The Complete Jack the Ripper

by Donald Rumbelow

  According to his own statement, Kürten had already committed his first murders when he was nine years old. He had gone swimming with two boys and had pushed one of them into the river. When the other one tried to rescue him, he managed to push both of them under the raft, and they had drowned.

  Of his time in prison, he wrote: ‘I did myself a great deal of damage through reading blood-and-thunder stories, for instance I read the tale of Jack the Ripper several times. When I came to think over what I had read, when I was in prison, I thought what pleasure it would give me to do things of that kind once I got out again.’ (Consciously or not, he imitated the Ripper when he began his own reign of terror. A good omen was that the sky was blood red over Düsseldorf when he returned to the city in 1925, as it was over London in the autumn of 1888.)

  When he was released from prison in August 1899 he resumed his career of petty thieving. He also began living with a woman, twice his age, who, significantly for his development was a masochist. Whereas Kürten’s other mistresses had unwillingly submitted to his perversions, this woman positively demanded them, which only served to increase his sadistic leanings.

  In the November after his release, when he was just sixteen, he tried to strangle a girl while he was having intercourse with her in the Grafenberger Wald. He thought that he had left her for dead, but as no body was ever found and no murders were reported in the press for that month, it is probable that she regained consciousness and staggered home without ever revealing her terrible experience.

  Kürten certainly thought that he had killed her. For the first time he had discovered that he could obtain maximum sexual release in this way, and from this point on he was prepared to go to these lengths to have such orgasms. It is significant that this happened within such a short space of time of his release from a long prison sentence. As a prisoner, Kürten had frequently committed minor breaches of prison discipline so that he could be further punished by spells of solitary confinement where, in the darkness of his cell, he could weave his fantasies and dreams of revenge. While indulging in these fantasies he would have seminal discharges. This, he confessed, would happen if he had imagined that he had cut somebody’s stomach or injured them in some way. It gave him final and complete satisfaction. He also invented a number of schemes for smashing bridges, poisoning reservoirs, killing whole schools of children with poisoned chocolates, each mass killing involving hundreds and thousands of victims. He made no attempt to control these perverted imaginings and steadily got more pleasure out of them. Behind them, there was a completely illogical theory of revenge which he called ‘compensatory justice’. For example, if he killed somebody, such as a child, who could in no way be blamed for his (Kürten’s) imagined wrongs, then society, if there was such a thing as compensatory justice, must feel it in the same way even if society did not know who had committed the crime.

  Soon after his release he was given two minor sentences for fraud and petty theft, and these were followed by a more severe two-year prison term for trying to intimidate a girl by firing shots at her and, through a window, at her family. After he was released in 1904, he was conscripted into the army but soon managed to desert. He went to live with a woman who joined him in his thieving activities until he was caught and sentenced to a further seven years in prison.

  In May 1912 he was released again, but a few months later was convicted of attempted bodily harm when he shot at a waiter who had tried to interrupt a conversation that Kürten was having with a woman he was trying to pick up.

  So far, he had not been linked with any sexual offences. Instead he began to specialize in robbing from certain kinds of buildings, preferably those with a public house on the ground floor and rooms or flats above them.

  On 25 May 1913, however, he went to the Cologne suburb of Muhlheim, where he had been born, and found a suitable house to burgle in the Wolfstrasse and between ten and eleven o’clock managed to get upstairs. In one of the bedrooms he found thirteen-year-old Christine Klein asleep. He seized her by the throat and strangled her for about a minute and a half. She struggled and then lost consciousness. Kürten slashed her throat four times and penetrated her vagina with his fingers. The whole incident lasted about three minutes. One of the tragedies of this case was that her uncle Otto was accused of the crime but acquitted for lack of evidence. He died with the stigma still attached to his name. On the evening of the murder he had quarrelled with his brother, Christine’s father Peter and in a rage had sworn to do something that his brother would remember all his life. The police found by the girl’s body a handkerchief with the initials P.K. which they assumed to be the name of the girl’s father – Peter Klein. It was just conceivable that Otto might have borrowed the handkerchief, and this was one of the points of evidence which led to Otto Klein’s acquittal.

  A few months later Kürten crept into a bedroom where there were several children and a young girl of seventeen asleep. In a rush of feelings which he was later unable to explain he fell upon the girl and tried to strangle her before escaping unobserved. The bruises on her throat testified to the seriousness of the attack. In the summer he broke into another house and was about to strangle another girl, but somebody heard him and he was forced to flee. In the same period he attacked an unknown man and an unknown woman with an axe, in both cases reaching orgasm at the sight of their blood. He also tried to strangle two women.

  Soon after the axe attacks he burned haywagons and hayricks. He had committed his first arson offences in 1904, setting fire to barns and hayricks. He found great delight in the sight of the flames, but more exciting still were the attempts to put out these fires and ‘the agitation of those who saw their property being destroyed’.

