Fritz Honka was born in Leipzig on July 31, 1935, one of eleven children of a communist father who was imprisoned by the Nazis and died shortly after the war. He fled to West Germany in 1951, was badly injured in a road accident that left his face distorted and one eye squinting, and worked as a night watchman and a cleaner. He was an alcoholic on a scale that is central to the case.
He drank at a bar in St Pauli called the Golden Glove, the Zum Goldenen Handschuh, among a regular clientele of older women who were also drinking heavily and several of whom worked occasionally as prostitutes. Between December 1970 and January 1975 he took four of them home to his attic flat on Zeissstrasse: Gertraud Brauer, Anna Beuschel, Frieda Roblick and Ruth Schult. He strangled each of them during or after sex, dismembered the bodies with a handsaw, and hid the parts behind a partition wall and in the roof space, using air fresheners and pine oil to cover the smell. Neighbours complained about it for years and were told it was the Greek family downstairs cooking.
On July 15, 1975, a fire started in the building by another resident. Firefighters going through the smoke found the remains.
He was tried in 1976. The court accepted diminished responsibility on grounds of chronic alcoholism and convicted him of one murder and three counts of manslaughter, sentencing him to fifteen years followed by psychiatric detention. He was released in 1993 under a new name and died in a nursing home on October 19, 1998, aged sixty-three.
The case is unusually well known in Germany because of what it says about who was not looked for. All four women had been missing for years and nobody had reported any of them. Heinz Strunk's novel Der goldene Handschuh and Fatih Akin's 2019 film of it are about that as much as about Honka.