Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  During these years, Gein started to manufacture his macabre household decorations from the corpses he dug up on his grave-robbing sprees. Eventually, his grave-robbing expeditions failed to satisfy his strange obsession, and in December 1954, he committed murder.

  The murders begin

  The police were called when a fifty-one-year-old woman called Mary Hogan disappeared from the bar she ran in Pine Grove, Wisconsin. As became clear later, the victim had a distinct resemblance to Ed Gein’s mother. There was blood on the floor and a spent cartridge was found at the scene. Ed Gein was among the potential suspects but there was no hard evidence to connect him, and the police saw no reason to visit his home.

  This was the first of only two murders that can definitely be credited to Gein. The next was three years later. Once again the victim was a woman in her fifties, and once again she looked like Ed’s mother. Her name was Bernice Worden and on November 16, 1957, she was abducted from her hardware store in Plainfield. Again, there was blood on the floor. This time, however, the police had a pretty good clue as to who was responsible. The victim’s son told them that Ed Gein had asked their mother for a date, and another local resident recalled Ed saying he needed to buy some antifreeze from her store on the day she died. A receipt for antifreeze was found lying in the store and this time the police decided to pay Ed Gein a visit.

  Macabre home decoration

  What confronted them there shocked even the most hardened of the officers. First there were the macabre ornaments in the house, such as the lampshades made of human skin and the skulls made into soup bowls. Worse was to follow when they went into the yard. Bernice Worden’s corpse was hanging from the rafters. She had had her head cut off, her genitalia removed and her torso was slit open and gutted. On further investigation they found her head turned into a makeshift ornament, and her heart sitting in a saucepan on the stove. They also discovered a pistol which matched the cartridge found at the scene of the Mary Hogan murder.

  On his arrest, Gein immediately confessed to the murders of Worden and Hogan as well as to his grave-robbing activities. His necrophiliac behaviour was so extreme that he was immediately deemed to be insane. For example, he explained the ‘mammary vest’ that he had stitched together as an attempt to change sex; wearing it, he felt as though he had turned into his mother. A judge found him incompetent for trial and he was committed to a secure mental hospital. Meanwhile, his house was burned to the ground to prevent it from becoming the focus of a macabre cult.

  Soon after, Ed Gein’s immortality was ensured when local writer Robert Bloch wrote a book called Psycho, inspired by the case, and Alfred Hitchcock picked it up for the movies. In 1968, Gein was once more submitted for trial but was once again found insane. He ended his days in the mental hospital, dying of respiratory failure on July 26, 1984. His last words on his deathbed were to curse his mother.

  Joachim Kroll

  Joachim Kroll has gone down in crime history as one of the most prolific serial killers of all time. Over a period of twenty years, he raped and strangled his young female victims, cutting slices from their dead bodies to cook and eat. Amazingly, he was not discovered until he had been killing for more than two decades. This was partly because he lived at a time when poverty and starvation were rife in Germany after the Second World War; even so, it is hard to explain why it took the authorities so long to notice what was going on.

  The first victim

  Joachim Kroll was born in the town of Hindenburg, on the German–Polish border, on April 17, 1933. He grew up during the war years, experiencing great deprivation, like many German people at the time. His father was taken prisoner by the Russian Army and never seen again, and after the war, he and his mother were forced to flee East Germany, which was occupied by the Russians. They moved to West Germany, to the Ruhr region, a centre for industry and another very poor, rough area. As a child, and even into his early adult years, Joachim was shy and withdrawn, and had little contact with anyone except his mother. When she died, in 1955, he seems to have experienced a mental breakdown, and within three weeks of her death began a killing spree that was to last for the next twenty years.

