100 Most Infamous Criminals Read Online Free PDF Page B

for some days.
    A month later, in July 1959, he added the special signature which the police came to recognize after they found the body of a sixteen-year-old with steaks cut from her thighs and buttocks. The signature appeared again on the bodies of two more young girls within six weeks of each other in 1962, and then on a four-year-old in 1966. Kroll went on to rape and kill at least four more women and girls in the next ten years, but it wasn’t until 1976, when a four-year-old disappeared from a playground in Duisberg, that his trademark reappeared in particularly grisly fashion.
    The young girl had been seen wandering away from the playground with a mild-looking man she called ‘uncle’. The police quickly started making a door-to-door enquiry, and were told something odd by a tenant in a nearby apartment building. He said he’d just been told by the janitor, Joachim Kroll, not to use one of the building’s lavatories because it was stopped up. ‘What with?’ he’d asked; and Kroll had answered, ‘Guts…’
    A plumber was called, and soon found that Kroll had been exactly right: the lavatory had indeed been blocked by the intestines and lungs of a small child. When the police searched Kroll’s apartment, they found human flesh wrapped in bags in the freezer, and on the stove, among the carrots and potatoes of a stew, the child’s hand.
    Kroll was a model prisoner. He seemed to think he’d be able to go home after he’d had an operation of some kind. So he readily confessed to all the murders he could remember – and he also told the police about two occasions on which he might have been caught. As for the human flesh, he hadn’t taken it, he said, for any particularly sinister reason. He just thought he’d save money on meat…
     

Peter Kürten
    P eter Kürten, the so-called ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’, was an indiscriminate murderer: he attacked and killed everything – men, women, children, animals – that came his way. Yet he was described by a psychiatrist at his trial in 1930 – where, from behind the bars of a specially-built cage, he spelled out the details of his crimes in meticulous detail – as a clever, even rather a nice man.
    That he should have been so is astonishing. For Kürten’s father had been a drunken, pathological sadist, who was sent to prison for repeatedly raping his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter and he himself had committed his first murders – the drowning of two playmates – at the age of nine. At about the same time, he later said, he was inducted by the local dog-catcher into the delights of torturing animals – he sometimes decapitated swans to drink their blood.
    By the age of 16, he was a petty young hoodlum and occasional arsonist living in a ménage-à-trois with a masochistic older woman and her teenage daughter. He was arrested and sent to prison twice – first for theft and fraud, and then for deserting from the army the day after he’d been called up. In between these two sentences, though, while making his living as a burglar in Cologne-Mullheim, he committed his first murder as an adult, when he came across a ten-year-old girl in a room over an inn, throttled her and cut her throat with a pocket-knife.
‘I heard the blood spurt and drip beside the bed,’
    – he said calmly at his trial seventeen years later.
    His second sentence, for desertion, kept Kürten out of circulation, perhaps luckily, for eight years; and in 1921, when he came out, he seemed on the face of it a changed man. He got married in Altenburg, took a job in a factory and became known in the community as a quiet, well-dressed and charming man, active in trade union politics. Then, though, in 1925, Kürten and his wife moved to Düsseldorf – and the opportunistic attacks on complete strangers began.
    ‘The Vampire’, as he soon became known, attacked people with either scissors or knives, in broad daylight, any time – as if inflamed by the idea and sight of blood. By