Joachim Georg Kroll killed women and girls in the Ruhr region of West Germany between February 1955 and July 1976. He confessed to fourteen killings, was charged with eight and one attempted murder, and was convicted on every count. He died of a heart attack at Rheinbach prison on July 1, 1991, aged fifty-eight.
He was born on April 17, 1933 in Hindenburg, in Upper Silesia, now Zabrze in Poland, the son of a miner and the sixth of nine children. His father was taken prisoner during the war and the family moved west to North Rhine-Westphalia afterwards. He began killing in 1955, the year his mother died.
He worked as a lavatory attendant in Duisburg and lived alone in a small flat. Psychiatrists at his trial put his IQ at seventy-six, consistent with mild intellectual disability. He kept inflatable dolls, which he strangled while masturbating, and his neighbours regarded him as a harmless simple man who was good with their children.
He surprised his victims and strangled them quickly, and afterwards had intercourse with the bodies. He then cut flesh from them, from the buttocks, thighs and belly, in pieces about the size of a steak, took it home and cooked it. He said he had done it to save on his grocery bill. Most of the dead were girls and young women; several were very young children.
Two things kept him at liberty for twenty-one years. He rarely killed twice in the same place, and when he did it was years apart. And there were several other killers working the same region in the same period, so the cases were not read as one series. The West German press called him the Ruhr Hunter, and after the confessions the Ruhr Cannibal and the Duisburg Man-Eater.
Other men were accused and some convicted of killings he later admitted. Heinrich Ott, questioned over the 1962 murder of Petra Giese, hanged himself in custody.
On July 3, 1976 a four-year-old named Marion Ketter disappeared from Friesenstrasse in Duisburg. During the door-to-door search a neighbour, Oskar Muller, told police that the shared lavatory on the top floor was blocked. Kroll had told him not to use it because it was stopped up with guts. A plumber found a child's internal organs in the pipe. Police went to Kroll's flat and he pointed at the stove: the pot held the child's hand simmering with carrots and potatoes, and there was more of her in the freezer.
He confessed readily, first to Marion Ketter and then, in his cell, to thirteen more killings and an attempted murder stretching back two decades. He did not appear to grasp the scale of it. He believed he would be given a simple operation to cure him of the urge and then released. He was charged with only eight of the fourteen; the rest were too old to be evidenced.
The trial opened on October 4, 1979 in courtroom 201 at Duisburg and sat for a hundred and fifty-one days over more than two years. On April 8, 1982 the court convicted him on all nine counts and imposed nine life sentences. The presiding judge, Paul Schimmann, rejected the defence argument of diminished capacity based on his IQ, found him fully responsible, and said he must never be released. Capital punishment had been abolished in West Germany after the war.
He was held in solitary confinement at Rheinbach for his own safety. He cooperated occasionally with investigators on unsolved cases. He developed heart disease, was admitted to the prison hospital, and died there on July 1, 1991; an autopsy found natural causes. His brain was afterwards examined by scientists.
Eight convictions stand against fourteen he admitted to. The six that were never charged are the clearest measure in this archive of what a twenty-year gap does to evidence.