Was this the corner of Ellerstrasse and Vulkanstrasse?

A: Hey, that's right. Were you there too?

Q: What time was this?

A: I left my apartment at just after seven pm and headed for the central station.

Q: Why the station?

A: Where else do
beinls
hang out?

Q: You went looking for sex?

A: I went looking for a victim.

Q: Could you look at this photograph please.

A: Yes, that's her.

Q: What time did you meet her?

A: I don't remember exactly.

Q: Try.

A: Well it takes ten minutes to walk to the station from my street. Say quarter past seven. It was half past when we got to the hotel, I know that. There was a clock behind the checking-in desk, beside the pigeon holes.

Q: This is the Hotel Adler?

A: (nods)

Q: Please answer the question.

A: Yes, it was the Hotel Adler.

Q: Whose idea was it to go there?

A: I don't remember. It's the nearest hotel with rooms you can pay for by the hour, as far as I know.

Q: How many hours did you pay for?

A: I don't know. She paid. I suppose all that was included in the price.

Q: And how much had you agreed to pay for her services?

A: We hadn't got that far, yet. I think the idea was that we negotiate once we were in the room.

Q: What happened next?

A: She paid at the desk and took a key. She led me up to the top floor, the third. I don't remember which room, though, before you ask. She opened the door. I grasped her throat from behind before she got the chance to turn on the room light. I kicked the door closed. She didn't have time to cry out. I dragged her to the divan by the throat. She went limp and I drew my scissors and stabbed her in the side of the head and in the chest.

Q: Which hand did you hold the scissors in?

A: The right.

Q: You were holding her by the throat at this point?

A: Yes. I kept hold of her with my left.

Q: Was there a lot of blood?

A: I stabbed her, Thomas. What do you think?

Q: I'm asking you.

A: Are you upset with me?

Q: Just answer the question, please.

A: Look, I told you I was sorry about yesterday.

Q: The question.

A: I've forgotten. What was the question?

Q: When you stabbed Emma Gross, was there a lot of blood?

A: I'll say. It got on my hands. I had to wash them afterwards.

Q: Where did you wash your hands?

A: There was a bowl and water.

Q: Where was this?

A: On a dresser, or a night stand. I don't remember exactly.

Q: Did the blood get anywhere else?

A: I checked my clothes but I hadn't got any there.

Q: Any blood elsewhere in the room?

A: My dear Thomas, I had no idea you were so ghoulish.

Q: The question, please.

A: I don't remember. She bled over my hands when I stabbed her, so there must have been some. I don't know where.

Q: What happened next?

A: I left.

Q: Did you try to violate the body in any way?

A: No.

Q: You didn't try to remove her clothing?

A: I didn't touch her clothing.

Q: You didn't remove her overcoat?

A: Well, I might have done. Yes, as a matter of fact I believe I did. I don't really remember.

Q: So you left the hotel soon after?

A: As soon as I'd washed.

Q: And what time was this?

A: I don't know. I'm not sure how long I was in the room before I left.

Q: You didn't see the clock at the desk on your way out?

A: No. I didn't go back to the desk. I left as quickly as I could.

Q: These scissors that you used. Are they the same ones you used in the murders of Rosa Ohliger on Friday the 8
^th
February 1929, Rudolph Scheer on Tuesday the 12
^th
February 1929, and of Gertrude Albermann on Friday the 23
^rd
May 1930?

A: Yes.

Q: You're sure they're the same pair exactly? Not another pair of the same style or manufacture?

A: Yes, I'm sure. They were the same scissors.

Q: Okay, let's go back to when you entered the hotel.

A: What do you want to know?

Q: You say you hadn't negotiated a price yet?

A: That's true.

Q: Then how did she know how much to pay at the desk?

I'd pinned him on his lie with that last question. It was textbook stuff when you saw a gap in the story they gave you to let them run on and come back to it later when they were more likely to've forgotten the lies they'd told. Then you could nail them on the inconsistencies. He hadn't negotiated a price with a streetwalker and yet she parted with cash at the desk? Not in this town. How much more of this confession was bullshit?

I stretched the tension out of my aching shoulders and drained cold coffee from a chipped cup. We were alone in Records, me leaning on the administrators' desk with my back to the door, the stenographer perched between his typewriter at the end of the desk and a bank of filing cabinets that towered over us and blocked the room's two tiny windows. The only light in there was electric and inadequate and I'd lost track of time. My vision was blurring from having to read in the semi-darkness.