On the afternoon of July 3, 1976, a four-year-old girl named Marion Ketter disappeared in the Laar district of Duisburg. Police went door to door along Friesenstrasse. A tenant in the building at number 24 told officers that a neighbor, a quiet man who worked as a lavatory attendant, had warned him not to use the shared toilet on the top floor because it was blocked. When the tenant asked what it was blocked with, the neighbor had said: guts. A plumber opened the pipe and found a child's internal organs. In the neighbor's apartment officers found parts of the girl's body in the freezer and in a pot on the stove. The man was Joachim Kroll. He had been killing in the Ruhr for twenty-one years.
The case that followed was as much about the men who had been blamed for his crimes as about Kroll himself. Over two decades his killings had been spread across a dozen towns in the industrial heart of West Germany, sometimes years apart, and investigators had treated each one as a separate case. In several of them they had found someone else to hold responsible.
Kroll was born on April 17, 1933, in Hindenburg in Upper Silesia, now Zabrze in Poland, the sixth of nine children of a miner who spent the war as a prisoner of war. Afterward the family came west to North Rhine-Westphalia. Psychiatrists later measured his IQ at seventy-six. He began killing in 1955, shortly after his mother's death. Around 1960 he moved to Duisburg and took work as a lavatory attendant, first at the steel-tube maker Mannesmann and later at Thyssen, and eventually settled in the building on Friesenstrasse. His neighbors thought of him as simple and harmless, a small, balding man with protruding ears who tinkered with his moped behind the building, and to the children of Friesenstrasse he was kind Uncle Achim.
The first victim was Irmgard Strehl, nineteen, who was walking along a country road near Walstedde, east of Hamm, on February 8, 1955, when Kroll invited her for a walk in the woods. When she refused his advances he stabbed her, then strangled and raped her, and cut her body open. She was found five days later in a barn near Lüdinghausen. On March 3, 1956, Erika Schuleter, twelve, was raped and strangled in Kirchhellen, now part of Bottrop.
On June 16, 1959, Klara Frieda Tesmer, twenty-four, was killed in the meadows along the Rhine at Rheinhausen. A mechanic named Heinrich Ott was arrested for her murder and hanged himself in his cell. Six weeks later, on July 26, 1959, Manuela Knodt, sixteen, was raped and strangled in the city park in Essen, and slices of flesh were cut from her buttocks and thighs. Kroll later said he had taken the flesh home to eat.
In 1962 the killings came close together. On Easter Monday, April 23, Petra Giese, thirteen, was lured away from a fair and killed in the woods outside Dinslaken-Bruckhausen. Police arrested a local sex offender, Vinzenz Kühn, who was convicted of her murder and sentenced to twelve years in prison and psychiatric treatment; he was released after six. On June 4, Monika Tafel, twelve, was killed in Walsum, and slices of flesh were cut from her buttocks; her body was found a week later by a police helicopter. A man named Walter Quicker was arrested and released, but his neighbors treated him as the killer, and in October he took his own life. On September 3, 1962, Barbara Bruder, twelve, was abducted in Burscheid; her body was never found.
On August 22, 1965, Kroll came on Hermann Schmitz, twenty-five, and his girlfriend as they sat in a car on a lovers' lane at Duisburg-Grossenbaum; English-language accounts name her Marion Veen, German ones Rita A. He slashed a tire, and when Schmitz opened the door he stabbed him. The woman drove off with her hand on the horn, and Schmitz, the only man among the dead, died before she reached a hospital. On September 13, 1966, Ursula Rohling, twenty, was strangled in a park near Marl; her boyfriend, Adolf Schickel, was falsely accused and took his own life. On December 22, 1966, Ilona Harke, five, was raped and drowned in a ditch in Wuppertal. Maria Hettgen, sixty-one, was raped and strangled at Hückeswagen on July 12, 1969. On May 21, 1970, Jutta Rahn, thirteen, was strangled on her way home from a train station. A young man named Peter Schay was arrested, released, and spent years under suspicion; in 1976, hounded by his neighbors, he falsely confessed. On May 8, 1976, Karin Toepfer, ten, was raped and strangled in Voerde. Two months later came Marion Ketter.
Kroll confessed at once to the Ketter killing and then, over the following days, to thirteen more murders and an attempted murder going back to 1955. He remembered the scenes in detail and led investigators to them, and the details matched the old files. He did not seem to understand what would happen to him. He told detectives that he expected to be given an operation to cure him and then be allowed to go home, and he said he had cut flesh from some of the bodies to cook, to save on groceries. A detective who questioned him for weeks in the late 1970s, Bernd Jägers, said they kept him talking by playing cards with him and bringing him his favorite food.
The prosecution could build a case on only eight of the killings. The others were too old, the evidence too thin, or the files too compromised by the earlier investigations. Kroll's trial on eight counts of murder and one of attempted murder opened in Duisburg on October 4, 1979, and ran for 151 days of hearings. The defense argued that his limited intelligence reduced his responsibility. On April 8, 1982, the presiding judge, Paul Schimmann, rejected that argument, found him fully responsible, convicted him on all counts, and sentenced him to nine terms of life imprisonment.
He spent the rest of his life at the prison in Rheinbach, held apart from other prisoners, and died there of a heart attack on July 1, 1991, at fifty-eight. Six of the killings he admitted were never tried. For the families of those victims, and for the men who had been blamed, his confession was the only account the law ever produced.