Ernst-Dieter Beck was born at Gohfeld on October 2, 1940. He worked as a labourer and had already been convicted several times, for theft, fraud, forgery, assault and sexual assault, before the first killing.
On April 8, 1961 he strangled Ingrid Kanike, twenty-three, an office worker. She had been to a Polterabend, the party held on the eve of a wedding, and disappeared on her way home; she was found in a mill near Rehme. The investigation was enormous by the standards of the place and time. All eighty-four guests were questioned closely and more than a thousand lines of inquiry were followed. Several men were suspected. One of them was Kanike's own father, and he was never able to free himself of the accusation, because he died before Beck was arrested.
On May 25, 1965 he killed Ursula Fritz, twenty-nine, also an office worker. She had met him at a dance hall and asked him to dance. After several evenings out she invited him to her mother's flat in Herford, where she was living alone at the time, and he strangled her there and left without being seen. Because she had been planning a trip to the Netherlands nobody thought her missing, and neighbours found her ten days later.
He was one of four men suspected in that investigation. There was no firm evidence against any of them.
On February 28, 1968 he killed Anneliese Herschel, twenty-one, an office worker from Werther.
He was arrested the following day, March 1, in a public house in Herford, a labourer of twenty-seven living at Diebrock. He said he had parted from Herschel at two in the morning and had spent the rest of the night reading a newspaper in the waiting room at Herford station. She had been killed at least two hours after two o'clock. Police found her things in his coat pocket, among them her lipstick, and he admitted the killing; a newspaper report of March 4 quotes him as having strangled her in order to satisfy his lust, under a headline describing it as a killing from sexual motives. The post-mortem found that the strangling had gone on for minutes.
A fingerprint from the flat where Ursula Fritz died was then matched to him, and the inquiry was extended to both earlier deaths. He was sent to the state hospital at Marsberg for a psychiatric report, and there, quite unexpectedly and quite quickly, he confessed all three murders to the head of the institution.
On November 4, 1968 the great assize court at Bielefeld was packed. Three professional judges and six jurors convicted him of all three murders and imposed three terms of life imprisonment, together with the loss of his civil rights for life.
The case has a place in German legal history for a reason unconnected with any of that: it was the first in which a chromosome test was applied to a man accused of murder.
He was still serving the sentence fifty years later, and died at the prison hospital in Frondenberg on April 29, 2018, at seventy-seven.
A note on what this entry used to say. It described him as charming and never short of girlfriends, and as preying for sport on women less attractive than the women he usually took out, the sort who wanted more attention than they were getting. That passage comes from a popular English-language crime anthology and not from the German record, which describes three office workers who met him at a wedding party, at a dance hall and in Werther. It has been removed, and no characterisation of the victims has been put in its place.