The Vampire of Düsseldorf: how a letter sent to the wrong address ended the hunt for Peter Kürten
In 1929, people in Düsseldorf stopped letting their daughters walk home alone after dark.
Düsseldorf is a large industrial city on the river Rhine in western Germany, about 40 km north of Cologne. That year, someone in the city was attacking strangers. Women walking home at night. Little girls. A man in the street.
Some of the victims were stabbed with a pair of scissors. Some were strangled. Later in the year, some were struck on the head with a hammer. A number of them survived. 8 of them did not.
The newspapers gave the unknown attacker a name: the Vampire of Düsseldorf.
This is the story of that case, which ended with the arrest of a man named Peter Kürten. Here it is in short, so that nothing later is confusing. Between February and November 1929, 8 people were murdered in Düsseldorf, and many more were attacked and survived. The police searched for more than a year. They received thousands of tips, compiled a list of hundreds of thousands of names, and still did not find the killer. In May 1930, a young woman who had been attacked and let go wrote a letter to a friend. The letter reached the police by accident. It led them to the door of a quiet married man. He confessed, was tried in April 1931, and was executed in July 1931.
The open question in 1929 was simple: who was doing this? The question this article follows is a different one: how could a man who killed again and again, in one city, walk past the police for 15 months?
Who he was
Peter Kürten was born on 26 May 1883 in Mülheim am Rhein, a town that is today part of Cologne. He was the oldest of 13 children. 2 of them died young.
The family was very poor. According to the case histories, both parents drank, and the father beat his wife and children. In 1897 the father was sent to prison for 18 months for raping his eldest daughter, who was 13. The mother obtained a separation, remarried and moved to Düsseldorf.
The boy left school in 1897 and became an apprentice in a foundry. About 2 years later he stole money and ran away. From then on, his life was a long chain of petty crime. Between 1899 and his final arrest, he was sent to prison 17 separate times.
In 1921 he was released from a military prison and moved to the town of Altenburg in eastern Germany. There he met the woman who would become his wife. They married about 2 years later. He held regular jobs and even became an official in a trade union. In 1925 the couple moved to Düsseldorf.
To the people around him, he was an ordinary married man in his 40s, with a job. Nobody knew that in 1913, during a burglary, he had already killed a child.
The first murder, 16 years earlier
On 25 May 1913, Kürten broke into a tavern in Mülheim to steal. In a room above the bar he found the innkeeper's daughter asleep. Her name was Christine Klein. She was 9 years old.
He strangled her and cut her throat, and left.
The murder of Christine Klein was never solved at the time. **For 17 years, nobody knew who had killed her.** The police learned the answer only in 1930, when Kürten confessed to it himself.
In 1930 he also claimed that as a child, in 1893, he had drowned 2 boys. That claim was never proven, and the court did not include it in the verdict.
The killings begin: February 1929
The series that terrified Düsseldorf began in February 1929, in Flingern, a working-class district in the east of the city.
On 3 February 1929, a woman named Apollonia Kühn was attacked in the street and stabbed 24 times with a pair of scissors. She survived.
A few days later, a girl named Rosa Ohliger was murdered. She was 9 years old. The sources give the date as 8 or 9 February. She was strangled and stabbed with scissors, and her body was dragged under a hedge. The killer came back later and tried to burn the body with kerosene. She was found under the hedge the next day.
On 13 February, a mechanic named Rudolf Scheer was stabbed about 20 times and left to die in the same part of the city. Most sources give his age as 45. One gives it as 54.
Kürten later told the psychiatrist who examined him that after the Scheer murder he went back to the scene, while the police were working there. He spoke to a detective and pretended he had only heard about it.
A man confesses, and the police stop looking
Here the investigation made its first serious mistake.
In 1929, a young man who was mentally ill confessed to 3 of the murders and to 2 other crimes. The police took the confession seriously.
The confession was false. According to the German case literature, it delayed the investigation, and it pointed the detectives at the wrong man while the real killer was still free.
Meanwhile, between March and July 1929, 4 more women were attacked by a man who tried to strangle them. All of them were later found to be Kürten's victims.
August 1929: the summer of terror
In August 1929 the attacks returned, faster and more openly than before.
On 8 August, Kürten met a young servant named Maria Hahn. They arranged to meet again on Sunday 11 August, for an outing to the Neandertal valley, just east of the city.
