Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  Louise stopped and turned round when she heard a gentle-sounding voice speaking to them.

  ‘Oh dear, I’ve forgotten to buy some cigarettes. Look, would you be very kind and go to one of the booths and get some for me? I will look after the little girl while you are gone,’ the man said.

  Louise trusted the stranger, took his money and ran back towards the fairground. As soon as Louise was out of sight, the man carried Gurtrude behind some beanpoles, strangled her and then proceeded to cut her throat. When Louise returned with the packet of cigarettes, she asked where her sister was, but the man didn’t answer and simply dragged her off the footpath and she met the same fate.

  The attacks continued unabated throughout the summer and autumn of 1929. Some of the victims were lucky enough to survive the man’s attacks and were able to give a rough description of a tall white man. However, this description could have applied to half the male residents of Düsseldorf.

  maria budlick

  Back in the city of Cologne, a twenty-one-year-old housemaid by the name of Maria Budlick was reading the ghastly details of the deaths that had taken place in Düsseldorf. She commented to her friends that she was glad she was miles away, but a few weeks later Budlick lost her job and was forced to move elsewhere to look for work. She decided to head for Düsseldorf, not realising that her encounter with the ‘vampire’ was so close. As soon as she stepped down from the train, a man walked over to her and offered to show her to the local girls’ hostel in the town. She felt comfortable with the man all the time they were walking along the brightly lit streets, but as soon as he started heading towards the dark area of Volksgarten Park, Budlick halted in her tracks. She remembered all the stories she had read in the newspapers about a monster prowling the streets of Düsseldorf and refused to go any further. An argument broke out and as they raised their voices a second man approached the pair to see if the girl was alright. The man who had approached her at the railway station backed off straight away and walked off, leaving Budlick with the second man to show her the way.

  Foolishly, feeling safer with her new companion, Budlick agreed to accompany him to his apartment in Mettmannersträsse. He asked her if she was hungry, and gave her a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. After feeling refreshed the man offered to take her to the hostel and they rode a tram to the north-eastern edge of the town. As they started to walk away from the tram, Budlick was aware that the man was leading her deeper into a secluded, wooded area and she could feel the hairs rise on the back of her neck. Her companion turned to her and said, ‘You are alone with me in the middle of the woods. Now you can scream as much as you like, and nobody will hear you!’

  The man lurched forward and grabbed Budlick by the neck and tried to force her to have sexual intercourse. Budlick struggled as hard as she could but the hand was tightening on her throat and she could feel herself slipping into unconsciousness. As she was about to pass out, Budlick felt the man release his hold on her neck and then asked her if she could remember the address of his apartment. Budlick replied, ‘No’, which was the one word that apparently saved her life. To her surprise the man let her go and even showed her the way out of the woods and back onto the road.

  Of course, Budlick had lied, she vividly remembered the street name, despite the fact that she was traumatised from the attack. Ashamed of the stigma of having been raped, Budlick did not go straight to the police but wrote a letter to a close friend telling her of her narrow escape from death. As luck would have it, the letter never reached her friend and ended up at the house of Frau Brugman, who immediately took it to the police. Detectives managed to trace Budlick and persuaded her to give them the full details of her attack. Twenty-four hours later she led some plain clothes detectives back to Mettmannersträsse and studied each door carefully to see if she recognised the apartment. She eventually stopped at number seventy-one and asked the landlady if there was a ‘fair-haired, rather sedate man’ living in the house. The woman led Budlick up to a room on the fourth floor which she immediately recognised as the place where she had eaten her snack two nights earlier. As she headed back down the stairs to tell the detectives waiting outside, she saw her attacker coming towards her. The man looked shocked to see her, but simply walked past her and into his room, closing the door behind him. Several minutes later he left the house again, this time wearing a hat which he had pulled down over his face and carrying a bag containing some clothes. He passed the two detectives standing in the street, but by the time Budlick had reached them the man had disappeared round the corner.

  Kurten moved to another apartment, aware that the only crime he was suspected of was that of rape, and doubting that they could link him with the other murders. However, the following morning he met his wife at the restaurant where she had been working late and confessed to her, ‘I am the Vampire of Düsseldorf.’ His wife panicked, saying that he would be sent to jail and that she would be left destitute. Kurten said he had a plan. He told her to go to the police with information about the murderer so that she could claim the large reward being offered.

  Frau Kurten told her story to the police on May 24, 1930, adding that she had arranged to meet her husband outside St. Rochus Church at 3.00 p.m. Although Kurten had planned one last grisly murder before he was finally locked away, his plans were foiled when he was surrounded by armed police as he walked to meet his wife. Kurten simply smiled in the face of the revolvers pointed at him and said, ‘There is no need to be afraid!’, holding his hands out in front of him ready to be handcuffed.

  the trial

  The trial of Peter Kurten opened on April 13, 1931, after intense questioning. He openly admitted to sixty-eight crimes and told the police that he had already spent twenty years of his life behind bars. The converted drill-hall at the Düsseldorf police headquarters was packed with people wanting to get their first glimpse of the ‘monster’. A special cage had been built inside the courtroom to prevent his escape, behind which was an array of gruesome exhibits. There were skulls from several of his victims, along with pieces of equipment he had used, articles of clothing and a spade he had dug one of the graves with. When Kurten was eventually led into his cage, a gasp went round the courtroom. Far from being an ugly, misshapen monster, with blood trickling from his mouth, the man in front of them was a handsome, quiet, ordinary-looking human being. He was not the image of the vampire they had imagined, in his immaculate suit, his neatly combed hair and the hint of eau de Cologne. The people sitting in the courtroom immediately jumped to the conclusion that they had arrested the wrong man. However, when Kurten started talking in his quiet, methodical voice about his life of perversion and bloodlust in such minute detail, even the hardened court officials found it hard to stomach.

