On December 19th 1924, he was found guilty of the murder of twenty-seven boys between the ages of 12 and 18. He was beheaded the next day. Grans, who on occasion had urged him to kill simply because he fancied a particular victim’s clothes, was sentenced to life imprisonment, later reduced to twelve years.
Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible was born under a bad star. When his father, the Grand Duke of Muscovy, divorced his first wife in 1525 to marry Ivan’s mother, the patriarch of Jerusalem is said to have said:
‘If you do this evil thing, you shall have an evil son. Your nation shall become prey to terror and tears.’
Terror and tears it duly got. For even in his lifetime Ivan became known as, not ‘the Terrible’ – a poor translation – but ‘the Dread.’
By the time he was eight years old, Ivan was an orphan – his father dead of an ulcer, his mother poisoned; and from then on, he later claimed, he had ‘no human care from any quarter.’ He grew up into a violent teenager – his first political act was to have one of the leaders of the warring factions beneath him assassinated and thrown to the dogs. Thirty of his followers were then hanged. One account says that Ivan liked to throw animals down from the Kremlin walls just to see them die; and that in the evenings – though full of daytime piety – he rampaged through the streets of Moscow with a gang of friends, beating up anyone who got in his way.
In 1547, Ivan had himself crowned as Tsar – Caesar – of all Russia, and shortly afterwards married Anastasia, the 15-year-old daughter of an influential member of his nobles’ council. She seems to have had a restraining influence on him; until she died 13 years later, he was a benevolent, if tough, ruler. He instituted reforms, attacked corruption, gave his people wider representation and access to the courts and reined in the powers of provincial governors. He also, by raking back territory from the Tartars, the descendants of the Mongol Khans, turned Russia into an imperial power.
In 1560, though, Anastasia died. Ivan soon imprisoned or exiled his closest advisers and became increasingly violent and irrational. In 1564, he withdrew from the capital completely and announced that he had laid down the office of Tsar. A deputation of churchmen and nobles rode out to see him and begged him to change his mind. He agreed, but only on condition that from now on he be allowed to govern without interference, and would have a free hand in dealing with traitors.
Ivan the Terrible – a tough and vicious ruler
At this point he began a bizarre social experiment. He divided the country into two halves, one of which was to be governed traditionally, and the other of which was from now on to be his personal domain. In his own half he soon unleashed the dark riders of a secret-service and assassination squad, the oprichniki, who instituted a reign of terror, wiping out all opposition to Ivan, killing more or less at will. Whole families were extirpated. Even the head of the Orthodox Church in Moscow was brutally murdered, while Ivan spent his time outside the capital, living a lifestyle, in the words of one historian,
‘blended of monastic piety, drunken debauchery and bizarre cruelty.’
The climax of the terror came in 1570, when the citizens of Novgorod were accused of being ready to hand their city over to the Poles. Ivan immediately rode northward, completely destroying the countryside in every direction. Then he built a wooden wall around the city, and for five weeks engaged in indiscriminate slaughter. Children were tortured in front of their parents – and vice versa. Women were impaled on stakes or roasted on spits; men were used in spear-hunts or fried alive in giant skillets. Tens of thousands were killed, and when Ivan was done, he rode back to Moscow for more execution-by-torture, this time of many of his advisers, in Red Square. So awesome did his reputation become that later when he invaded Livonia, one town garrison blew itself up rather than fall into his hands. He tortured to death all those who survived.
In 1572, Ivan abandoned the division of this kingdom to beat off a Tartar invasion that threatened Moscow. By now, in any case, all opposition to him had been emasculated. From now on, as in his youth, he see-sawed between monkish piety and unbridled carnality and rage. In 1581, after finding his son and heir Ivan’s pregnant wife not properly dressed, he threw her to the ground and kicked her. Then he lashed out at Ivan and fractured his skull. Both died within a few days.