  The next eight years he spent in prison. He boasted subsequently that he poisoned some of the patients in the prison hospital where he went to work as a volunteer nurse. After his release he went to Altenberg, where his sister lived, and told her he had been a prisoner of war. She believed him and introduced him to the woman who became his wife despite rejecting his first advances because of his obvious success with other women. Apart from being a very hard-working and frugal person, she was also a very jealous one. She had been engaged to a gardener for eight years and had been his mistress; when he had refused to marry her she had shot him and had served four years of a five-year prison sentence. When Kürten threatened to kill her if she didn’t marry him, she gave in and stuck loyally by him to the end. She didn’t know of his prison sentences when they were married in 1923 and later regarded their marriage as some sort of penance in expiation of her own earlier sin. He struck her only once in their married life, but the incident made her realize that there was a violent side to his character. Philosophically, she shrugged off the gossip about her husband’s conquests, knowing them to be true, and stubbornly justified her behaviour by arguing that without her he would go under completely.

  For the first two years of their marriage Kürten was a steady and reliable worker. He stayed at home in the evenings and joined the trade union. The only discordant note was when he left the Catholic Church, which he decided to do because of a fund-raising church tax. He had no friends and was an extremely self-contained person. He was dismissed from his job because of general unemployment, and in 1925 he returned to Düsseldorf. He was delighted to see that the sky was blood red on the night of his return. It was a good omen for him and it was to mark the beginning of Düsseldorf’s reign of terror. It started slowly. The first attacks were carefully spaced over the four years until 1929, when they accelerated into truly horrific proportions. Between 1925 and the end of 1928, Kürten later confessed, he had been responsible for three cases of attempted strangulation of women, and seventeen cases of arson involving barns, hayricks, hay wagons and, on two occasions, houses.

  At the beginning of 1929 he committed six more crimes of arson. Then on 3 February, a woman, Frau Kuhn, was walking home from a friend’s house when she was caught by the sleeve and savagely attacked. She was stabbed twe
nty-four times and lay in hospital for some weeks, unable to give any information as to what had actually happened. Kürten remembered that he had been feeling particularly excited. ‘On that evening, if an animal had crossed my path I would have fallen upon it and killed it,’ he said. He had leapt at Frau Kuhn with a pair of scissors, which he drove into her head several times. As he hurried away he had seen her pick herself up and stagger off. Kürten found afterwards that he had broken off the point of his scissors.

  He had them ground down to a point again.

  Ten days later, on the Tuesday of Carnival Week, he bumped into a 45-year-old mechanic, Rudolf Scheer, who was helplessly drunk. Kürten stabbed him twenty times with his scissors. On 8 March he had a different pair with him when he killed eight-year-old Rose Ohliger. He took her to a building plot and strangled her before he stabbed her thirteen times. Later the same evening he went back and tried to burn the body. This attempt was unsuccessful, and so was another when he went back to the spot for the third time early the next morning. Because of the damp the clothes would only char.

  The local press, when they picked up these stories, also began to publish stories about London’s Jack the Ripper with whose activities there were obvious parallels. In time they would refer to Kürten as the Düsseldorf Ripper. Some newspapers, as the savagery of the attacks increased, also referred to him as the Vampire and the Werewolf. The police were puzzled by the apparent inconsistencies of the attacks. It was clear that this was the work of no ordinary sex maniac. The victims, so far, had been a man, a woman and a child. Yet the stabbings in the temples, and the similarity of the cuts, all pointed to the attacks being the work of one man. In spite of hundreds of interrogations and plain-clothes police observations, there were no real leads.

  In July Kürten tried in the space of twenty-four hours to strangle two more women. A sixteen-year-old-girl was lassoed from behind and dragged backwards to a hedge where her attacker knelt by her head and tried to strangle her with his hands. She caught hold of his nose and fought him off until she could get to her feet. Twenty-four hours later he attacked another woman in an identical manner. She remembered afterwards that he had knelt down by her head and listened to hear if she was still breathing. Because of the tightness of the lasso she couldn’t open her mouth or scream. As he dragged her over the ground by the rope still around her throat, a couple out walking saw him and, although they couldn’t make out what he was dragging along, except that it was large and heavy, they went to investigate and Kürten was forced to flee.

  From their description the police arrested a 21-year-old epileptic named Hans Strausberg, who was living in a home on the outskirts of Düsseldorf. He couldn’t read or write and had a cleft palate and a hare lip. When he was questioned he confessed not only to the attacks but to the killings as well. The discrepancies in his statements and vagueness of response to some of the questions that he was asked were put down to the loss of memory which is a frequent condition of epileptics, and he was committed to a lunatic asylum for life.

  Only a few weeks later the reign of terror began again.

  On 30 July a prostitute named Emma Gross was found lying naked in her room. She had been strangled. Kürten was not, as it happened, the murderer, but the killing set off a new wave of panic. On 21 August three people were stabbed from behind, at different times during the day, by an unknown assailant. Two of the victims were women. One was only slightly wounded but the other was more seriously hurt by a thrust through her liver and stomach. The third victim, a man, was stabbed in the small of the back; but fortunately the injury was lessened to some extent by the heavy leather braces (which were cut through) he was wearing.