  Far from being a deranged, crazed monster, the court doctor pronounced that Kurten was totally sane and aware of his actions at all times. Kurten explained to the court that his sadistic impulses were aroused by the violence that he had suffered at the hands of his father as a child. He said that these urges took over his whole body and that it had started to form a terrible pattern during his adult life.

  The jury took one and a half hours to reach a verdict – GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS – and Peter Kurten was sentenced to death nine times.

  On the night before his execution, Kurten was offered the traditional last meal and he asked for Wienerschnitzel, fried potatoes and a bottle of wine. He told the prison guard that he enjoyed the meal so much that he could eat it all over again.

  At 6.00 a.m. on July 2, 1931, Kurten was led to the guillotine with a priest on either side. As he faced the blade in the yard of Klingelputz Prison, the Attorney-General asked, ‘Have you any last wish to express?’

  Kurten replied without showing any emotion, ‘No’. He had already told his prison psychiatrist that the thought of the blood gushing from his severed neck would be the ‘pleasure to end all pleasures’.

  Peter Kurten has to go down in history as one of the most fiendish killers to walk the face
of this earth. Not only did he get extreme pleasure out of killing, torturing, maiming and sexually abusing his victims but he openly admitted that the sight of his victim’s blood was enough to bring on an orgasm. He even disclosed with a smile on his face that he had drunk the blood of his victims on several occasions as it pumped out of their bodies.

  Vampire Killer of Sacramento

  Richard Trenton Chase was an exceptionally disturbed individual right from his early childhood. In January 1978, Chase went on a four-day blood binge in California, which claimed the lives of six people. He earned himself the nickname of ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’ due to his lust for drinking the blood of his victims, which he claimed stopped his own blood from turning into powder. Although he was institutionalised on two occasions, his doctors decided Chase was not certifiable and he was released to wreak havoc on the citizens of Sacramento.

  Born on May 23, 1950, Chase was raised in a household full of anger and violence. He was frequently beaten by his father who was a strict disciplinarian, and by the time he was ten years old Chase was showing signs of abnormal behaviour. He loved to start fires, and had a morbid obsession with mutilating and killing small animals and drinking their blood. By the time he reached his late teens, Chase was not only a drug addict but a disturbed hypochondriac as well. He was always convinced there was something wrong with him, even going as far as visiting a hospital and claiming that someone had stolen his pulmonary artery. He spent two lengthy periods in a mental institution after a psychiatrist feared he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, but in 1978 his doctors felt the prescribed medication had his problem under control and he was released. He was allowed back into society and deemed no longer a danger to himself or anyone else – or so they believed!

  On his release Chase decided to stop taking his medication and his old problems promptly reared their ugly heads once again. He was now convinced that his blood was turning into powder and that his own mother was being paid by the Nazis to poison him. The voices in his head returned to haunt him and kept telling him to do something about the condition of his blood. Chase took to killing rabbits and other small animals. He would either smear their blood all over his body, or drink their blood which he mixed with portions of their internal organs.

  He soon moved from the neighbourhood dogs and cats to larger animals, and was once found in the back of his car smeared with the blood of a cow’s liver. Gradually his sense of boundaries deserted him and he moved on to human sacrifices.

  the first murder

  The police department north of Sacramento received a phone call on the night of Monday, January 23, 1978, to say that a terrible murder had been committed. David Wallin, a twenty-four-year-old truck driver had returned to his suburban home at about 6.00 p.m. to find their dog, a German shepherd, waiting in the hall, but his wife didn’t seem to be home. There was a rubbish bag lying on the floor with the contents spilled everywhere and what appeared to be some oil stains on the carpet. The stains led him all the way into the bedroom and when he looked inside the room David started to scream. He ran to a neighbour’s house and asked them to call the police.

  Wallin was so traumatised by what he saw that he was unable to talk to the authorities when they arrived at the house. When they saw the body, the police realised that they were dealing with some sort of monster killer, not just a regular murder as the result of a burglary. The body of twenty-two-year-old Terry Wallin was lying just inside the door on her back and the fact that she was three months pregnant made the crime even more abhorrent. Terry’s jumper had been pulled up over her breasts and her underwear was round her ankles. Her knees were apart and her legs were open as if she had been raped. Her left nipple had been cut off, her stomach had been cut open and her spleen and intestines had been removed. There was blood everywhere and it was later discovered that the killer had smeared Terry’s blood all over his face, licking it off his fingers. Near the body was an old yoghurt carton which the police believed the killer had used to drink his victim’s blood. But perhaps the most heinous part of his crime was the fact that he had stuffed animal faeces into her mouth.

