Klaus Gossmann, a theology student in Nuremberg, shot people in public places at midday between 1960 and 1965, timing the killings to church bells so the noise would cover the shot. He was sentenced to life in 1965.
Klaus Gosmann was born on September 1, 1940, the son of a career officer who went missing in February 1945. He grew up in Meseritz in eastern Brandenburg and, from 1949, in Hersbruck. He was nineteen when the killings began.
Between 1960 and 1965 seven people were shot in and around Nuremberg, in shops, banks and on the street. The dead were Valeska Eder and Enrique Hering, an engaged couple, on April 22, 1960; Erich Hallbauer, a cashier, at Ochenbruck in 1962; Oskar Seidel, a cash courier, at Neuhaus an der Pegnitz the same year; Karola and Helmut Hannwacker, a mother and son who dealt in firearms, in Nuremberg in 1963; and Otto Thieme, a caretaker, in 1965.
The German press called him the Mittagsmörder, the midday murderer, because the robberies fell around noon and the church bells were sounding. He said himself that the timing meant nothing: he was not an early riser, and his preparations always took so long that it was close to twelve by the time he acted. The name that made the case famous describes a man’s habits rather than his method.
The hunt ran for nearly five years and became one of the largest in the history of the Federal Republic. Every man born in 1939 or 1940 who had lived in Nuremberg at the time of the first killings was checked - more than fifty thousand people. The weapons were identified from the bullets and casings, which tied several of the scenes together.
He deserted the Bundeswehr in April 1965 and lived under false names. It ended on 1 June that year with a robbery in a Nuremberg department store in which he shot a man dead and seriously wounded two others; he was carrying three pistols when he was taken. He had finished school in Ingolstadt in 1962 and begun a degree in economics at Nuremberg that autumn, which he abandoned.
He was convicted on July 27, 1967 of five murders and three counts of aggravated robbery, sentenced to life, and stripped of his civil rights; the Federal Court of Justice rejected his appeal. The 1960 double murder of Eder and Hering was never tried. German accounts differ on why: some record that those two deaths could not be proved against him conclusively, and others that he was under twenty-one when they happened and a life term followed from the adult counts in any event.
His release took five years and went to the constitutional court. In early 2010 the court at Regensburg ordered him prepared for license; the Nuremberg higher regional court overturned that, holding he might offend again; his constitutional complaint succeeded. He was released on parole from Straubing prison on February 26, 2015, after almost fifty years - at that point the longest-serving prisoner in Bavaria. He had no surviving relatives and went to a men’s home in Bavaria.