Peter Goebbels was born in 1961 and worked on a factory assembly line in West Berlin. He was twenty-three when he was caught. He attacked women at weekends, and kept his working week clear.
Four young women were raped and strangled in the Lichterfelde district. Helga Kousdoerfer, twenty-two, on Sunday August 26, 1984. Liselotte Mohn, nineteen, seven months later, on Sunday March 24, 1985. Karola Eisenstein, twenty, on Saturday June 1. Marion Bormann, seventeen, on Saturday July 6.
On the day Marion Bormann died a teenage boy saw a man and a woman struggling in an alley and took it for a quarrel between lovers. He thought no more about it until passers-by found her body nearby. He then went to the police and gave them a good description. Detectives, working through their files for attacks fitting the same pattern, pulled the other three cases.
They also pulled one that had not ended in a death. In mid-July 1984 a twenty-year-old woman from the same district had been attacked and her attacker had run off when pedestrians appeared. He had dropped his identity card at the scene, so the case against him was straightforward, but it did not fit: that attack had happened on a Wednesday, and the killer they were hunting struck at weekends.
The link was made by ordinary work. Goebbels worked a five-day week on the assembly line, and his plant had been shut for the retooling of machinery on one Wednesday in July 1984.
He was convicted of that rape and given a year's suspended sentence. Homicide investigators kept at him, and put him in a line-up where the teenage witness from the Bormann case picked him out. He broke down and confessed to killing Marion Bormann. He denied any involvement in the other three, said he was sick and needed help, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Berlin authorities went on trying to find evidence to connect him to the other three deaths.
So the count is one murder conviction, three further killings attributed to him and never proved, a rape conviction, and one woman who got away. An earlier version of this entry gave four murder convictions in 1985, which the source does not support.
The account here is Michael Newton's encyclopaedia entry, which is written in the register of its genre; nothing in it beyond the facts of the case is reproduced.