Wolter was born in 1958 and lived in the Frankfurt area of Hesse. Between 1980 and 1983 he attacked girls and young women, most of them alone in the open or on their way home in the evening: Gabriele Roesner, twenty-five; Regina Barthel, fourteen; Annedore Ligeika; Fatima Sonnenberg; Beatrix Scheible, sixteen; Regina Spielman, seventeen; Ilke Rutsch, twenty-one; and Simone Newin, twenty-two. He raped them and killed them by stabbing or strangling.
He was arrested on November 29, 1983 and tried and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1984.
The accessible source base is an encyclopaedia entry and brief contemporary German press reports. Eight victims are given and seven are named. Because the German courts do not publish judgments of this period and the case has not been the subject of any substantial later account, nothing more specific about the evidence or the trial can be set down here. The entry is retained on the conviction and the sentence.