  The police were horrified, mystified and alarmed because it was obvious that this person had a deranged mind and would most likely kill again. They tried to build up a profile of the killer, and their worst fears were confirmed when news of more grisly murders reached their offices on Thursday, January 26. At about 12.30 p.m. a neighbour had found three bodies at a house that was within a mile radius of the Wallin home.

  The victims were thirty-six-year-old Evelyn Miroth, her six-year-old son Jason and fifty-two-year-old Daniel Meredith, who was a friend of the family. Evelyn had been babysitting her twenty-month-old nephew when an intruder had broken into the house. Daniel Meredith lay in the hall in a pool of blood with a gunshot wound to his head. There was blood everywhere and the trail led into the bathroom, where the bath was full of bloody water. Evelyn was lying naked on her bed with her legs splayed open. Two bloodstained carving knives lay near the body, which the police assumed had been used to slice open her abdomen. As in the murder of Terry Wallin, the intestines had been pulled out and blood rings on the carpet suggested he had used some containers to collect his victim’s blood. On the far side of the bed, the police officers found the body of a young boy who had been shot twice in the head at close range.

  The police searched the house thoroughly but the body of the baby was not found. They felt from the amount of blood found in the playpen that he was probably not still alive. The intruder had left bloody footprints everywhere which resembled the shoe prints from the Wallin house.

  Meredith’s stolen red station wagon was found abandoned with the keys still inside not far from the murder scene. The police, using the new evidence, started a concentrated search within a half-mile radius of the abandoned station wagon, knocking on everyone’s doors to see if anyone had seen anything suspicious in the area. The police search uncovered a dog that had been shot and disembowelled close to where the station wagon had been abandoned and they felt their suspect probably lived quite close to the scene of the crime.

  Although two witnesses came forward to say they had seen a stranger driving the station wagon, they were unable to give any sort of description other than the fact that it was a white male. The most promising lead came from a woman in her late twenties who told the police she had bumped into a young man who used to attend the same high school as herself. She said what struck her as odd, was her old classmate’s appearance. She described him as being stick thin, dishevelled, wearing a blood-stained T-shirt and with some sort of yellow foodstuff caked around his mouth. He had extremely sunken eyes and when he tried to open her car door to speak to her, she said she simply drove away. When she heard that the police were looking for someone wearing bloodstained clothing, she contacted the authorities and told them the man’s name was Richard Trenton Chase.

  By Saturday, the police had found out that Chase lived just one block way from the abandoned station wagon. They placed officers to watch his apartment and waited for him to come out. They had tried phoning and knocking on the front door but had obtained no answer, so when he didn’t appear by late afternoon, the officers decided to try a ruse and lure him out. They knew they had to be careful because Chase owned a .22 revolver and he wouldn’t be afraid to use it. One policeman went to the manager of the apartment blocks to pretend to use the telephone, while the other one quite openly walked away from the front of Chase’s own apartment. Just minutes later, Chase had taken the bait and appeared at his front door carrying a box under his arm. He looked up and down the street and then made a run for his truck. As soon as he made a dash for it the police pounced and after a brief struggle managed to apprehend their suspect by grappling him to the ground. As they pushed him to the floor, a .22 revolver fell out of Chase’s gun holster and in his back pocket was Daniel Meredith’s wallet. The box that he had been carrying when he came out of the apartment, was full of bloody rags.

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sp; When they searched Chase’s truck and apartment, both were messy and littered with old newspapers, beer cans, plates with dried food on them, milk cartons and a large number of dirty rags.

  A locked toolbox contained a bloodstained kitchen knife and his rubber boots appeared to have spots of blood all over them. In the kitchen were three food blenders which contained body parts and blood, and on the table was a newspaper cutting of the first murder. There were dirty clothes in every room, many of which were covered with bloodstains. Inside the refrigerator were dishes containing human body parts, and the kitchen drawers contained several knives taken from the Wallin house. The police had so much evidence they were in no doubt that they had found their sadistic killer.

  Three months after Chase’s arrest, the body of baby David Ferreira was found in a churchyard.

  a life for a life

  The trial opened on January 2, 1979. Chase originally told the FBI that he had killed in an effort to preserve his own life, but when the trial started he entered pleas of not guilty to all six murders due to his insanity. The trial had to be moved to San José because of the intense hatred shown towards Chase by the Sacramento residents. The trial lasted for four months and despite his constant pleas that he did not know what he was doing, the jury came back with a guilty verdict on all counts.

  Chase was sentenced to death and incarcerated at San Quentin prison to await his turn in the electric chair. However, Chase managed to cheat the system, because on Boxing Day in 1980, his guard found him lying face down on his bunk. When they searched his cell they found a strange suicide note about taking some pills. Chase had been prescribed a daily dose of antidepressants which apparently he had been hoarding so that he could take his own life with an overdose.