On Saturday, July 6, 1985, a teenage boy in the Lichterfelde district of West Berlin saw a man and a woman struggling in an alley and took it for a lovers' quarrel. He thought no more about it until passers-by found the body of Marion Bormann, seventeen, raped and strangled nearby. Frightened, the boy went to the police and gave them a good description of the man.
Detectives went through their files for attacks that fit, and three more Lichterfelde cases stood out. Helga Kousdoerfer, twenty-two, had been raped and strangled on the night of Sunday, August 26, 1984. Liselotte Mohn, nineteen, died the same way seven months later, on Sunday, March 24, 1985. Karola Eisenstein, twenty, was killed on Saturday, June 1, 1985. Every attack had come on a weekend.
They also turned up an attack that had not ended in a death. In mid-July 1984 a twenty-year-old woman from the district had been assaulted, and her attacker ran off when pedestrians appeared, dropping his identity card. The case against him was straightforward, but it did not seem to fit, because it had happened on a Wednesday. The man was Peter Goebbels, twenty-three, who worked a five-day week on a factory assembly line. The detectives' answer was ordinary police work: his plant had been shut on that Wednesday for the retooling of its machinery.
Goebbels was convicted of that rape and given a one-year suspended sentence. Homicide detectives kept after him and put him in a lineup, where the boy who had seen the struggle picked him out. He broke down and confessed to killing Marion Bormann, said he was sick and needed help, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
He denied any part in the other three deaths. Berlin investigators went on looking for evidence to connect him to Helga Kousdoerfer, Liselotte Mohn and Karola Eisenstein, and none was ever published. The case is thinly documented: one murder conviction, one rape conviction, a woman who got away, and three killings attributed to him that were never proved.