They spent several hours together. In the evening he led her into a meadow. There he raped her, strangled her and stabbed her many times. He buried her body in a field.
Nobody saw it. Nobody reported a body. For the next 3 months, Maria Hahn was simply a missing person.
10 days later, on the night of 21 August, 3 people were stabbed in separate attacks in the street: an 18-year-old girl, a 30-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman. All 3 survived.
The fair at Flehe
On Saturday 24 August 1929, the district of Flehe, in the south of the city, held its annual fair.
That evening, 2 foster sisters were walking home from the fair across the fields. The younger was Gertrud Hamacher, 5 years old. The older was Luise Lenzen. The sources give her age as 13 or 14.
A man stopped them. He gave the older girl money and asked her to go back and buy him cigarettes.
While she was gone, he strangled the 5-year-old and cut her throat. He left her body in a bean field.
When Luise came back with the cigarettes, he attacked her too. He strangled her and stabbed her. Her footprints were later found near her body. She had tried to run.
The next morning, both bodies were found in the fields.
The day after that, on 25 August, a 27-year-old housemaid named Gertrud Schulte was stabbed many times. She survived. She would become one of the most important witnesses in the case, because she had seen his face.
The hammer
From the end of September, the weapon changed.
On the night of 29 to 30 September 1929, a 31-year-old servant named Ida Reuter was struck on the head with a hammer, raped and killed. On 11 October, a 22-year-old servant named Elisabeth Dörrier was attacked the same way on a path beside the Düssel, the small river that gives the city its name. She was found the next morning in a coma and died in hospital.
On 25 October, 2 more women were struck with a hammer. Both survived.
To the police, this looked confusing. Scissors, a knife, bare hands, a hammer. Children, women, a man. Some victims robbed of nothing, some raped. Many detectives believed that Düsseldorf might have more than one attacker.
The letters
Then the killer started writing.
In the autumn of 1929, letters arrived claiming to be from the murderer. One of them, dated 14 October, confessed to killing Maria Hahn and said she was buried "at the edge of the woods".
On 7 November, a 5-year-old girl named Gertrud Albermann disappeared in Flingern. She had been strangled and stabbed many times. She was the last person Kürten killed.
Days later, a newspaper in the city received a hand-drawn map. It showed where the body of Gertrud Albermann lay, among the allotment gardens. It also showed a second place: the grave of Maria Hahn.
Gertrud Albermann was found where the map said.
On 15 November 1929, searchers dug at the second place on the map and found the remains of Maria Hahn. Until that day, nobody had known for certain that she was dead.
A handwriting expert compared the letters and said that one person had written all of them.
The largest manhunt of its time
By now Düsseldorf was in a state of fear. Parents kept children indoors. The case was in newspapers across Germany and abroad.
The Düsseldorf police called in help from Berlin. A senior detective, the head of the Berlin police murder squad, came to the city. He studied the attacks and concluded that most or all of them were the work of one man, despite the different weapons.
This detective is also credited with coining the German word "Serienmörder", serial killer, in connection with this case.
The numbers of the hunt were enormous for the time. By the end of 1929 the police had received more than 13,000 letters from the public. More than 9,000 people were questioned. Investigators followed up 2,650 separate leads. A list of possible suspects grew to about 900,000 names.
According to the German case literature, at least 3 of the tips that came in pointed at Peter Kürten. None of them was followed through to the end.
The sources do not explain why. What is known is that the tips came in by the thousands, and that the false confession had already sent the detectives in another direction. The man himself was married, had a job, and was known to the police only as a habitual petty criminal.
The winter and spring of 1930
After November 1929, there were no more murders.
The attacks did not stop. Between February and May 1930, Kürten struck again and again: hammer blows, attempts at strangling, assaults on young women he met in the street. According to the records, about 10 women were hurt in this period, and all of them survived.
The police still had no name.
The woman from Cologne
On 14 May 1930, a 20-year-old woman arrived at the main railway station in Düsseldorf. Her name appears in the sources in 2 forms: Maria Budlick in English accounts, Maria Butlies in German ones. She had come from Cologne to look for work, and she had nowhere to stay.
At the station, a man started talking to her and offered to show her to a hostel. He led her through a quiet park. They argued.
A second man approached and asked whether she was being bothered. When she nodded, the first man walked away.
The second man was Peter Kürten.