By the time of Ivan’s own death, after seven marriages and innumerable mistresses, he was raddled with disease. As a British trader put it:
‘The emperor began grievously to swell in his cods [genitals], with which he had most horribly offended above fifty years, boasting of a thousand virgins he had deflowered and thousands of children of his begetting destroyed.’
In March 1584, acting in character, he called together sixty astrologers and told them to predict the day of his death, adding that if they got it wrong, they’d be burned alive. They said March 18th – and luckily for them he died one day before, before they could be proved wrong.
Bela Kiss
Bela Kiss was forty years old when he moved with his young bride Maria to the Hungarian village of Czinkota in 1913. A plumber by trade, but obviously well-to-do, he bought a large house with an adjoining workshop and settled down to a quiet life, growing roses and collecting stamps. From time to time he would drive into Budapest on business, but otherwise his was an uneventful life. No one in the village ever thought to tell him that whenever he was away his wife was often seen out with a young artist called Paul Bihari.
Nor did anybody particularly remark on the fact that when he returned from the big city he started bringing oil drums back with him. Everyone, after all, knew that war was coming, and that fuel was likely to be scarce. When Kiss’s wife and the artist Bihari ended up disappearing from Czinkota, the villagers took it for granted that they’d eloped. Why, Kiss even had a letter from his wife that said as much.
Besides, poor man, he was clearly distraught at what had happened. He withdrew from village life – and it only became clear much later what the oil drums, which he continued from time to time quietly to bring back from Budapest, along with the occasional woman overnight guest, were really for…
After war came in August 1914, the reclusive Kiss was conscripted. While he served in the army, his house remained empty, its taxes unpaid; and then, in May 1916, news arrived that he’d been killed in action. His house was sold at auction for the unpaid taxes, and bought by a local blacksmith, who found seven oil-drums behind sheets of corrugated iron in the workshop. One day he opened one of them. It was full of alcohol – as were the rest of the drums. But in each one floated the body of a naked woman. When police subsequently searched the garden, they found the pickled bodies of another fifteen women, aged between 25 and 50, and that of a single young man. All of them had been garrotted.
It wasn’t long before police in Budapest picked up Kiss’s trail. He’d been placing advertisements in a newspaper, giving a post-office box number and claiming to be a widower anxious to meet a mature spinster or widow, with marriage in mind. Both the name and the address he’d given the newspaper proved false. But one of the payments he’d made to it had been by postal order, and when the signature on it was published in the press, a woman came forward and said it was that of her lover, Bela Kiss – and she produced a postcard sent from the front to prove it. When a photograph of Kiss was found and published in its turn, he was recognized as a frequent – and sexually voracious – visitor to Budapest’s red-light district. He’d apparently been using the savings he’d persuaded his victims to withdraw – in advance of their marriage – to feed his constant need for sex.
Kiss was, of course, dead. So the case was closed. But then a friend of one of his victims swore she’d seen him one day in 1919 crossing Budapest’s Margaret Bridge. Five years later a former French legionnaire told French police of a Hungarian fellow-soldier, with the same name as that used in Kiss’s ads, who’d boasted of his skill at garrotting. In 1932, Kiss was again recognized, this time in Times Square in New York. Had he swapped his identity
with a dead man at the front and got away with it?
Ilse Koch
In 1950, when the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ Ilse Koch was finally tried for mass-murder in a German court, she protested that she had no knowledge at all of what had gone on in the concentration-camp outside Weimar. Despite the evidence of dozens of ex-inmates, she insisted:
‘I was merely a housewife. I was busy raising my children. I never saw anything that was against humanity!’
