By Jack Raiser
In the German city of Erlangen in May of 2021, a thirty-eight year old man by the name of Sayad E. of Iraqi origin is stabbed in the neck by a young and beautiful woman of only eighteen years old. Her name? It's unknown due to Germany's strict privacy laws. She is only known as "Sarah M."
At the age of eighteen Sarah was already obsessed with true crime and serial killers, having countless photos of famous murderers on her Instagram profile, mainly of Richard Ramirez and Ted Bundy. Not only on her social media and her cellphone but also on the walls of her bedroom. Was it a fascination with people capable of murder that turned her into a killer? Or something else was originally at play?
"Sarah M." was born in 2003 near the city of Gasseldorf, Germany, but grew up in Upper Franconia. Her parents would divorce when she was only four years old. At such a young age, she would already experience many negative things from her family. Growing up in a broken home, with a dysfunctional family, is no easy task. Sarah would only see her father occasionally until finally both would break contact forever while her mother would be in relationship after relationship with different men, never succeeding, making Sarah and her mother having to move multiple times. Sarah would only have an ambivalent relationship with her mother making her fluctuate between love and hate towards her which would lead into a rebellious attitude. Sarah began skipping school in different occasions, self-harming and posting videos of these actions online, and even suicide attempts starting when she was only thirteen years old. Here we already see many of the aspects of a serial killer's early life. Bad childhood, broken home, suicidal ideation and eventual attempts. However, her rebellious and self-destructive attitude aimed at nothing else but attention. Sarah developed an immense need for it after all the loneliness and isolation from her early life. She would repeatedly tell her friends that she wanted to murder someone without any of them taking her seriously. Was this maybe a way of trying to find someone that would stop her and give her the love she craved so much? From her early life experiences she would also suffer severe mood swings, and intense negative emotions. These would form her violent fantasies, and since serial killers were able to live up to these fantasies Sarah would feel a "connection" with them making her idolize these dangerous individuals. Sarah would make her own feelings be a priority eventually losing the ability to feel any sort of compassion. Meaning nothing would stop her to satisfy her fantasy and curiosity as to how would it feel to murder someone.
At age fifteen Sarah started abusing substances like alcohol, marijuana and other chemical drugs. She would quit school and at such young age she would already receive a criminal record with a sentence to community service and multiple psychiatric treatments. A reason for one of these was a hostile attitude towards police officers, calling them "bastards" and "sons of bitches". All this while being described by a friend of her as caring and putting her own needs aside in order to make sure others were doing well. Maybe a bit of self-awareness due to her upbringing? Was she able to see other people going through similar experiences? "Emotionally unstable personality disorder of the borderline type" would be one of the diagnoses Sarah received. A symptom of such is the feeling of inner emptiness, making her strive for this attention. But her behaviour is argumentative making her fight with people around her. This would only make a person like this feel lonelier and eventually being left completely alone, which would only make her need for love and attention even greater. But paradoxically she would not accept any help from anyone who would be willing to help her. Here we see this conflictive nature inside of her between her being a caring person but also hostile. This could only lead to more worry, more conflict in herself, and a lot of unrest. At the age of sixteen, Sarah would find love and she would move with her new boyfriend as soon as possible. They would only last for two years however. Jealousy and repeated arguments due to Sarah's unstable and unpredictable mood would not make things easy for the two of them and of course this would only take a toll on her eventually putting an end to the love she had finally found. In April of 2021 the two would finally go separate ways, making Sarah feel completely destroyed and devastated. The immense fear of being abandoned is a major symptom of her mental state. She would describe this feeling after being abandoned as one of being in severe pain, nauseous and unable to cope at all. Within a few hours Sarah would send her ex-boyfriend around sixty messages, all of them which remained unanswered. Was her wish to be with her boyfriend again one of true love or just a display of extreme narcissism? Being emotionally dependent is no easy thing, whether for the person dependent and the subject of such dependency. Eventually, of all things that Sarah could have thought of instead, she decides to kill her ex-boyfriend and then herself. Sarah arranged what in her words would