Volker Eckert was born in Plauen, in what was then East Germany, on January 1, 1959. He was fixated from childhood on women's long hair, and he killed for the first time at fifteen, in 1974, strangling a schoolfriend, Silvia W., in Plauen. He was assessed, held in psychiatric care, and released.
After German reunification he became an international lorry driver, which took him across Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and the Czech Republic on long unsupervised runs. Between 2001 and 2006 he killed at least five more women, most of them prostitutes working at lay-bys and service areas along the motorway network, and hitchhikers. He strangled them in the cab, photographed the bodies, cut off their hair and kept it, and left them at the roadside hundreds of miles from where they were taken. German reporting called him the Brummi Killer, after the slang for a lorry.
The transnational nature of it is why it took so long. A body found in Spain, another in France and another in Germany, all of women whose disappearances were not reported, were not connected by any European mechanism that then existed.
He was identified in November 2006 from closed-circuit footage at a service station near Barcelona showing a woman getting into his lorry shortly before her body was found. He was arrested in Germany and confessed to six killings, and investigators believed the true number was higher.
He hanged himself in his cell at Paderborn on July 2, 2007, aged forty-eight, before any trial. The case is cited in European policing as an argument for cross-border databases of unsolved killings along the motorway network.