Manfred Wittmann was born in 1945 and offended in Upper Franconia, in northern Bavaria, which is where the newspaper name for him came from.
His first attack was on December 25 or 26, 1959, when he was fourteen. Irmgard Feder was attacked and mutilated after coming out of a cinema at Freiberg. He made her undress. She survived. Her age is given as sixteen in one part of the source and nineteen in another. German reporting called him the Beast of Oberfranken.
Nine years passed. On December 19, 1968 he killed Nora Wenzl, fourteen, at Staffelstein. On November 15, 1969 he killed Sieglinde Hübner, sixteen, at Kaltenbrunn, cutting her throat and mutilating her body. Helga Luther, sixteen, was killed later in November 1969; the source names her and gives no particulars at all.
He was sentenced to three life terms on December 15, 1971. Michael Newton's encyclopaedia records the disposition as a life term on a guilty plea, which is the only indication available of how the case was resolved.
The count here is the three girls he killed and the woman who survived him in 1959, which the earlier version of this entry did not carry.
The sourcing remains thin. There is no published judgment, no account of the investigation or the arrest, and nothing about him after 1971. Two photographs exist, credited to Norbert Niermann of Coburg, one of them showing him being handed over to detectives beside an official car.