  His first victim was Irmgard Srehl, a nineteen-year-old girl he raped and stabbed to death in a barn outside the town of Ludinghausen. Not long afterwards he abducted twelve-year-old Erika Schuleter, raping and strangling her in the same way, this time in the town of Kirchellen. Two years later, he moved to Duisburg, another town in the Ruhr district. For a while, he remained quiet, until on June 16, 1959, he raped and murdered Klara Frieda Tesmer. The following month, there was another murder, this time in the industrial town of Essen: that of sixteen-year-old Manuela Knodt. Kroll raped and strangled her, and also cut chunks of flesh from her buttocks and thighs, which he later ate.

  Raped, strangled . . . and eaten

  Despite his rising toll of murders, Kroll was not caught. In the Knodt case, a man named Horst Otto made a confession, and was later found to be suffering from mental illness. Thus, Kroll was left free to carry on his killing spree. In 1962, he went to where he raped and strangled Barbara Bruder; later that year, on April 23, he raped and strangled Petra Giese. Police noticed that ‘the Ruhr Hunter’, as the mystery serial killer became known, had taken away parts of his victims’ bodies: portions of flesh had been taken from their buttocks and thighs. This horrific cutting out of flesh became Kroll’s trademark, and the hunt was now on for a killer who not only raped and strangled, but ate his victims as well.

  On June 4, 1962, another young girl was found dead, this time in a cornfield outside the town of Walsum. Her name was Monika Tafel and she was just thirteen years old. But once again, the police got the wrong man for the crime. A thirty-four-year-old paedophile named Walter Quicker was picked up for the murder and held as a suspect. During this ordeal, Quicker hanged himself, and thus the police were no closer to finding the perpetrator of these dreadful murders.

  Abducting and murdering children

  After the Walsum investigation, Kroll kept his head down for a few years, afraid that his crimes would come to light. But he could not resist murdering again, and so it was that on August 22, 1965, he struck again. This time, his victims were a couple who were parked in their car in a lover’s lane. Kroll attacked them with a knife, stabbing the man to death, but the woman escaped to raise the alarm. However, Kroll quickly disappeared, and once again, the police did not catch up with him.

  The following year there was another murder, that of Ursula Rohling, who was raped and strangled in a park in Marl. Amazingly, the police got the wrong man again, and accused the girl’s boyfriend Adolf Schickel, who – like Quicker – was so traumatised by the accusation that he killed himself. This left Kroll free to prey on his victims once more, and he abducted a five-year-old girl, Ilona Harke. The child was taken by public transport to a wood named Feldbachtal, where she was raped. Afterwards, Kroll drowned her. He was clearly experimenting with new ways to wreak his vengeance on the world. A year later, he lured ten-year-old Gabrielle Puetman into a cornfield where he showed her pornographic pictures; fortunately, some passers-by arrived and saw what was going on. The girl fainted and Kroll ran away. He was pursued, but managed to escape.

  Drains ‘full of guts’

  Kroll’s next victim was not a child but a woman in her sixties, Maria Hettgen. He burst into her home before raping and strangling her. He went on to murder Jutta Rahn, a thirteen-year-old girl who was coming home from school. Once again, police followed the wrong trail, and an innocent neighbour of the girl’s, Peter Schay, was arrested and imprisoned for fifteen months before being released. The murders continued with the raping and strangling of Karin Toepfer, also a schoolgirl, in the area of Dinslaken-Voerde. On July 3, 1976, Kroll abducted a four-year-old, Marion Ketter, his youngest victim yet, and murdered her.

  The murder of Marion Ketter provoked a public outcry, and the police were forced at last to conduct a proper investigation. Kroll was not covering his tracks very caref
ully by now, and it appeared that he almost wanted to be caught. He was living in an apartment block, and when a neighbour complained to him about the drains being blocked, he replied that they were ‘full of guts’. The neighbour thought he must be joking, but called a plumber, who found that Kroll had been serious when he made this remark. The lungs and innards of a child were found in the drains, and when police searched Kroll’s apartment, they found bags of human flesh stored in the fridge. Further investigation revealed a child’s hand simmering on the stove, cooked with carrots and potatoes. They immediately arrested Kroll, and he confessed to a long list of murders that he had committed all over the Ruhr area in the previous twenty years. Kroll was charged, brought to trial, and found guilty on eight counts of murder. His sentence was life imprisonment, eight times over. He served his sentence until July 1, 1991, when he died of a heart attack.

