Peter Kurten was born in Mulheim am Rhein on May 26, 1883, one of thirteen children in a single room, to a violent alcoholic father who was imprisoned for assaulting his own daughter. Kurten later said a local dog-catcher had taught him to torture animals when he was a small boy.
He spent more than twenty of his first forty-five years in prison for theft, arson and assault, and said that solitary confinement had been where the fantasies grew.
He killed a nine-year-old girl, Christine Klein, in 1913, and then, after the war and a long sentence, began again in February 1929. Over that year he attacked at least thirty people in Dusseldorf, killing nine of them, with scissors, a knife, a hammer and his hands, and set a series of fires.
Victims were of both sexes and all ages, from a nine-year-old to a middle-aged man, which is one reason the police could not see a pattern. He drank the blood of some of them, and the German press called him the Vampire of Dusseldorf.
The city came close to hysteria. There were thousands of denunciations and a public panic that spread across Germany, and the case is generally taken as the source for Fritz Lang's M, released in 1931.
He was caught because he chose to be. In May 1930 he released a woman named Maria Budlick after assaulting her, and she wrote about it to a friend. The letter went astray and reached the police, and she led detectives to his address.
Kurten then told his wife who he was and instructed her to turn him in and claim the reward, so that she would be provided for. She did.
He confessed to seventy-nine offences and was tried in April 1931 in a courtroom with his weapons displayed in a glass case. He was convicted of nine murders and seven attempted murders and guillotined at Klingelputz prison in Cologne on July 2, 1931.
He asked the prison psychiatrist whether he would be able to hear his own blood for a moment after the blade fell, and said that would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.