The police still thought that there were several maniacs at work – namely, the strangler, the killer with a knife, the hammer-wielding fanatic and a fourth who was using a weapon which they had not been able to identify but which with hindsight they knew to be the scissors. Kürten had gone out of his way to blur his tracks and to create this sort of confusion. He later admitted: ‘I hoped by changing the methods to bring about the theory that there were several murderers at work.’ More importantly, he thought that these variations would give him still greater sexual satisfaction. The police carried out intensive raids on the underworld to find him. They even dressed a tailor’s dummy in the clothes of one of his victims and took it around the dance halls, cinemas and theatres in the hope that somebody might be able to identify her mysterious escort.
Soon afterwards, Kürten made the mistake that led to his capture.
On 14 May 1929, twenty-year-old Maria Budlick travelled to Düsseldorf to look for a new job. A friend who had arranged to meet her did not turn up, but a man who spoke to her on the station told her that he would show her the way to a girls’ hostel. He took her through the main streets of Düsseldorf but when he turned into the Volksgarten, a public park, she became alarmed. She hung back, and refused to go any further with him, remembering the stories of the Düsseldorf monster. Fortunately a second man came along at this point and offered his help. It was Peter Kürten. Gratefully the girl explained what had happened and, as the first man scuttled away, she thankfully accepted Kürten’s offer of a temporary rest and some food at his flat in the Mettman-nerstrasse. She was disappointed to see how poorly furnished his attic rooms were, but after some milk, bread and ham she insisted on leaving as it was now after eleven o’clock and she had to find lodgings. They went the last part of the journey by tram. But instead of going towards the centre of Düsseldorf they were going, in fact, towards the Grafenberg woods, to a dell which was locally known as the Wolf’s Glen. After they got off the tram and had been walking for only a little way Kürten suddenly stopped and tried to kiss her. He told her that she could scream as nobody would hear. She struggled violently and Kürten tried to have intercourse with her standing up. Suddenly he let go of her throat and asked her if she remembered where he lived. She said no. The lie saved her life, and trapped Kürten.
He showed her the way out of the woods and let her go. Instead of going to the police, the girl said nothing at all about the incident to anyone. It was only when she wrote about it in a letter to a friend that it came to light. Fate took a hand: the letter was wrongly addressed and the woman who opened it immediately realized its probable significance and handed it to the police. The police just as quickly contacted the girl and asked her to identify Kürten’s house. She remembered the name of the street, as she had seen it by the light of a lamp, but she hadn’t seen the number of the house. She walked up and down the street several times before picking one house out. Only when she was at the top of the four flights of stairs did she feel almost certain that she had picked the right house. When she was shown into Kürten’s flat she immediately recognized it as the one that she had been brought to. As she came out onto the landing she saw, coming upstairs, the fair-haired man who had picked her up and attacked her. He started when he saw her and hurried downstairs again, walking briskly away. The landlady wrote his name down on a piece of paper: Peter Kürten.
That same evening Kürten went to call for his wife, who normally worked until 4.30 a.m., and told her that he would have to leave the flat for a while because of this girl. It was only an assault case, he explained, but with his record it would mean a fifteen-year sentence. He walked about the streets all Wednesday night, and hid in a room which he rented close by until the Friday morning when he met his wife as arranged. She told him that the police had searched their flat and that he wasn’t to go back there as she didn’t want him to be arrested at home. It was then that he told her he was wanted for the other attacks and persuaded her to go to the police. The next day they had their fateful meeting outside St Rochus church and he was arrested.
His wife could never understand what other girls saw in him. She never suspected his perversions and Kürten had been obliged to fantasize acts of sadistic violence in order to go through with their irregular bouts of marital intercourse. However, she was used to his infidelities. Soon after they were married she had had to talk a girl into dropping an assault charge. Less than a year before she had publicly slapped a girl’s face when she saw her give her husband a rose in the street. (Kürten had playfully brushed it against her cheek as he had turned on his heel and walked away. At the time he had a pair of scissors in his pocket, with which he was planning to stab the young girl if the opportunity arose.) Later that same afternoon he half strangled a girl he picked up, and she later gave evidence that for days afterwards the marks of his fingernails were clearly visible on her neck.