  There was an immediate outburst of press and public comment criticizing the police. Some people were already saying that the police had got hold of the wrong man and there were demands for Strausberg’s immediate release. Faced with such a barrage of hostile criticism, the police intensified their efforts to catch the Düsseldorf Ripper. A special watch was kept on the fairs where intended victims might be picked up.

  On 24 August the bodies of two foster sisters, one aged fourteen and the other five, were found on an allotment not far from their home. The youngest one had been strangled and stabbed and the older had been stabbed. Kürten later described how he had persuaded the older girl to go and buy him some cigarettes from the fair. While she was away he had killed her sister and, when she came back he took her to the same spot and stabbed her. She had run away screaming but he had chased after her and killed her by stabbing her in the back four times. On the Sunday when the bodies were discovered Kürten, still feeling sexually excited, picked up a servant girl named Schulte and introduced himself to her as Fritz Baugmart. In a wood he tried to have sexual intercourse with her but she told him that she would rather die first. ‘Well die then,’ he said, and stabbed her several times. The last savage thrust broke off the point of his knife which lodged in her back. Fortunately some young men near by had heard her screams for help and came to her rescue. Kürten ran away. The woman could give only a confused description of her attacker. The only thing it seemed she could remember about him was that he had a tooth missing from his upper jaw.

  The police conviction that there was more than one maniac at work was now strengthened. It seemed inconceivable that the same man would kill two children on a Saturday and, just over twelve hours later, try to commit a third murder.

  Nearly a month later Kürten struck again. A domestic servant named Ida Reuter went to Düsseldorf to spend the afternoon and evening there. When she was found on the Monday morning it was apparent that she had been dragged from a footpath into some nearby woods and battered to death with a hammer. Kürten’s later explanation for using the hammer was that he thought that he might get more enjoyment out of it. Her handbag and knickers were missing.

  Ten days later Elisabeth Dorrier was killed in the same way. She was still breathing when she was found but she died before she regained consciousness. Her hat was missing, as were some fragments of her coat, which had been torn to ribbons.

  On 25 October a 34-year-old woman, Frau Meurer, was accosted by a man in a lonely street in Flingern. ‘Aren’t you frightened? So much has happened here!’ he said. Before she could turn her head, Kürten battered her unconscious with his hammer. She knew nothing more for an hour or two until she woke up in hospital. The force of the blows had broken the skin and exposed, but not broken, the bone. This attack had not given Kürten quite the satisfaction he wanted; later the same evening he attacked a woman in a park in the centre of town. He hit her four times, knocking her unconscious with the first blow, but when his hammer broke he left her alone.

  On 7 November, five-year-old Gertrude Albermann was reported missing from her home. Her body was discovered, two days later, lying in some brick rubble and nettles, close to a factory wall. She had been strangled and stabbed thirty-six times with a pair of scissors.

  Still more horrific was the news that the killer had sent a letter to a communist newspaper telling them exactly where they could find the body of a child as well as the body of another victim. There can be no doubt that at this point Kürten was imitating the Ripper’s tactics. Kürten forwarded a sketch map showing where the body was; he drew it on some greyish-white wrapping paper and marked it: ‘Murder at Pappendelle. In the place with a cross a corpse lies buried.’ The police began to dig at once in the lonely meadows indicated on the map. A farmer handed in a bunch of keys and a battered straw hat which he had found some weeks before and these were soon identified as belonging to a domestic housekeeper, Maria Hahn, who had been missing since 14 August. There was a further storm of criticism about police failure to catch the Düsseldorf murderer, and the story of Jack the Ripper (which had been a newspaper standby almost since the murders had begun) now took a new turn as stress was laid on the fact that the Düsseldorf Ripper had copied him to the extent of writing to the police in exactly the same way. Kürten said that writing the letter had given him
a sadistic satisfaction. On 14 November the body of the missing woman was found in a shallow grave. She was naked and had been stabbed twenty times in the temples, throat and breast.

  All the resources of the Alexanderplatz, Berlin’s equivalent of Scotland Yard, were now thrown into the biggest manhunt that had ever been launched. Nine thousand people were questioned in Düsseldorf alone, and in the fifteen months covering these attacks more than 900,000 people were denounced as possible suspects in different parts of the country. Only three out of these denunciations were made against Kürten. One was made by a fellow prisoner who had once heard him talking about sadistic practices. The second was by a woman who had known Kürten when she was a girl. From the descriptions of the stranglings she thought she recognized his habit of playfully strangling his girlfriends as they went walking in the woods. At his trial quite a number of women gave evidence about this. The woman was told, when she reported it, that nobody of Kürten’s name existed at his address! The third informant was Christine Heerstrasse whom Kürten had half strangled and thrown into the river. When she reported this incident to the police she was laughed at and fined for her ‘gross nonsense’ and only escaped payment of it on appeal.