  A society in chaos

  In retrospect, it is hard to understand why it took so long to track down and arrest this prolific serial killer, who had left so many clues along the way during his long reign of terror. One reason was, the chaos and turmoil that reigned in Germany during and after World War II made it difficult for normal police investigations to take place. There are many horrific stories of ordinary people starving to death during this dark period in German history, and tales are told of an underground trade in human flesh, which was apparently bought and sold in the markets, and which Kroll may have been involved in.

  Not only this, but with the fragmentation of communities and disturbances of populations during the war, disappearances of individuals were relatively common; people often lost touch with their relatives, and human life was cheap. This was a world in which people were struggling to survive, and if a person went missing here or there, there were sometimes few to mourn them; and even if families did raise the alarm, the police were extremely slow to react.

  Such an atmosphere of poverty and lawlessness in the depressed industrialised cities of the Ruhr did much to foster crime, violence and brutality, and it is not altogether suprising that a killer like Kroll made less of an impact during that period than he would have done in quieter, more ordered times. Even so, the police record in trying to solve the crimes was startlingly poor, and it was only when Kroll began to abduct very young children that anything systematic was done to try to track him down. By the time that the police caught up with Kroll, he had a long list of violent murders to his name, many of which could have been avoided had previous cases been properly investigated. In addition, two men took their lives as a result of being falsely accused of murders committed by him. Thus it was that the Ruhr Hunter’s reign of terror went on, unchecked, for two decades before he was finally brought to justice and imprisoned for the horrific crimes, including rape, murder and cannibalism, that he had committed throughout his adult life.

  Andrei Chikatilo

  Andrei Chikatilo was one of the most prolific serial killers of all time. Known as ‘the Rostov Ripper’, he murdered over fifty men, women and children during a reign of terror that lasted for years. Like Joachim Kroll, the ‘Ruhr Hunter’, he was the product of a period of extreme social disturbance, his spate of killings coming at a time when his country, the Soviet Union, was beginning to collapse into disorder. In the early years of his crimes, the extent of what was going on was covered up by the corrupt Soviet government of the time, whose official line was that serial killing was a product of the decadent West, particularly the United States, and did not occur in the Soviet Union. However, because of the ultimate collapse of the Soviet system, Chikatilo’s crimes came to international attention when he was arrested in 1990, and shocked the world.

  Difficult start

  This most fearsome of modern serial killers was born on October 19, 1936 in the small village of Yablochnoye, which lies in the rural area of the Ukraine. The baby was born with water on the brain and a rather large, misshapen head. Later on, it was found that he had also undergone a certain amount of brain damage. In this respect, he was like many other serial killers, who have often sustained some kind of brain damage, for example through receiving a blow on the head.

  This difficult start in life was compounded by the fact that Chikatilo’s family were victims of famine, as a result of the forced collectivisation imposed by Stalin. Chikatilo’s mother told how her oldest son, Stepan, was kidnapped, killed and eaten by starving neighbours. Whether this was true or not, her tale had the effect of completely traumatising the young Andrei, as well it might.

  Starvation and misery

  Chikatilo’s early childhood was spent during World War II, when the region’s misery grew even worse as privations of all kind were visited upon its people. His father was taken prisoner during the war, then sent to a Russian prison camp on his return. Meanwhile, Andrei was growing up without a father, and with a mother who seemed to take a perverse delight in terrifying her young son. On leaving school, Chikatilo joined the army. He also joined the Communist Party, which was an important step for any ambitious young person who wanted to succeed in Soviet Russia.