The women who came forward and testified against him clearly enjoyed being treated brutally. Brutality, Kürten had told them, ‘belongs to love’. His charm and fascination were undeniable. He boasted once to a fellow workman, ‘Come with me to the Rhine meadows and I’ll show you, on a Sunday afternoon, I can count them – ten to each hand.’ Sometimes, to demonstrate that the blame wasn’t always his, he would arrange a rendezvous with a girl and take his wife with him as his sister so that she could see how the women ran after him. Occasionally his outings were likely to end in a scene as the love-making wasn’t always one way. On one occasion she had come home unexpectedly and caught him in bed with a girl, but he had as gracefully as ever extricated himself from this compromising situation with a facile explanation which she had docilely accepted.
His trial opened on 13 April 1931, nearly a year after his arrest. In accordance with German custom, it was presided over by three judges. The courtroom was the drill hall of Düsseldorf police headquarters, specially converted for the occasion, and the dock was a hastily improvised wooden construction resembling a cage. In a room behind the court was a veritable museum of exhibits. In The Monster of Düsseldorf: the life and trial of Peter Kürten, Margaret Seaton Wagner writes: ‘Here were the prepared skulls of his victims showing the various injuries inflicted by scissors or hammer blows, the weapons themselves, articles of clothing belonging to the dead women and children, and the spade used to bury Maria Hahn.’
He was indicted for nine murders and seven attempted murders. No less than forty cases of arson were omitted. There was some speculation that he might retract his confession, as he had done once before while awaiting trail, but now that the spotlight was on him he didn’t hesitate to play to the hilt the role of monster.
Among the women who testified against him was one referred to as Charlotte U. Unwittingly she testified to the ease with which Kürten could persuade women to go with him to a lonely spot, even at the height of the terror. Margaret Seaton Wagner quotes his statement in court:
I met a girl, and we had a glass of beer together and then went to the Grafenberg woods. I was able to calm away her fears of the dark and the murderer; I said there were always couples about the woods. At the spot called Beautiful View I gave her a blow with my hammer on the right temple. She dropped with a scream; I left her lying there after hitting her several times. The hammer was as big as those I had been using before. I saw the blood flowing.
She had seen him take something out of his pocket and when he hit her she felt the blood running down her face like water from a tap. She was able to save her life by protecting her head with her hands. Afterwards she bandaged it up with her underskirt and hid for a fortnight until the wounds healed. She didn’t dare go to the police. If she had done so, she might have brought about Kürten’s arrest much sooner.
An interesting point that came out at the trial is that killing was not always necessary to Kürten’s sexual relief. This explained why again and again his victims were allowed to recover consciousness, or even why, when they were battered and stabbed, they were still allowed to get up and stagg
er away while Kürten still had them in view and could have quite safely killed them. The question that the court had to decide was whether he acted with premeditation before or after these attacks. Professor Karl Berg, who examined him, said that with the exception of the Klein case in 1913, they were not the acts of irresistible impulse. Kürten was always fully in command of the situation. Occasional lapses of memory in some of the details he recalled were attributable to sexual excitation. Neither insanity nor irresistible impulse could be put forward as a defence for these murders.
Some of the details Kürten revealed were quite horrifying. Once, when he could not find a victim, he cut the head off a sleeping swan and drank the blood. In a dream he pictured himself as saving the city from the Düsseldorf murderer, a torchlight procession being given in his honour, and himself being nominated as a commissioner of police. Margaret Seaton Wagner says: ‘He pictured himself being badly wounded in a fight with the vanquished mass-murderer, lying ill in a hospital with the populace storming the building to do honour to Kürten, whose recovery was hampered by their attentions. At the time of his arrest he had probably reached the climacteric of his sexual life.’
