On July 17, 1975, fire broke out in the building at Zeissstrasse 74 in the Ottensen district of Hamburg while one of the tenants, a night watchman named Fritz Honka, was out. A firefighter working through the attic flat found parts of human bodies. The police searched and found the partly decomposed remains of three women hidden in the flat and the roof space, along with a large number of scented air-freshener blocks. For years the other tenants had complained about the smell. Honka was arrested, and on July 29 he confessed to killing the women. The investigation also tied him to a fourth: Gertraud Bräuer, whose head, breasts, hands and a leg had been found at a scrapyard near his building on November 2, 1971, and whose torso now turned up in the flat.
Friedrich Paul Honka was born on July 31, 1935, in Leipzig, the third of ten children of a carpenter and a cleaning woman; three of the children died at birth. His father, a member of the banned Communist Party, was sent to a concentration camp, and Honka said he himself had been held in a camp for children and freed by the Russians. He grew up in children's homes, and his father died in 1946 of drink and the effects of imprisonment. In 1951 he fled East Germany, worked as a farm laborer on the Lüneburg Heath, and in 1956 came to Hamburg and took a job at the Howaldtswerke shipyard. A serious road accident near Barsbüttel left him with a crushed nose and a heavy squint. He was small, 5 feet 6, ashamed of a speech defect, and two marriages to the same woman ended in divorce, in 1960 and 1967. That year he moved into the attic at Zeissstrasse 74.
The women all came from the drinking crowd around the Reeperbahn in St. Pauli, and all were older, homeless or close to it, sometimes trading sex for a bed, drink or a little money. He met them late at night in the bars of the Hamburger Berg, above all Zum Goldenen Handschuh, where he was known as Fiete. Gertraud Bräuer, forty-two, a hairdresser, was killed probably in December 1970 after refusing a threesome. Anna Beuschel, fifty-four, a housewife he met at the Goldener Handschuh, was strangled in 1974. Frieda Roblick, called Rita, fifty-seven, was killed in December 1974 after he found she had stolen two hundred marks from him. Ruth Schult, fifty-two, who had moved in with him, was knocked out with a bottle of schnapps and strangled with a stocking. He cut up the bodies with a handsaw while very drunk and hid what he could not carry. Nobody reported any of the four women missing.
He had been in trouble once before. In August 1972 a woman named Ruth Dufner fled his flat naked after he tried to force her into sex, and reported him; the rape charge was dropped, and in April 1975 a court in Altona fined him forty-five hundred marks.
His trial opened on November 11, 1976, before the Hamburg Regional Court's jury chamber under Judge Reimer Hadenfeldt, with Rolf Bossi and Gunter Widmaier for the defense. The prosecution asked for life for four murders, pointing to the air fresheners laid over the bodies and to the new women he invited home the same evenings. The defense said the women had insulted him, calling him a bum and a pig, and described him as a man ruined by his life and by drink. Honka said they had insulted him and so he killed them, and at one interrogation claimed Jack the Ripper had told him to do it; at trial he withdrew his confession and said he remembered nothing. On December 20, 1976, the court convicted him of the murder of Gertraud Bräuer and of manslaughter in the other three deaths, all with diminished responsibility, and sentenced him to fifteen years and committal to a psychiatric hospital.
He was released from psychiatric care in 1993, and a Hamburg lawyer obtained a change of name for him; he lived as Peter Jensen. He died on October 19, 1998, in Hamburg-Langenhorn. Heinz Strunk's 2016 novel Der goldene Handschuh and Fatih Akin's 2019 film of it brought the case, and the women nobody had looked for, back to wide attention.