  When he left the army, Chikatilo worked as a telephone engineer and studied in his spare time to gain a university degree, which eventually allowed him to become a schoolteacher near his home in Rostov-on-Don. His sister introduced him to a young woman named Fayina, whom he married. As it emerged later, Chikatilo’s marriage was not happy, and he had lifelong problems with impotence, but he did manage to have two children by Fayina, and for a while the family lived quietly enough together.

  Rape and murder

  However, this period of stability was not to last. At the age of forty-two, Chikatilo’s past began to catch up with him. In this, he was different from most serial killers, whose impulse to kill usually shows itself in early adulthood, if not before. Chikatilo murdered his first victim in 1979, a nine-year-old girl called Lenochka Zakotnova. He took her to a vacant house in the town of Shakhty, attempted to rape her, failed because of his impotence, and impaled her with a knife instead, stabbing her to death and dumping her body into the Grushovka River. Her corpse was found there on Christmas Eve. Chikatilo was questioned by police, and persuaded his wife to give him a false alibi. Eventually, local rapist Alexander Kravchenko was beaten into confessing to the crime and put to death, while Chikatilo got off the charges – only to murder again.

  Despite his attempts to cover his tracks, Chikatilo’s perverted behaviour was noticed by his fellow teachers, and he was accused of molesting boys in the dormitory at the school where he worked. He confessed and was dismissed from his job. However, because he was a member of the Communist Party, he managed to get another job as a recruiting officer for a factory. This meant that he travelled a great deal, and therefore had a lot of opportunity to continue his killing career without being observed. His method of luring his victims to their death was to approach them at a train or bus station and take them into nearby woodland to muder them. In this way, he committed the murder of seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko in 1982. Tkachenko was a poverty-stricken runaway, known locally for her habit of exchanging sexual favours for food and drink. Chikatilo strangled her and piled dirt into her mouth to muffle her screams. He later commented that although his first killing had upset him, this second one had been thrilling for him.

  Eye gouging

  In the same year, Chikatilo killed his next victim, thirteen-year-old Lyuba Biryuk. At this point he committed the act that was to become his trademark as a killer, which was to cut out her eyes. The following year he killed six more times, and this time his murders changed their pattern: two of the victims were young men, which initially confused the police. What the killings had in common was their increasing savagery and the way that certain body parts were always removed. One of the features of Chikatilo’s killings was that the genitals of his victims were often missing. It is generally believed that Chikatilo ate the parts he removed; however, he himself only confessed to ‘nibbling on them’. Some believe that, in his madness, he was acting out
the fate that befell his older brother, to be killed and eaten in the most violent, vicious way imaginable.

  Chikatilo’s series of gruesome murders attracted a great deal of police attention, but at the time the Soviet media had its hands tied. Journalists were not permitted to publicise the existence of a serial killer in the Soviet Union, as this reflected badly on the political situation there, or so the apparatchiks felt. Thus, the public were not warned to be on their guard and to keep their children safe from harm. For this reason, Chikatilo’s crimes became easier, and he continued to kill his victims, in increasingly savage ways. In just one month, August 1984, he did away with eight victims. Despite the increasing death toll, the only clue the police were able to find was that the killer’s blood group was AB. This was determined by analysing the semen found on the bodies of some of his more recent victims.

  Brought to justice

  However, it was in late 1984, just as his murders had reached a peak, that Chikatilo was arrested at a railway station where he was trying to seduce some young girls. He was arrested and found to have a knife and a length of rope in his bag but, because his blood group was A, not AB, he was eventually released. This evident mistake by police has never been explained, and it had tragic consequences. Once he was released, Chikatilo redoubled his killings, so that dozens more innocent people lost their lives. In 1988, he murdered eight more times, and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed nine people, several of them boys. By then, a new detective, Issa Kostoyev, had taken over the case and was determined to bring him to justice. Kostoyev ordered an army of detectives to wait at train and bus stations in the area and her plan worked.