He took her to his flat and gave her food and something to drink. She told him plainly that she was not interested in anything more. He said that was fine, and offered to take her to a place where she could sleep.
Instead, he led her into the Grafenberg woods, on the edge of the city. There he grabbed her by the throat and raped her.
Then, for reasons only he knew, he let go.
He asked her whether she remembered where he lived. She said no. That was a lie, and she said later that she believed it saved her life.
He let her go.
The letter that went to the wrong address
She did not go to the police. Instead, she wrote a letter to a friend, describing what had happened.
She got the address wrong.
The letter could not be delivered. On 19 May 1930, a post office clerk opened it to find the sender, read what was inside, and passed it to the police.
The detective from Berlin read the letter himself and went to find the young woman.
She told him everything. She did not know the man's name, but she remembered the street. On 21 May she led the detectives through the city and stopped at a building on Mettmanner Straße. The landlady told them that the tenant of the room she described was Peter Kürten.
The last 3 days
Kürten saw them. He was in the building when the young woman and the detectives came up the stairs, and he walked out.
He did not go home that night.
He told his wife that he had raped a young woman and that he would probably be sent to prison again. He stayed away for 2 days.
On 23 May 1930 he came back, and told his wife something else. He told her that he was the Vampire of Düsseldorf.
According to the accounts, he told her to go to the police and claim the reward.
The next day she went to the police. She told them that her husband would be meeting her outside the church of St. Rochus in Düsseldorf.
On the afternoon of 24 May 1930, police officers arrested him at the church at gunpoint.
Gertrud Schulte, the woman who survived the stabbing in August, and the young woman from Cologne both identified him.
The confession
Kürten confessed on the day of his arrest. Over the following weeks he described 68 crimes, among them 9 murders and 31 attempted murders, going back to 1913.
He gave dates, places and details that only the killer could know, such as the maps he had sent and where he had buried Maria Hahn.
In this way the murder of Christine Klein in Mülheim, 17 years earlier, was finally solved.
Not everything he said was true. He confessed to 3 murders and 4 attempted murders near Altenburg, where he had lived in the early 1920s. Those claims were checked and disproven.
In June 1930 he withdrew his confession to the murders. In August 1930 he confirmed it again.
The psychiatrist who examined him most closely was a professor of forensic medicine named Karl Berg. Berg interviewed him for many hours, in prison and during the trial. Kürten told him that the sight of blood excited him, and that violence and sexual pleasure were bound together for him. He also said he was taking revenge on a society that had treated him badly since childhood. Berg later wrote a book about the case.
It was Kürten's own words to Berg about blood that gave the case the name it still carries.
The trial
The trial opened in Düsseldorf on 13 April 1931. He was charged with 9 murders and 7 attempted murders.
His lawyer entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. Kürten later changed his plea to guilty.
The central legal question was not whether he did it. He had confessed. The question was whether he was legally responsible. 5 doctors and psychiatrists testified that he was sane under the law. Karl Berg told the court that, in his assessment, the motive was 90 percent sadism and 10 percent revenge.
On 22 April 1931, after less than 2 hours of deliberation, the court found him guilty on all 9 counts of murder and all 7 counts of attempted murder. He was given 9 death sentences, plus 15 years of penal servitude for the attempted murders.
He did not appeal. A request for clemency was rejected by the Prussian government at the end of June 1931.
At 6:00 in the morning of 2 July 1931, Peter Kürten was executed by guillotine in the courtyard of the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne. He was 48 years old.
Afterward
The case left 2 marks that last to this day.
The first is a film. In May 1931, a few weeks after the verdict, the German director Fritz Lang released the film "M" ("M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder", "M - A City Searches for a Murderer"). It tells the story of a fictional child killer in a German city who is hunted by both the police and the criminal underworld. The Düsseldorf case is one of several real cases that inspired it.
The second is stranger. After the execution, Kürten's head was cut in half and preserved for scientific study. The doctors found nothing abnormal in his brain. After the Second World War the head was taken to the United States. Today it is displayed in a museum of curiosities in Wisconsin.
A few questions remain open, and they are small ones. The exact number of people he attacked is not known, because some victims never reported it and some of his claims were false. The sources also disagree on several dates and ages, which is why this article gives more than one where they differ.
But the main question of 1929 is closed. The Vampire of Düsseldorf was found, not by the 900,000 names on the list, but by a letter that went to the wrong address.