In the early 1980s a student in the Aachen district of North Rhine-Westphalia began attacking older women in the street and taking their purses. He did it wearing his sister's clothes. When police caught him he admitted everything and would not say why he had done it, and a court sentenced him to two years.
He appealed. German law left him at liberty while the appeal was pending, and that is when the killings started.
Helmut Weidenbröker was born in 1964. He lived at Broichweiden, a village on the edge of Aachen, and was training as a chemist in the city. He was eighteen when the first girl died.
Marta Habermann was nineteen. On the evening of May 4, 1982 she was waiting at a bus stop in Aachen and she never got home. Her body was found naked at another stop further along the same route. She had been raped, sexually assaulted with a beer bottle, and stabbed seventeen times in the chest and abdomen.
Eleven months later, on April 19, 1983, Karen Fink, sixteen, disappeared on her way home from school in Würselen. Search teams took a week to find her, in a pond nearby. She had been raped, beaten, choked and stabbed nine times.
Doris Schröder was eighteen. On August 30, 1983 she vanished after a bus ride in the village of Breinig. Her body was pulled from an artificial lake near the Belgian border. She had been raped, stabbed nineteen times and violated with an object, and the official cause of death was drowning. She had been put into the water alive.
On June 3, 1984 Elke Braun, seventeen, was taken at Rott, near Breinig. She was beaten, raped, stabbed and assaulted with an object, and she was still alive when she was thrown from a twelve-meter cliff into a quarry. The fall killed her.
On March 6, 1986 Beate Görtz, eighteen, got off her bus in Broichweiden and disappeared. Twelve days later she was recovered from the Rur near Düren. She had been raped and stabbed, and her skull had been broken before she went into the river, where she drowned.
Other passengers remembered that Weidenbröker had got off the bus at the same stop that evening. He was arrested in September 1986. Under questioning he admitted killing Beate Görtz. He admitted nothing else.
On April 10, 1987 a court convicted him of her murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
That is one conviction out of five deaths. The authorities were convinced he had killed the other four, and the reason they gave was that the series ended when he was arrested. German reference works describe him as the man who murdered five young women around Aachen. A court found that he murdered one. The other four were attributed to him and never proved to the standard a German court requires, and no account of the evidence gathered on them has been published.
German reporting convention generally withholds the surnames of victims and offenders. The full names given here for the five appear in German and English reference works on the case, and they cannot be checked against a published judgment, because the 1987 judgment has never been published.
His case has almost no public record beyond that: no published photograph and little German press coverage, though he had multiple deaths attributed to him. He has been in custody since September 1986, when he was twenty-two. He was last reported still in prison in the mid-2010s.