Bernd Servé, a Düsseldorf lawyer, was sitting in his car one night in January 1953 with Adolf Hüllencremer, eighteen, when two masked men came at them out of the dark. Servé was shot in the head and killed. Hüllencremer was struck on the head, and as he lay there one of the attackers whispered to him to play dead. He did. The men took him for dead and left, and he was only slightly hurt when he reached the police. The whisper mattered later, because the man who gave it became the one witness able to name the gunman.
Nearly three years passed before the pattern showed itself again. In November 1955 police raised a car that had been sunk in a gravel pit near Düsseldorf-Kalkum; inside were the bodies of Friedhelm Behre, twenty-six, and his girlfriend, Thea Kürmann, both robbed and killed in the manner of the attack on Servé. On February 8, 1956, officers searching for two missing people found an empty car with a great deal of blood inside. The next day, in a haystack not far away, they found Hildegard Wassing, a twenty-year-old secretary, and the man she had gone out with that evening, Peter Falkenberg. The German press called them the Liebespaarmorde, the lovers' murders, and couples stayed away from the dark lanes around the city.
The arrest, four months later, came close to chance. A gamekeeper came upon a man in a grove near Düsseldorf watching a couple in their car, and the man, though he had room to run, did not resist. A German account of the case gives a different version, in which the woman in the car screamed, walkers and a forester came running, and the forester held the man, who claimed he too had answered the cries, until police arrived and the woman identified him as her attacker. The accounts agree on the name, Werner Boost, and on the month, June 1956; the date given is June 6.
He had been born Werner Korecki in Düsseldorf on May 6, 1928, and never met his father. He grew up in a Protestant orphanage in Düsseldorf-Kaiserswerth, where he was adopted, and was sent to a care home after stealing 300 Reichsmarks from his mother. At sixteen, after abandoning two apprenticeships, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht and was soon a prisoner of the Americans. After the war he failed to finish a baker's apprenticeship, took casual work in what became East Germany, and helped people escape to the West, for which a court in the Soviet zone gave him three weeks in jail. He married in 1949, and in 1950 he moved with his wife and two daughters into his mother's home in Düsseldorf. There he served several months for thefts committed with a friend, Franz Lorbach.
Lorbach went to the police after reading about the arrest. He confessed to his part in the attack on Servé and Hüllencremer, said it was Boost who had fired the aimed shot into the lawyer's head, and described himself as having been under Boost's spell. Accounts of his statement have Boost experimenting with drugs and poisons in search of a perfect method of murder, and Lorbach spoke of a plan to float balloons filled with cyanide into the cars of courting couples. He also described robberies and sexual assaults on couples that did not end in death. Much of it rested on his word. He knew details that only investigators knew and he had weapons, but he produced no hard evidence against the man he accused.
The trial opened on November 3, 1959, before the jury court in Düsseldorf. Prosecutors charged Boost with eighteen offenses, five of them murders, and he denied every one. Observers found the quiet, unremarkable defendant oddly commanding, and the papers called him the man with the stone mask. The court convicted him of the murder of Bernd Servé, on the strength of Lorbach's account, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The other murder charges were held not proved, as was an attempted attack on a couple in 1956 that failed only because the woman shouted for help. Lorbach, whose confession was taken into account, was convicted of aiding and abetting and sentenced to six years. A later account of the proceedings concluded that nobody left the courtroom satisfied with the verdict.
The figure of five killings is therefore an attribution; the court was satisfied of one. Der Spiegel returned to the case in 1971, and the crime writer Stephan Harbort devoted a book to it in 2005. Boost, who had always protested his innocence, served thirty-four years and was released from prison in Schwerte in July 1990.