As hundreds of people gathered outside the court shouted ‘Kill her! Kill her!’ she was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Ilse Koch was born in Dresden, and by the age of 17 she was a voluptuous blue-eyed blonde: the very model of Aryan womanhood – and every potential storm-trooper’s wet dream. Enrolling in the Nazi Youth Party, she went to work in a bookshop that sold party literature and under-the-counter pornography and she was soon having a string of affairs with SS men. Then, though, she came to the attention of SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, who selected her as the perfect mate for his then top aide, the brutish Karl Koch. Shortly after the wedding, when Koch was appointed commander of Buchenwald, she was installed in a villa near the camp, given two children, and then more or less forgotten by her husband, who was too busy staging multiple sex-orgies in Weimar to care.
Isle Koch, otherwise known as the Bitch of Buchenwald
Perhaps in revenge, Ilse began mounting orgies of her own, taking five or six of her husband’s officers into her bed at a time. She was perverse, sexually insatiable – and it wasn’t long after the beginning of the war that she started turning her attention to the mostly Jewish prisoners at the camp.
She first sunbathed nude outside the wire to tantalize them; then started greeting their trucks and transport trains semi-naked, fondling her breasts and shouting obscenties. If any of the incoming prisoners looked up at her, they were beaten senseless; on one occasion, about which she filled out a report, two were clubbed to death and one had his face ground into the earth until he suffocated. All were executed, she wrote blithely, for ogling her.
Koch committed suicide in prison in 1967
She encouraged the guards to use the prisoners for target practice – and often took part herself. She scouted out good-looking soldiers seconded to the camp and offered them mass-orgies with her. Then, finally – perhaps jaded with mere sex – she started to collect trophies…
One day, by chance, she saw two tattooed prisoners working without their shirts. She ordered them to be killed immediately and their skins prepared and brought to her. She soon became obsessed with the possibilities of human skin, particularly if tattooed. She had lampshades made from the skin of selected prisoners for her living room, even a pair of gloves. Not content with this, she also started to experiment with prisoners’ severed heads, having them shrunk down by the dozen to grapefruit size to decorate her dining-room.
She was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg after the war by an American military court, and sentenced to life in prison, but two years later she was released, on the grounds that a crime by one German against others could not properly be considered a war crime. By the time she appeared in a German court in Augsburg, she was a bloated, raddled figure who blamed everything on her husband – who had conveniently been executed by the Nazis for embezzlement years before. She staged an epileptic fit in court, and when she heard its final judgment in her prison cell, she merely laughed. She hanged herself in Aichach Prison in 1967.
Joachim Kroll
It wasn’t until July 1959 that German police began to recognize the signature of the man they came to call ‘the Ruhr Hunter’, Joachim Kroll. For it was only then that he began cutting strips of flesh from his victims’ bodies to take them home and cook them – and sometimes he couldn’t be bothered to do any butchery at all if they were old and tough. When he was finally caught in 1976, he confessed to a total of fourteen murders over a twenty-two-year period. But there could well have been many more.
For Kroll, though entirely cooperative, was a simpleton with not much of a memory – and what little he had, had to be jogged. He did, though, finally exonerate two men who’d been arrested for his murders and then released for lack of evidence. Of these two, one had been divorced by his wife and had then committed suicide; the other had been ostracized by his neighbours for six long years.
He’d started, Kroll told police, in 1955 at the age of 22. Too self-conscious and nervous for a real relationship – and dissatisfied with the rubber dolls he mock-strangled and masturbated over at home – he’d beaten unconscious, then raped and killed a nineteen-year-old girl in a barn near the village of Walstedde. Four years later, in a different part of the Ruhr, he struck again in exactly the same way, after tracking the movements of another young girl for some days.
A month later, in July 1959, he added the special signature which the police came to recognize after they found the body of a sixteen-year-old with steaks cut from her thighs and buttocks. The signature appeared again on the bodies of two more young girls within six weeks of each other in 1962, and then on a four-year-old in 1966. Kroll went on to rape and kill at least four more women and girls in the next ten years, but it wasn’t until 1976, when a four-year-old disappeared from a playground in Duisberg, that his trademark reappeared in particularly grisly fashion.
