On June 19, 1959, a customer collected a suit he had ordered from a tailor in Hornberg, a small town in the Black Forest, said he was just going to the barber, and left a bag behind. It was suspiciously heavy. The tailor, Kohler, looked inside and found a sawed-off small-caliber rifle, and called the police. The customer was arrested the same day in the square outside Hornberg station. He was Heinrich Pommerenke, twenty-two, a laborer who had worked for some months washing dishes at the Hotel Bären, and within hours he was confessing to the murders that had kept southwest Germany in fear for four months, with five thousand police officers looking for the killer.
He was born in 1937 in Bentwisch, near Rostock in Mecklenburg, and came to West Germany as a young man. By his own account, told later, the trigger was a showing of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments in Karlsruhe in February 1959: watching scantily dressed women dance around the golden calf, he said, he decided that women were the root of evil. That is his explanation, offered in his defense, and it has never been more than that. The same evening, he said, he killed for the first time. Hilde Konter, forty-nine, whose name also appears as Conther, was found raped with her throat cut near the motorway junction at Durlach on February 26, 1959.
Karin Wälde, eighteen, a hairdresser's assistant, was murdered in Hornberg. Rita Waltersbacher was sixteen. Late in May he boarded the holiday special D 969, bound from Heidelberg to Finale Ligure on the Italian Riviera, and killed Dagmar Klimek, twenty-one, with a knife; accounts differ on whether he stabbed her in the compartment or pushed her from the train first. Either way her body went out beside the Rhine Valley line just south of Freiburg, near Ebringen. He pulled the emergency brake, walked back along the track to where she lay, dragged her to a dirt road and violated the body. He also attacked a young woman near Stuttgart with a stone and, finding her still alive, stamped on her throat.
He confessed to sixty-five offenses in all: the four murders, seven further attempted murders, two rapes and twenty-five attempted rapes, six robberies, ten burglaries and six thefts. Thirty-eight of them were not charged because he had committed them before he turned twenty-one. His trial opened before the Freiburg court on October 3, 1960, and the court experts, Hans Ruffin and Christoph Staewen, found him fully responsible. Spectators called for the return of the death penalty. On October 22, 1960, he was convicted of four murders, twelve attempted murders, the attempted rape of a child under fourteen, dangerous bodily injury, aggravated robbery, extortion and theft, and sentenced to six terms of life imprisonment plus fifteen years, the severest sentence a West German court had yet handed down; the total was reckoned at 140 years, and in some accounts 156.
In August 1994, thirty-five years after his arrest, he was let out of Bruchsal prison for a few hours for the first time, accompanied by an officer and a chaplain. He died in custody on December 27, 2008, after more than forty-nine years in prison.