Sickest Of The Sick: Peter Kurten, A Cannibal, Sexual Sadist, And Necrophiliac

Serving as the inspiration behind Fritz Lang's classic film M, Peter Kürten remains one of the most infamous serial killers in European history. Nicknamed the "Vampire of Düsseldorf," Kürten terrorized Germany between 1913 and 1929, claiming the lives of at least nine in a series of bloody knifings and hammer attacks.   

Kürten holds a prominent position among German serial killers, as he was a sadist without bounds whose sensational exploits instilled fear in an entire nation. Sometimes referred to as the "Düsseldorf Monster," Kürten was a child killer who also practiced necrophilia, cannibalism, and bestiality - a real-life bogeyman capable of unfathomable evil.

Peter Kürten was born in Köln-Mullheim, a suburb of Cologne, Germany, on May 26, 1883. He was the eldest of a staggering 13 children, and his parents struggled to provide for their massive brood, which was confined to a small, one-room apartment. 

Growing up in extreme poverty, Peter - and the rest of his family - also had to endure an abusive and alcoholic father. Coming home after an evening of drinking, the Kürtens' patriarch would often rape his wife in plain view of his children. His father also served three years in prison for committing crimes of incest on Peter's 13-year-old sister.

Traumatic childhoods are often a unifying trait among serial killers, and Peter Kürten's experience as a youth - particularly as a witness to extreme sexual violence - certainly puts him that group. 

It's typical for a serial killer to ramp up to the act of murder by committing a series of escalating crimes, and Peter Kürten certainly accumulated an impressive criminal resume on his road to killing. With convictions for arson, burglary, sexual assault, and even desertion during WWI, Kürten did almost 30 prison bids before his final arrest. He would later blame the conditions in the German penal system for fostering his sadistic tendencies, particularly his time spent in solitary confinement. It was in those isolated cells that Kürten began experiencing strong, murderous fantasies - visions that he enjoyed so much he committed further crimes while in prison just to be sent to solitary. 

Suffering from a chaotic and unstable life at home, at the age of nine, Kürten formed a strange and unhealthy bond with a neighbor. The man - who happened to be a dog-catcher - would introduce Kürten to the practice of bestiality, another dark turn on his path to mass murder.

As he grew into his late teens and early twenties, Kürten expanded his bestiality to farm animals, including cattle, goats, and sheep. It was during this experimentation that he discovered how much pleasure he derived from stabbing a creature to death during intercourse, a practice he would carry on as he graduated to violating humans. 

One does not acquire a nickname like "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" for committing run-of-the-mill homicides. Peter Kürten earned that charming title from the German press after a startling discovery was made at his various crime scenes. It seemed that Kürten suffered from a particularly unusual paraphilia - he received sexual pleasure from drinking the blood of victims. His usual modus operandi was to stab his victims, then put his mouth on their open wounds and drink directly from their bloodstream. 

Peter Kürten's reign of terror came to a merciful halt in 1930, when he was finally arrested. In an uncharacteristic act of kindness to his wife, he had colluded with her to turn himself in to authorities in hopes that she would recover the reward, leaving her with some financial security. Though he confessed to dozens of crimes, he was only convicted of nine murders. Through his vivid courtroom accounts, and later descriptions to psychiatrist Karl Berg, the his actual body count is thought to be around 68.

Before escalating to murdering his victims directly, Kürten set a series of fires. He told police he set the fires because he found them sexually stimulating, and also because he hoped they might burn sleeping homeless men alive, an idea he found sexually thrilling. He said, "When my desire for injuring people awoke, the love of setting fire to things awoke as well."

Later profilers would say that Kürten's desire to start fires - and later, to murder - were manifestations of his desire for control after his unstable and chaotic childhood.

As he began getting more press for heinous crimes, Peter Kürten reveled in his newfound celebrity. Feeding the rampant hysteria, Kürten reached out to a local newspaper on November 9, 1929, and provided a map to the body of his most recent victim. The map proved to be accurate, and led authorities to the body of five-year-old Gertrude Albermann, who had been stabbed to death placed under a pile of rubble. It's believed that she was killed two days before Kürten had sent his letter.

It's not uncommon for serial killers - especially necrophiles - to return to the scenes of their crimes. Famous murderers like Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgeway were both known to re-visit the corpses of their victims. Peter Kürten also engaged in this practice, most notably after he had murdered 10-year-old Christine Klein.

Kürten had killed the young girl in her home while her parents were working downstairs in the pub. When he returned to the scene the next day, he looked on in delight as horror had swept the community. Klein's uncle would later become a suspect in the murder and face trial, a proceeding which Kürten followed quite closely.

When Peter Kürten advanced to regularly committing murder, he did so with an unflinching brutality. His victims, more often than not, were young girls who were subjected to unthinkable horrors in their final moments. He often raped his victims while simultaneously stabbing them - sometimes upwards of 25 times - climaxing at the perceived moment of their death. 

His homicidal fantasies were strong and sadistic and gave him unique sexual pleasure. After his conviction, he recalled an instance to his psychologist where he had witnessed a man fall under a train. Feigning an effort to help the injured and dying man, he simply wanted to get close to the sight of blood, which caused him to reflexively climax on the spot.

Peter Kürten, by his own accounts, got an early start on his murderous career. After he was apprehended in 1930, he described to a court-appointed psychologist that at the age of just nine years old, he killed two of his classmates. In his version of the events, he pushed one boy into a nearby river, and when another jumped into help him, Kürten held the second boy under the water, resulting in the drowning death of both children. He never faced any consequences for this particular crime, which at the time was deemed to be a tragic accident.