On November 9, 1929, a Düsseldorf newspaper received a letter with a hand-drawn map. It showed where to find the body of Gertrud Albermann, a five-year-old who had been missing for two days. She was there, under builders' rubble, stabbed to death. The man who drew the map had by then killed eight people in the city that year and attacked many more, and he had spent the year returning to the scenes of his crimes to listen to what people were saying about him. His name was Peter Kürten, and he would not be caught for another six months.
He was born in Mülheim am Rhein, near Cologne, on May 26, 1883, the eldest of thirteen children, two of whom died young, in a family crowded into a one-room apartment; both parents drank, and his father beat his wife and children. By Kürten's own later account, the violence of that household and a neighborhood dog-catcher who showed him how to torture animals were where it began, and he claimed to have drowned two schoolmates when he was nine; no record supports that claim. As a young man he was in and out of prison for theft, fraud, arson and assault, and he spent much of his adult life behind bars. He said that the fantasies grew during long periods of solitary confinement.
The first killing that can be established came in 1913. On May 25 he killed Christine Klein in Mülheim. Her age is given as nine or ten. The crime was not solved. Kürten spent most of the next eight years in prison. In 1921 he moved to Altenburg in Thuringia, where he married Auguste Scharf in 1923, and in 1925 the couple moved to Düsseldorf. To his neighbors and his wife he was a quiet, well-dressed man who paid attention to his appearance.
The killings in Düsseldorf began in February 1929. Rosa Ohliger, eight, was found under a hedge on February 9, stabbed thirteen times; Kürten went back the next morning and set fire to her body with petroleum. Five days later Rudolf Scheer, a forty-five-year-old mechanic, was found on a road in the Flingern district with twenty knife wounds. The next day Kürten returned to the spot and chatted with a detective about the case. Then the police arrested a man with an intellectual disability named Stausberg, who had attacked two women with a noose. Stausberg confessed to everything he was asked about, including the February killings, and was committed to an asylum. For five months the investigation believed it had its man.
In August the killings resumed and accelerated. Maria Hahn was killed on August 11. On the night of August 23 to 24, at a fair in the suburb of Flehe, Kürten approached two foster sisters walking home, Gertrud Hamacher, five, and Louise Lenzen, fourteen. He sent Louise off on an errand with a little money, strangled Gertrud and cut her throat, then strangled and stabbed Louise when she came back. The next day he stabbed Gertrud Schulte, a servant, who survived after the blade of his dagger broke off in her back. He then switched to a hammer. Ida Reuter, a servant, was beaten to death on September 29. Elisabeth Dörrier, twenty-two, was struck down beside the Kleine Düssel on the night of October 11 and died the next day. Two more women were attacked with a hammer on October 25 and survived. Then came Gertrud Albermann, and the letter to the newspaper.
Düsseldorf was thrown into a panic that spread through Germany. The victims were children and adults, men and women, killed with scissors, a dagger, a hammer and bare hands, and the police could not see a single hand behind them. The papers called the killer the Vampire of Düsseldorf because some of the victims had been bitten and he was said to drink their blood. The police received many thousands of tips. The case became the background for Fritz Lang's film M, released in 1931.
Kürten's attacks continued into the spring of 1930, but none of them was fatal, and his capture came through a woman he let go. On May 14, 1930, he offered Maria Budlick, a young unemployed woman, a place to stay, took her to his apartment, and later assaulted her and let her go. She wrote about the encounter to a friend. The letter went astray, was opened, and reached the police, and Budlick led detectives to his building. Kürten knew they were close. On May 23 he told his wife everything and urged her to go to the police and claim the reward, so that she would be provided for. She did, and he was arrested on May 24.
In custody he talked at length, confessing to dozens of attacks going back to his youth. Much of what investigators know about the crimes, and much of the case's later fame, comes from the long interviews he gave to Karl Berg, a forensic physician who examined him before the trial and later published a study of him as a sadist. When his trial opened in Düsseldorf on April 13, 1931, he withdrew his confession, saying he had made it only to secure the reward for his wife, and then returned to it under questioning. He sat in a shoulder-high cage built for the trial, with the exhibits of the case arranged behind it.
He was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders. The nine were Christine Klein, Rosa Ohliger, Rudolf Scheer, Maria Hahn, Gertrud Hamacher, Louise Lenzen, Ida Reuter, Elisabeth Dörrier and Gertrud Albermann. On April 22, 1931, the court convicted him on all nine murder counts and sentenced him to death nine times. The court rejected any finding that he was not responsible for his acts. He was guillotined at the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne early on July 2, 1931.
Before his execution he is reported to have asked whether, after his head was cut off, he would still be able to hear the sound of his own blood for a moment, and to have said that it would be the pleasure to end all pleasures. The story comes from those who dealt with him in his last days and cannot be verified. The names read at his trial are the part of the record that is certain.