In the prosecution’s address it was revealed that twelve thousand individual clues were followed up; that two hundred people gave themselves up for the murders; and that about two hundred and fifty accusations were received by the police on average each day.
The case ended on 23 April. The jury deliberated for one and a half hours and when they returned Kürten was sentenced to death nine times for murder. The judge, giving detailed reasons for the verdict, underlined the point that Kürten had always acted with premeditation. He always armed himself with a weapon, he was always capable of leaving off an attack and there was always a carefully thought-out plan of flight and concealment of evidence. Throughout the trial he had ‘created the impression of cleverness, calmness, and considered deliberation. Kürten is normal,’ he said.
There was such a storm of controversy about the execution, which would have been the first since 1928, that for a time it seemed as if the sentence would not be carried out. Kürten, meanwhile, was being bombarded with letters, most of them anonymous, including love letters, poems and requests for autographs; he also received letters in equal numbers elaborating on the most horrible ways that he could be made to die.
He appealed against his sentence but on 30 June the Prussian Ministry of Justice, in secret session, turned it down. The information was leaked to the press that he was to be executed at 6 a.m. on 2 July.
Kürten was not told of the decision until twelve hours before his execution. He received the news quite calmly and spent the time he had left writing to the families of thirteen of his victims asking for their pardon. He claimed that since his arrest his sleep had not been disturbed by any more sado-erotic fantasies. His last meal, the Henkers-Mahlzeit, or hangman’s meal, consisted of Wienerschnitzel, fried potatoes and white wine. He enjoyed it so much that he had a double helping.
At 6 a.m. as the ‘poor sinners’ bell’ began to toll, he was led into the inner courtyard of Klingelputz prison in Cologne where the Magdeburg executioner was waiting for him, and walked briskly to the guillotine. His hands were tied behind his back and he was asked if he had any last request to make. He said ‘No’ in a quiet, firm voice. A few seconds later his head tumbled into the canvas bag.
He had told his psychiatrist, that his last wish would be that he might have the pleasure of hearing his own blood running into the bag.
The Yorkshire Ripper
The trial of Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed by the press the Yorkshire Ripper because some of his victims were prostitutes and because of the way in which he mutilated some of the bodies, opened in London’s Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, on 29 April 1981. He was charged with thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. Initially, the prosecution was prepared to accept a plea of diminished responsibility since the psychiatrists to be called were unanimous in their diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and it was unlikely that Sutcliffe would ever be released. The judge, however, having expressed some anxieties about such a plea, ruled against acceptance and ordered that the case be heard by a jury.
Opening the prosecution’s case several days later, the Attorney-General said that what the jury had to decide was whether Sutcliffe, as ‘a clever, callous murderer, deliberately set out to create a cock and bull story to avoid a conviction for murder’. There was a marked difference between the stories that Sutcliffe had told the police and the doctors.
Sutcliffe’s defence would be that he had killed the women as part of a divine mission given to him by God to kill prostitutes. He had told the doctors when examined that his mission was only partially fulfilled and that the urge to kill could return (although there was no outside evidence for this). What the jury had to decide was whether this story was an attempt to fool the doctors and escape the mandatory life sentence which a murder conviction carries; or, alternatively, whether he really was suffering from diminished responsibility at the time of the killings. If the latter, then there was a possibility of a lighter sentence and an early release, although the balance of probabilities was against this. In prison he had been overheard to tell his wife Sonia that he expected to get thirty years but that if he could convince people that he was mad he would only get ten years in a ‘loony bin’.
