Three days after Simone Newin was killed, the man police had been hunting for three and a half years was caught in the act. On November 29, 1983, a nineteen-year-old woman walking home from work in Frankfurt was stopped by a man who tore at her clothes, threw her to the ground and tried to rape her. A group of city workers interrupted him. He ran, and they caught him and held him until the police arrived.
He was Michael Wolpert, twenty-five, an electrician from Neu-Isenburg, the town just south of Frankfurt. German accounts, including the regional press, give the surname as Wolpert; English-language reference works spell it Wolter. He already had a record. In 1979, at twenty-one, he was convicted of public indecency, and in 1982 he was convicted again, and both times he got away with a small fine although he had been charged with assault and attempted rape.
The series had begun in Langen. On the night of May 7, 1980, Gabriele Roesner, twenty-five, was attacked in her own bed by an intruder, raped, and strangled with her own pajama trousers. Semen at the scene gave investigators his blood group and nothing else.
A month later, on June 14, Regina Barthel, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from Dietzenbach, went for a walk in the woods and did not come home for dinner. Search parties found her that evening. She had been raped and stabbed. On October 21 a woman working as a prostitute, identified in the German record only as Annedore L., was found raped and strangled with a pillowcase in her apartment. The blood group matched the first two killings, but no one yet saw a pattern.
Fatima Sonnenberg, also working as a prostitute, was raped and stabbed in her Frankfurt apartment on February 7, 1981; police found her after an anonymous call they believed came from her pimp. On May 9, 1982, in the same stretch of Dietzenbach woodland where Regina Barthel had died, Regina Spielmann, seventeen, was picking flowers for her parents in the same woodland near Dietzenbach where Regina Barthel had died when she was attacked, raped and stabbed.
Then eighteen months passed with nothing. By that point the police had recognized the pattern, and what they feared was that the killer would go to ground or move on before they reached him. So the news from Babenhausen on November 3, 1983 came with a grim kind of relief: Ulrike Rutsch, twenty-one, had been attacked, raped and stabbed while walking in woods near the town. He was still there. On November 26 he attacked Simone Newin, twenty-two, as she jogged through woodland, raped her and strangled her with her tracksuit trousers. Other joggers found her body soon afterward.
On March 5, 1984 the police announced that he had confessed to five murders from the series. He was tried at the Landgericht Frankfurt, convicted of five murders and one attempted murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment with a finding of particular gravity of guilt, which under German law bars the release review a life sentence otherwise allows after fifteen years. The judgment has never been published, and the accounts that survive do not say which five killings the conviction covered.
The lists of his victims differ at the edges. German reporting names the seven women above. English-language lists add an eighth, Beatrix Scheible, sixteen; German coverage of the region's crimes discusses a sixteen-year-old named Beatrix, killed while taking a shortcut through a shopping center, whose case went cold and was reopened some twenty-five years later, but no source ties her death to him. The English lists also give the Babenhausen victim as Ilke Rutsch. German sources name her Ulrike, and she was the subject of an Aktenzeichen XY broadcast in May 1984.
He has drawn almost no press attention since the trial. No release has been reported; the last confirmation that he remained in custody in Hesse dates from the mid-2010s.