be one last meeting with her ex-boyfriend as a way to lure him and finally murder him. That is until she is finally in front of him and she feels unable to fulfill her plan. She's angry, but still loves him and wishes to be with him. But both ideas remain fantasies. Nothing more. This was the breaking point. Shortly after her last meeting with her ex-boyfriend, Sarah created a profile on a dating platform to find a victim. Sarah presented herself as a twenty-one year old woman by the name of "Domina Cherry" looking for fun and open to everything. In only a couple of hours she would be in contact with over two hundred different men. Sarah arranged a fake date with Sayad E., a former security guard, the same day they made contact. She searched online on ways to stab a person and eventually met up on May 1st. Sarah vowed to kill one man every day. She had bought a camping knife five days earlier, and before she left with her fake date she sent a message to a friend: "I'm going out now, I want to kill my first one. I'm excited. Wish me luck that it works". Sayad drove with her to a nearby forest hut until in a moment of distraction she stabbed him in the neck. After a bit of struggle Sarah ran away from the scene and Sayad dragged himself to the road only to die three weeks later in an intensive care unit. Fleeing to the next town, Sarah would be approached by people believing her to be hurt due to Sayad's blood covering part of her body. She had no plans on what to do after everything had been done. Impulsivity is another symptom of her mental condition, meaning she had no consideration about the consequences of her own actions. "I'm a murderer" she would tell the by-passers. Sarah was arrested an hour later. Sarah's trial began in January of 2022. On the way to the verdict, Sarah would wear a black leather jacket along with her blood red dyed hair. But what gets everyone's attention is her display of a pentagram drawn on her left hand to the cameras, imitating none other than Richard Ramirez. She was described as completely emotionless and enjoying the attention wearing make up in order to look good for the cameras, and would even tell her mother how much she enjoyed her time in prison. A close friend of Sarah could not stand to look at her in the eye during the trial. He had received a letter from her telling him how she planned everything. Sarah M. was convicted of murder under juvenile criminal law and found to be fully responsible. She was sentenced to twelve years in a social therapy facility.
Sarah would not have gone very far as a serial murderer due to carelessness and the fact that she was open about her plans and would-be crimes with friends. Personally I doubt she would have managed to get to kill more than five people, counting Sayad. What if her friends continued her to ignore her insistence on her murderous fantasies and plans? This was a person with a giant need for attention, meaning she probably would have attempted to show murder weapons, personal belongings of victims and other stuff to her friends in order to get a reaction only for them to quickly call the authorities. Her strong desire for attention would not be able to help Sarah keep her crimes secret.
Maybe a lack love and attention gave birth to a rage that would only be satisfied by pouring it into violence. We know that Sarah went through really tough times prior to the crime and, in the words of true crime author Peter Vronsky, the serial killer himself is the first victim as so many cases have shown us. So much despair, sadness and anger have been inhabiting Sarah for so long that eventually everything exploded in murder. This however does not justify any sort of violent act, let alone murder. We'll have yet to see whether Sarah may regret her actions in the future, however due to the little attention the case has received and the privacy laws in Germany it is then likely we won't hear much, let alone anything else, about "Sarah M." ever again.
"18-Jährige träumt vom Töten | Der Fall Sarah M." by Der Fall: https://youtu.be/eDFku2nX3n0?si=CQAo07GrRL5qwAlr -"Serial Predator: Chilling texts of Ted Bundy-obsessed teen girl, 19, who lured date to his death then vowed to kill a lover EVERY DAY" The Sun -"Ein Freund: ,,Ich konnte ihr nicht in die Augen schauen'' Bild -"Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters'' by Peter Vronsky. 2007, Berkley Books
This feature is reproduced as Jack Raiser wrote it for the magazine, with the spelling of four words corrected and nothing else. The subject is identified only as Sarah M. because German law withholds the names of juvenile defendants, and the magazine follows that. She was convicted of murder under juvenile criminal law in 2022 and sentenced to twelve years; the victim, identified in German reporting as Sayad E., died three weeks after the attack. The portrait that accompanies the piece is the author's own.
One line calls Peter Vronsky a true crime author and attributes to him the view that the serial killer is himself the first victim. Vronsky is a historian who has written extensively on serial homicide, and the sentiment is his; readers should not take it as an excuse for the crime, which the author does not offer it as either.