Sutcliffe’s reign of terror in north-east England lasted for five years. More than £4,000,000 was spent in the hunt for him, but when he was eventually caught it was only as the result of a chance stop in the street by two uniformed policemen. There had been near-misses. Once he had nearly been caught when a man heard his girl-friend’s screams and ran to her rescue. Another victim, Maureen Long, who had miraculously survived his murderous attack with a hammer, had passed by him in Bradford city centre only two weeks before he was captured, giving him a nasty turn as he recognized her, although she had not recognized him. Three times he went back to bodies when they had not been discovered, once after eight days and another time after a month, to mutilate or move them, each time risking capture. He was interviewed nine times by police, once when he was wearing his murder boots and the detective questioning him was holding a photograph of his boot sole. As the manhunt intensified, his car was repeatedly logged in the red-light districts of Leeds and Bradford; but each time he was interviewed he would explain it away by saying that he lived and worked in the area and was just passing through.
Undoubtedly, his biggest stroke of luck concerned three letters and a mocking cassette tape sent to the police in 1978–9 from someone claiming to be the killer, and appearing to have a detailed knowledge of the crimes, signing and identifying himself as Jack the Ripper. The letters all came from Sunderland; the margins were cut off where the writer might have left his fingerprints. The voice on tape had a flat, unemotional Geordie accent.
Although subsequently shown to be fake, the hoaxer seems to have implied direct comparisons with the 1888 murders, including the taunting suggestion that he might kill in September or October, consciously or not suggesting that almost a century later he might create a second autumn of terror. He mocked the police, as did the writer of the letter to Dr Openshaw in 1888, saying that the only time they had come near to catching him was when they had disturbed him a few months previously in the Chapeltown district of Leeds. Because of a theory that the letters and tape displayed similarities to the letters sent to the police in 1888, libraries in the north were checked to see if anything could be found out about readers who had borrowed books on the Whitechapel murders (I’m told that an earlier edition of this present book disappeared from the shelves completely). Although fake, the tape and letters were enough to send the police on what has been described as one of the wildest goose chases of all time. Twenty-four hours after they had been made public the police were inundated with more than three thousand calls from persons claiming that they could identify the man. Nobody ever did. But the trail had been so effectively blurred that even
people who had had their doubts about Sutcliffe now shrugged off their suspicions and mentally struck him from the list of suspects.
Sutcliffe was described by a friend as a quiet, unaggressive man. He was one of a family of six and had left school when he was fifteen years old. The eleven jobs that followed included factory work, labouring and two spells as a gravedigger. Nine times out of ten, a workmate recalled, he would open up the coffins and rob the bodies of rings and other pieces of jewellery, sometimes forcing open the mouth to see if there were any gold teeth to be had. Even more macabre, he would sometimes use the body like a ventriloquist’s doll or peer under bandages or into the plastic-bagged remains of road accident victims sometimes found in the coffins. As a mortuary attendant he enjoyed washing up the post-mortem instruments. It was during his second spell as a gravedigger that he claimed to have heard the voice of God speaking to him from the top of a cross.
After being sacked for bad timekeeping he qualified as a heavy goods driver. Prints from his moulded rubber boots, with the twist in the centre of the right sole which told police that the murderer was continually pressing some sort of pedal, were found at two of the murder scenes.
Sutcliffe courted his future wife Sonia for seven or eight years and eventually they were married in August 1974 when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-four; they lived with her parents until they bought a house of their own in Bradford. They had no children. Sonia’s regular job was as a supply teacher but one night a week she worked as a nursing auxiliary.
That was the night Sutcliffe usually chose for the killings.
Ten of his twenty attacks were on either the Friday or Saturday night when his wife was working. Cross-examined by Mr Ognall QC for the Crown, one of the consultant psychiatrists, Dr Milne, was asked: ‘Why did God only direct him on Friday and Saturday nights?’ Milne answered that he didn’t think God did only direct him on those nights. ‘Paranoid schizophrenics are extraordinarily cunning,’ he explained, ‘extremely involved in premeditation and determined not to be found.’
The Complete Jack the Ripper Page 35