On November 2, 2006, a surveillance camera near a parking area in Hostalric, in Catalonia, recorded a truck standing next to the naked body of Miglena Petrova, a twenty-year-old Bulgarian sex worker. The footage went to the Catalan police, the Mossos d'Esquadra, and the truck led them to its driver, a forty-seven-year-old German named Volker Eckert. On November 17 German police arrested him in Wesseling, near Cologne. In his truck and his home they found tufts of women's hair and photographs of his victims. He admitted six killings, and the first of them had happened thirty-two years earlier.
Eckert was born on July 1, 1959, in Oelsnitz, in East Germany, and grew up in nearby Plauen, the eldest of three children. Somewhere between the ages of six and nine he found that stroking the hair of his sister's dolls aroused him, and he went on to his mother's wigs in the attic. By his own later account he came to believe that no woman would ever let him touch her hair. When he was fourteen his parents went through a bitter divorce, and during the 1973 to 1974 school year he began stalking long-haired girls in his class.
On May 7, 1974, at fourteen, he lured his classmate Silvia Unterdörfel into her attic and strangled her with a curtain cord. When she fought, he pulled harder, and she died. He stroked her hair, then hung a cord from her neck to the doorknob to make it look like suicide, and the death was recorded as one. In 1977, at eighteen, he was caught strangling a woman in the street and served eight months for sexual assault. Between 1979 and 1987 he attacked about thirty women in the dark streets of Plauen, choking them unconscious and leaving them alive. At the end of 1987 a sixteen-year-old girl survived one of those attacks and helped police draw a composite; a psychiatrist who had examined Eckert recognized the face. In 1988 he was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to twelve years.
He was released in July 1994 after six and a half years, moved to Hof in Bavaria, and in 1999 became a long-haul truck driver. He used the cab to pick up sex workers. On June 25, 2001, he killed Sandra Osifo, twenty-one, a Nigerian woman, near Chermignac outside Bordeaux. On October 9, 2001, he killed Beatriz Diaz, twenty-four, at Maçanet de la Selva in Catalonia. On March 1, 2005, it was Mariy Veselova, twenty-seven, a Russian woman, at Figueres; on October 2, 2006, Agneska Bos, twenty-eight, a Polish woman, at Reims; and a month later Miglena Petrova. He strangled most of them, photographed them, kept a journal of the killings, and cut off their hair.
Investigators believed he had killed at least nine women. The killing of Ahhiobe Gali, a twenty-five-year-old Ghanaian sex worker, at Rezzato in Italy on September 5, 2004, is listed among his victims. Others suspected include Heike Wunderlich, an eighteen-year-old student strangled and left naked in the woods at Plauen in April 1987, a case closed at the time as unrelated to the attacks; Benedicta Edwards, twenty-three, from Sierra Leone, killed at Troyes in August 2002; and four women, three in the Czech Republic and one in France, whom police in those countries connected to him.
None of it was ever tried. On July 2, 2007, the day after his forty-eighth birthday, he was found hanged in his cell in Bayreuth, using a drape tied to the bracket that held his television. He was reported to have been upset that his sister had not come to see him on his birthday. The inquiries into the other deaths were closed.