The young girl had been seen wandering away from the playground with a mild-looking man she called ‘uncle’. The police quickly started making a door-to-door enquiry, and were told something odd by a tenant in a nearby apartment building. He said he’d just been told by the janitor, Joachim Kroll, not to use one of the building’s lavatories because it was stopped up. ‘What with?’ he’d asked; and Kroll had answered, ‘Guts…’
A plumber was called, and soon found that Kroll had been exactly right: the lavatory had indeed been blocked by the intestines and lungs of a small child. When the police searched Kroll’s apartment, they found human flesh wrapped in bags in the freezer, and on the stove, among the carrots and potatoes of a stew, the child’s hand.
Kroll was a model prisoner. He seemed to think he’d be able to go home after he’d had an operation of some kind. So he readily confessed to all the murders he could remember – and he also told the police about two occasions on which he might have been caught. As for the human flesh, he hadn’t taken it, he said, for any particularly sinister reason. He just thought he’d save money on meat…
Peter Kürten
Peter Kürten, the so-called ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’, was an indiscriminate murderer: he attacked and killed everything – men, women, children, animals – that came his way. Yet he was described by a psychiatrist at his trial in 1930 – where, from behind the bars of a specially-built cage, he spelled out the details of his crimes in meticulous detail – as a clever, even rather a nice man.
That he should have been so is astonishing. For Kürten’s father had been a drunken, pathological sadist, who was sent to prison for repeatedly raping his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter and he himself had committed his first murders – the drowning of two playmates – at the age of nine. At about the same time, he later said, he was inducted by the local dog-catcher into the delights of torturing animals – he sometimes decapitated swans to drink their blood.
By the age of 16, he was a petty young hoodlum and occasional arsonist living in a ménage-à-trois with a masochistic older woman and her teenage daughter. He was arrested and sent to prison twice – first for theft and fraud, and then for deserting from the army the day after he’d been called up. In between these two sentences, though, while making his living as a burglar in Cologne-Mullheim, he committed his first murder as an adult, when he came across a ten-year-old girl in a room over an inn, throttled her and cut her throat with a pocket-knife.
‘I heard the blood spurt and drip beside the bed,’
– he said calmly at his trial seventeen years later.
His second sentence, for desertion, kept Kürten out of circulation, perhaps luckily, for eight
years; and in 1921, when he came out, he seemed on the face of it a changed man. He got married in Altenburg, took a job in a factory and became known in the community as a quiet, well-dressed and charming man, active in trade union politics. Then, though, in 1925, Kürten and his wife moved to Düsseldorf – and the opportunistic attacks on complete strangers began.
‘The Vampire’, as he soon became known, attacked people with either scissors or knives, in broad daylight, any time – as if inflamed by the idea and sight of blood. By 1929, he had struck forty-six times and four of his victims had died; and now, far from stopping, he was beginning to step up the rate and violence of his attacks. On the evening of August 23rd of that year, he strangled and cut the throats of two young sisters on their way back from a fair; twelve hours later, after offering to take a servant-girl to another fair, he attacked and stabbed her as they walked through woods nearby. For a while there was a lull, but then he attacked three people, a man and two women, within a single half-hour; later he bludgeoned a pair of serving women to death. Finally, on November 27th, he killed a five-year-old girl, slashing her body thirty-six times.
Peter Kürten was named the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’
The city of Düsseldorf was by now in a state of panic. But again, for a while, nothing more was heard from ‘The Vampire.’ Then, on May 14th 1930, Maria Budlick, a young girl looking for work in the city, arrived from Cologne and was picked up at the station by a man who offered to show her the way to a women’s hostel. When he tried to take her into a nearby park, though, she refused on the grounds that she didn’t know who he was – he might even be ‘The Vampire.’ While they were arguing, a second man stepped up and asked her if she was all right. This second man was charm itself, Maria later said, and, when the first man left, he offered her something to eat before taking her to the hostel.
100 Most Infamous Criminals Page 3