In his own words, Peter Kurten aspired to become “the most celebrated criminal of all time.” He didn’t quite make it - other criminals are more famous, including his role model, Jack the Ripper. Still, though Kurten fell short of that goal, he can lay claim to another distinction. In a century that has produced a slew of sadistic lust killers, Kurten, in the view of many experts, may have been the most appalling of all. The household Kurten grew up in - a single room occupied by ten family members - was a hotbed of depraved sex. His father was a vicious drunk who habitually forced himself upon his wife in front of the children and was jailed for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter. Kurten, too, engaged in sex with his sisters. Young Kurten’s favourite form of sexual activity, however, wasn’t incest but beastiality. A neighbor who worked as a dog catcher taught the boy how to torture and masturbate animals, forging an early link in Kurten’s already twisted psyche between sadistic cruelty and sexual release. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, he committed countless acts of beastiality with pigs, sheep, and goats, deriving particularly intense pleasure from stabbing the animal to death while having intercourse with it. At fifteen, Kurten - already a habitual thief - was arrested and jailed, the first of a long string of prison sentences. Altogether, he would spend more than half his forty-seven years behind bars. Between 1899 and 1928, during those periods when he managed to stay at large, he may have committed as many as three murders, though none was ever pinned on him. A raging pyromaniac, he also derived sexual satisfaction from torching barns, another of his favourite pastimes.
Kurten took a wife in 1921, winning the consent of his bride-to-be in an unconventional way: he threatened to kill her if she refused to marry him. Until Kurten himself confesses to the unspeakable truth, his loyal, long-suffering wife remained completely unaware that she was wed to the infamous “Monster of Dusseldorf.” Kurten earned that nickname in 1929. During that year, he unleashed an unprecedented torrent of violence, attacking twenty-nine people between February and November. This blood spree came to an end with the strangling and frenzied stabbing of a five-year-old girl, Gertrude Alberman. A few days later - in emulation of his idol, Jack the Ripper - Kurten sent the police a letter. In it, he directed the to the savaged remains of the Alberman girl, as well as to the body of another of his victims, a housemaid he had stabbed twenty times and sodomized after death. Fore more than a year, the citizens of Dusseldorf lived in terror. The police did everything possible to track down the killer, questioning nearly a thousand suspects and following hundreds of leads. But Kurten was hellishly difficult to track. Most lust killers prefer a single kind of weapon and a certain type of victim. But Kurten used axes, scissors, hammers, knife, and his bare hands to kill the young and old, male and female alike. In May 1930, Kurten mysteriously let a young woman go after attempting to rape her. Seventy-two hours later, he was under arrest. In custody, he spilled out his unspeakable story in amazing detail. Among other facts, authorities learned that - besides his other perversions - Kurten was a vampire, who drank the blood of various victims, and he had once experienced an ejaculation after cutting the head off a sleeping swan and guzzling the blood from the neck stump. Convicted of nine murders, he was guillotined in July 1931. Before he was executed he asked: “After my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.”
Kurten took a wife in 1921, winning the consent of his bride-to-be in an unconventional way: he threatened to kill her if she refused to marry him. Until Kurten himself confesses to the unspeakable truth, his loyal, long-suffering wife remained completely unaware that she was wed to the infamous “Monster of Dusseldorf.” Kurten earned that nickname in 1929. During that year, he unleashed an unprecedented torrent of violence, attacking twenty-nine people between February and November. This blood spree came to an end with the strangling and frenzied stabbing of a five-year-old girl, Gertrude Alberman. A few days later - in emulation of his idol, Jack the Ripper - Kurten sent the police a letter. In it, he directed the to the savaged remains of the Alberman girl, as well as to the body of another of his victims, a housemaid he had stabbed twenty times and sodomized after death. Fore more than a year, the citizens of Dusseldorf lived in terror. The police did everything possible to track down the killer, questioning nearly a thousand suspects and following hundreds of leads. But Kurten was hellishly difficult to track. Most lust killers prefer a single kind of weapon and a certain type of victim. But Kurten used axes, scissors, hammers, knife, and his bare hands to kill the young and old, male and female alike. In May 1930, Kurten mysteriously let a young woman go after attempting to rape her. Seventy-two hours later, he was under arrest. In custody, he spilled out his unspeakable story in amazing detail. Among other facts, authorities learned that - besides his other perversions - Kurten was a vampire, who drank the blood of various victims, and he had once experienced an ejaculation after cutting the head off a sleeping swan and guzzling the blood from the neck stump. Convicted of nine murders, he was guillotined in July 1931. Before he was executed he asked: “After my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.”