Vampires (19 page)

 

 

Kürten responded by going quiet once again. For a while it seemed as if he had simply disappeared. But on 14 May 1930, he picked up a young woman named Mari Budlick who was looking for work. He took her to his house, then took her to the woods, where he attempted to rape her. She resisted and amazingly, he simply let her go. She went to the police and told them where her would-be rapist lived. Even then, Kürten initially evaded capture. When he saw the police arrive at his house, he quickly left and rented a room round the corner. Then he summoned his wife and confessed to her. His concern was that she should receive the reward money for turning him in. She agreed to the plan and on 24 May, arranged for his handover to the police. When they approached him, he simply smiled and said, ‘There is no need to be afraid'.

Kürten, it seemed, was as relieved as anyone else that it was over, he was quickly tried, convicted of nine murders, and sentenced to death by beheading. In prison waiting for execution he was extensively interviewed by psychiatrists. He told them that he was looking forward to his death – he could imagine no greater thrill than hearing the blood spurt out from his severed neck.

The sentence was carried out on 2 July 1931. Today, Kürten is remembered as the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf', one of the most bloodthirsty serial killers of all time.

In the early years of the twentieth century, the term ‘serial killer’ had not been coined. Instead, media pundits used a variety of terms from European folklore to describe killers who struck again and again, seemingly at random. What we would now call a serial killer would be described, especially in Northern Europe, as a vampire, a werewolf, or a ‘wolf man’.

Thus it was that Fritz Haarmann, a murderer who committed a series of shocking crimes in the period after World War I, was dubbed ‘the Vampire of Hanover’. In actual fact, most of the murders he committed involved beheading his victims, knifing them, and cutting up their bodies, which he then – horrifyingly – sold as pork meat on the black market. It was only towards the end of his grisly run of murders that Haarmann began to bite his victims in the neck, sucking out their blood. Nevertheless, he went down in history as a real-life vampire, and his chilling legacy of violence and murder is still part of the city’s heritage today. Haarmann is also thought to be the first serial killer whose case was widely reported in the press, causing a media frenzy that culminated in a sensational trial, and giving him the dubious honour of being forever remembered as ‘The Vampire of Hanover’.

Fritz Haarmann was one of the first serial killers to hit the headlines in modern times, having confessed to the murders of at least 27 young men and boys in the town of Hanover between 1918 and 1924. What made Haarmann uniquely terrifying was the bizarre mixture of frenzy and orderliness that characterized his crimes. He would kill his victims in a savage onslaught, biting through their windpipes as he raped them. Then with considerable care he would remove their clothes and sell them, dismember the bodies, dispose of the bones, cook the flesh, and finally sell it on the black market as pork.

If this seems hard to believe, one should remember that Germany in the years after World War I was on the brink of starvation. People were so hungry that few questions were asked as to the provenance of food, especially meat. In addition, the basic structures of government, law and order, and social services had almost entirely broken down, so that the disappearance of individuals – especially those who were not from the more wealthy classes – was not often remarked upon. Life was cheap, and horrific murderers like Haarmann flourished in such circumstances.

Fritz (Friedrich) Haarmann was born on 25 October in Hanover. He was the sixth child of Ollie and Johanna. Ollie was a locomotive stoker, a drunk and a womanizer. Johanna was older than him, 41 at the time Fritz was born and in poor health. Fritz, the baby of the family, was his mother’s particular favourite and he often sided with her against his father. As a child he preferred dolls to boys’ toys. More worrying at the time was a fondness for frightening people, particularly his sisters. He liked to play games that involved tying them up or scaring them by tapping on their windows at night.

Haarmann’s mother died when he was 12 and his feuding with his father intensified. After school he tried an apprenticeship as a locksmith. When that failed, he was sent to military school. After six months there, however, he was sent home because he seemed to be suffering from epileptic fits.

Back in Hanover, the young Haarmann took to molesting children. Complaints were made and he was examined by a doctor, who sent him to the insane asylum. This turned out to be a deeply traumatizing experience. Haarmann eventually escaped and fled to Switzerland before returning to Hanover at the turn of the twentieth century. To all appearances, he seemed to be a reformed character. He married a woman named Erna Loewert and seemed ready to settle down. This peaceful interlude was not to last, when his wife became pregnant, Haarmann left her and joined the army.

After his discharge in 1903, Haarmann returned to Hanover once again and became involved in petty crime. He was arrested for burglary, pick pocketing, and small-scale cons. In 1914 he was convicted for a warehouse burglary and sent to prison, enabling him to escape combat as a soldier in World War I. On his release from prison in 1918, he stepped into a Germany that was traumatized by war, and whose people were suffering intense poverty and the breakdown of ordered society. Crime was flourishing as people struggled to make ends meet. This was the ideal environment for a man like Haarmann. He immediately joined a smuggling ring and simultaneously became a police informer, managing to profit from both sides at once.

Another feature of the post-war years was the number of homeless and displaced people milling around the city. Many of the younger ones resorted to prostitution and thus, it became easy for Haarmann to pick up young boys. In particular he liked to frequent the railway station and find likely prospects there. Often he would introduce himself as Detective Haarmann and use that pretext to get the boys to go with him. And where once he had been satisfied with simple sexual abuse, now he needed to kill his victims to fully satisfy his lust.

One of his first victims was named Friedel Rothe. Rothe’s parents found out that their son had gone with ‘Detective Haarmann’ and the police went round to Haarmaan’s apartment but failed to notice the boy’s severed head hidden behind the stove. Shortly afterwards Haarmann received a nine month prison sentence for indecency. On his release he met a young homosexual called Hans Grans. They entered into a sexual relationship and moved in together, next they became business partners, trading on the black market with Fritz continuing to also act a police informer. Over the next couple of years their business began to include a gruesome new sideline: selling the clothes and the cooked flesh of Haarmann’s victims.

For the most part their victims were not missed. Even when they were, the authorities seemed to make elementary blunders in following up clues: the parents of one victim told the police they suspected Grans of having been the murderer. Grans was temporarily in prison at the time of the accusation, but Haarmann was never investigated, even though he visited the house of the parents pretending to be a criminologist and laughing hysterically as they told him of their fears.

On another occasion, a suspicious customer took some of Haarmann’s meat to the authorities for examination, the police expert, without making any tests, duly pronounced it to be pork. Thus, it seemed to be the case that as long as the murders were confined to a homosexual netherworld, the authorities preferred to turn a blind eye.

All that changed in May 1924 when, first one, and then, over the next few weeks, several more, human skulls were found by the river Leine. The authorities tried to damp down the public’s fear, suggesting that it was all a macabre joke, the skulls having been left there by graverobbers. However when, on 24 July, children playing in the area found a sack full of human bones, there was no stopping the panic. In all, the police found 500 bones belonging to at least 27 different bodies.

The police investigated all the local sex offenders, amongst them Fritz Haarmann, but still found no evidence to connect him to the apparent murders. In the end it was Haarmann’s own over-confidence that led to his downfall. For some reason – conceivably to try and stop himself form committing another murder – he took a 15-year-old boy to the police to report the boy for insolent behaviour. Once under arrest the boy accused Haarmann of making sexual advances. Haarmann was then arrested and his flat was searched. The police found garments belonging to some of the missing children, some of them bloodstained. Haarmann explained them away saying he was a dealer in used clothing and he had no idea where they had come from.