In October 1983 Thomas Rung strangled his landlady, Melanie Scharnow, seventy-seven, in her apartment on Silbersteinstraße in the Berlin district of Neukölln, and robbed her. Another young man, Michael Mager, twenty-three, confessed to the police, briefly, and was convicted of the killing in 1984. He spent six years in juvenile detention for a murder he had not committed. He was acquitted and compensated only after Rung, arrested for murder in 1995, told the police what he had done.
The next month, November 1983, Rung killed a twenty-two-year-old student, Susanne Matthes, also in Neukölln. For that death, too, the police charged someone else: in 1985 a twenty-six-year-old man with schizophrenia was put on trial, acquitted, and committed to a psychiatric hospital. Two innocent men were caught up in the first two killings of a series that ran for twelve years before anyone connected its parts.
He was born in West Berlin on January 3, 1961, the sixth of seven children. His father drank and ruled the family by violence. His mother left when he was two. The stepmother who replaced her, Aunt Hilde, as he called her, "sat on a throne, she was the judge"; she decided the punishments and his father carried them out. He went to a special school and was already known for burglary and assault while he was there, and before 1995 he had been in prison many times, once for rape, a sentence that interrupted the killings.
Between 1983 and 1995 he killed six women and his stepbrother. The named victims include Frieda Kramer, eighty-five, Josefine Grosser, sixty-two, Helga Klinner, fifty-eight, and Gabriele Propper, thirty-four; the male victim is listed as Eckhard Trutti. He strangled some, drowned some and suffocated others, and robbed or raped some of them. Several of the older women were found in their own bathwater, which is why the German press later called him the bathtub murderer. His methods changed from one killing to the next, and without DNA profiling the police had no way to see that one man was behind them.
He was arrested on February 28, 1995, after DNA linked him to the last killing, and he confessed quickly. The forensic psychiatrist Wilfried Rasch examined him and concluded that he had committed his acts "despite his normality." In 1996 the Landgericht Berlin sentenced him to two cumulative life sentences, found that his guilt was of particular gravity, which rules out the usual review of a German life sentence after fifteen years, and ordered preventive detention to follow. German reporting called him the most dangerous serial killer in Berlin since the Second World War.
Prison did not stop the violence. In 2001, at Tegel prison, he abused a fellow inmate and was given another two years and eight months. In 2003 he injured another prisoner so badly that the man nearly died, and in 2004 the Landgericht Berlin sentenced him for attempted manslaughter to ten more years and a second order of preventive detention. Tegel refused to take him back, and he was held first at Moabit in Berlin and then at Celle in Lower Saxony, before eventually being moved back to Tegel.
The journalist Peter Niggl published Rung's confessions in 1999 as Ich bin ein Untier, I Am a Monster, and the criminologist Stephan Harbort discussed the case in Das Hannibal-Syndrom in 2001. No judgment in the case has been published.