THE DüSSELDORF VAMPIRE AND THE EARLIEST DAYS OF OFFENDER PROFILING

Murder; offender profiling; police investigation; arson; torture

Oct 16, 2024

The charge was nine murders and seven attempted murders. As if that weren’t enough in itself, Peter Kürten later confessed to 68 further crimes. Some of his victims would never be identified, he claimed, because no one would even notice they were missing. There were arson attacks, too, nobody knows how many, and animal killings.

Didn’t his conscience trouble him? ’I have none,’ Kürten said. ‘Never have I felt any misgiving in my soul; never did I think to myself that what I did was bad, even though human society condemns it […] I had no pity for my victims’.[i]

Here is another quote: ‘Kürten is a riddle to me. I cannot solve it […] Peter killed men, women, children, and animals; killed anything he found’. Who is speaking? Kürten’s own lawyer, no less. Not even the man who was paid to defend him could conceive of anything profitable to say. No wonder psychologists were fascinated with the case: no wonder it made for what one writer calls ‘a watershed in the investigation of serial killers’.[ii]

Kürten was the subject of not just one but two psychological profiles. They were among the earliest ever drawn up – so early that the term hadn’t even been invented yet. One was created by a policeman during the course of the investigation; the other, more extensive, was the work of the psychiatrist, Karl Berg, who interviewed Kürten after his arrest.

It’s not easy to give an outline of the crimes (and not only because most of the literature is in German). Much of his career was so lurid and disturbing the merely by recounting it, one leaves oneself open to accusations of being spectacular for the sake of it. But let’s have a go.

Our subject was born in Cologne-Millheim,1883, the third of thirteen children. If a psychologist had to design a criminogenic background, they couldn’t do much better than Kürten’s. The drunkard father beat his children regularly, raped their mother while they watched, and was finally sentenced to hard labour for attempted incest with one of his own daughters. Modern serial killers, too, often seem to have lost a father figure at an impressionable age (just check almost any published serial-killer biography).

Kürten had apparently committed his first murders before the age of ten. So, at least, he claimed (serial killers, it may not surprise you to learn, have never been renowned for their honesty). One boy fell off a raft; another jumped into the river to save him; Kürten held the second underwater and watched both drown. He took a job with a dog-catcher and killed one of the dogs himself. He was said to have tortured others. Soon, with the encouragement of a family lodger, he was torturing and raping other animals too, most often sheep. Sometimes he stabbed them while he was in the act. As if this weren’t enough, he took to arson, setting fire to houses for the pleasure he derived from the flames and his victims’ screams. If this sounds bad, you should read the source material. I am making an honest attempt not to be lurid.

None of these hideous early events would surprise a psychological profiler. Indeed, Kürten’s upbringing and childhood were almost exactly the kind they might anticipate.

Profilers speak of the ‘Macdonald triad’ – sometimes called the ‘homicidal triad’. It consists of bed-wetting after the age of five; animal-torture; and fire-setting. Two out of three is said to indicate predatory and homicidal behaviour later in life. That, at any rate, is the idea. Research by the FBI’s psychological profilers seemed to confirm that the triad was at least somewhat useful. It remains a bit controversial, though, since some psychologists have failed to find the Macdonald triad useful at all.[iii] Be that as it may, Kürten evidently fits a pattern. That, as you’ll see, becomes a pattern in itself.

Kürten’s sexual experiences with human beings began at the relatively early age of 14. He assaulted a girl in the woods near Düsseldorf and tried to strangle her. True to type, young Kürten was a prolific criminal, if not a very successful one. He spent much of his adolescence passing in and out of prison. During one of his intermittent periods of freedom, he took up with an older woman who introduced him to sado-masochistic sex.

In 1913, Kürten’s career as a serial killer began. He broke into a house intending to rob it, but he found a ten year old girl asleep. He throttled her and slit her throat with a knife. According to some reports, he then drank the girl’s blood. Hence his nickname. Reports differ on this topic. Some have Kürten drinking blood from all his victims and getting some kind of erotic charge from it. Others, perhaps more delicate, don’t mention it.

The next day, Kürten returned to the area and sat in a café where he could enjoy the excitement and horror that his crime had caused. He had often done the same thing at the sites of the fires he’d set. ‘Kürten,’ writes the psychoanalyst, Theodor Reik, ‘always listened attentively to conversations about the murders [and] followed the investigations with feverish interest’.[iv]

This kind of behaviour is not uncommon among serial killers. There is truth in the cliché that criminals return to the scene of the crime. That is precisely how some serial killers are caught. The notorious Arthur Shawcross, for instance, was caught by police who literally waited for him at a body ‘dump site’.

It’s true, at least, of so-called ‘organised’ killers, who tend to be moderately intelligent and socially and sexually competent. Their crime-scenes reveal that they were able to plan their murders beforehand, rather than simply taking those victims of opportunity who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In most respects, Kürten fits this profile very well.

Organised serial killers, so to speak, because they are often intelligent and reflective, get ‘better’ at their crimes. In other words, they learn how how to get away with them. For that reason, police officers are routinely advised to look most closely at the clues they may leave behind in the course of their earliest murders, while they are still novices and still making mistakes. The fist and second murder sites are likely to contain the most clues. There will probably be fewer as the series goes on. Kürten, for instance, dropped a handkerchief at the site of his first murder. It was embroidered with the initials PK. That should have been a hefty clue for the police, you’d think. Sadly, it led them to the girl’s father, whose name was Peter Klein.

A few months passed before Kürten took his second victim. He strangled her to death during sex. Perhaps this might have been the start of a whole series, but the First World War interrupted it. Kürten deserted from the army, was arrested, and spent eight more years in prison. He wasn’t free until 1921.

Organised killers are often in relationships, even at the time of their murders. Kürten was married in 1923. Frau Kürten, a one-time prostitute, had herself recently spent four years in prison for murder. Unpromising beginnings, perhaps, but the Kürtens managed to make themselves outwardly respectable. Kürten himself managed to find a steady job and even became an active trades unionist. Unknown to his neighbours, though, he had returned to petty crime, arson, and assault.

The first of Kürten’s second – prolonged - series of murders occurred in 1929. It was as if he’d been building up to it. Again, this is a phenomenon we see among modern-day serial killers. Murder is no trivial act even for the most cold-blooded criminal. Killers seem to have to progress through other, less serious, crimes, many of them enacted in fantasy long before they desecrate the real world. Ed Kemper, for instance, reportedly used to sneak into his mother’s bedroom at night, holding a hammer, and fantasise about breaking her skull with it. He did so long before he murdered her for real.

Kürten’s next victim was a child. His state of mind is intensely disturbing, and indicates very well the sexual nature of this sort of crime: ‘When […] I poured petrol over the child […] and set fire to her, I had an orgasm at the height of the fire’.[v]

Düsselfdorf was soon ‘in a state of panic’.[vi] Over the next several weeks, the violence and frequency of the attacks did not diminish. This is another common feature of serial murders. It’s as if the jaded killer needs his exploits to become more and more lurid in order to provide the same thrill. Kürten began to send the police details - notes and maps – to tell them where the bodies could be found.

That’s all we have room for this week, Crime & Psychology fan! Please remember to come back next time, when we’ll be concluding the tale of Peter Kürten, explaining in what ways his crimes were similar to those of the serial killers of the last ninety years, and studying the profiles that the police created at the time.

THE DüSSELDORF VAMPIRE AND THE EARLIEST DAYS OF OFFENDER PROFILING

Murder; offender profiling; police investigation; arson; torture

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