page_title: Peter Kürten
section_title: 1929
hierarchical_section_title: Peter Kürten / 1929
caption_attribution_description: English: Maria Hahn. Murdered by Peter Kürten in August 1929. Weimar Republic police image.
context_page_description: Peter Kürten was a German serial killer known as "The Vampire of Düsseldorf" and the "Düsseldorf Monster". He committed a series of murders and sexual assaults between February and November 1929 in the city of Düsseldorf. In the years before these assaults and murders, Kürten had amassed a lengthy criminal record for offences including arson and attempted murder. He also confessed to the 1913 murders of a nine-year-old girl in Mülheim am Rhein and a 17-year-old girl in Düsseldorf.
  Described by Karl Berg as "the king of the sexual perverts," Kürten was found guilty of nine counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder for which he was sentenced to death by beheading in April 1931. He was executed in July 1931 at age 48.
  Kürten became known as the "Vampire of Düsseldorf" because he occasionally made attempts to drink the blood from his victims' wounds, and the "Düsseldorf Monster" both because the majority of his murders were committed in and around the city of Düsseldorf, and the savagery he inflicted upon his victims' bodies.
context_section_description: On 3 February 1929, Kürten stalked an elderly woman named Apollonia Kühn. Waiting until Kühn was shielded from the view of potential witnesses by bushes, Kürten pounced upon her, grabbing her by the lapels of her coat and shouting the words, "No row! Don't scream!" before dragging her into nearby undergrowth, where he proceeded to stab her 24 times with a sharpened pair of scissors. Although many of the blows were inflicted so deeply that the scissors struck her bones, Kühn survived her injuries.
   
  On 8 February, Kürten strangled a nine-year-old girl named Rosa Ohliger into unconsciousness before stabbing her in the stomach, temple, genitals and heart with a pair of scissors, spontaneously ejaculating as he knifed the child. He then inserted his semen into her vagina with his fingers. Kürten then made a rudimentary effort to hide Ohliger's body by dragging it beneath a hedge before returning to the scene with a bottle of kerosene several hours later and setting the child's body alight, achieving an orgasm at the sight of the flames. Ohliger's body was found beneath a hedge the following day. 
  Five days later, on 13 February, Kürten murdered a 45-year-old mechanic named Rudolf Scheer in the suburb of Flingen Nord, stabbing him 20 times, particularly about the head, back and eyes. Following the discovery of Scheer's body, Kürten returned to the scene of the murder to converse with police, falsely informing one detective he had heard about the murder via telephone.
  Despite the differences in age and sex of these three victims, the fact that all three crimes had been committed in the Flingern district of Düsseldorf at dusk, that each victim had received a multitude of stab wounds likely inflicted in rapid succession and invariably involving at least one wound to the temple, plus the absence of a common motive such as robbery, led investigators to conclude the same perpetrator had committed all three attacks. Furthermore, the seemingly random selection of these victims led criminologists to remark as to the abnormal nature of the perpetrator.
  
  Although Kürten did attempt to strangle four women between March and July 1929, one of whom he claimed to have thrown into the Rhine River, he is not known to have killed any further victims until 11 August when he raped, strangled, then repeatedly stabbed a young woman named Maria Hahn. Kürten had first encountered Hahn—whom he described as "a girl looking for marriage"—on 8 August, and had arranged to take her on a date to the Neandertal district of Düsseldorf the following Sunday. After several hours in Hahn's company, Kürten lured her into a meadow in order that he could kill her; he later admitted Hahn had repeatedly pleaded with him to spare her life as he alternately strangled her, stabbed her in the chest and head, or sat astride her body, waiting for her to die.
   Hahn died approximately one hour after Kürten had begun attacking her. Fearful his wife might connect the bloodstains she had noted on his clothes with Hahn's murder, Kürten later buried her body in a cornfield, only to return to her body several weeks later with the intention of nailing her decomposing remains to a tree in a mock crucifixion to shock and disgust the public; however, Hahn's remains proved too heavy for Kürten to complete this act, and he simply returned her corpse to her grave before embracing and caressing the decomposing body as he lay beneath her remains. He then reburied Hahn's body. According to Kürten's later confession, both before and after he had attempted to impale Hahn's corpse to a tree, he "went to the grave many times and kept improving on it; and every time I thought of what was lying there and was filled with satisfaction."
  Three months after Kürten had murdered Hahn, he posted an anonymous letter to the police in which he confessed to the murder, adding that her remains had been buried in a field. In this letter, Kürten also drew a crude map describing the location of her remains. This letter would prove sufficiently detailed to enable investigators to locate Hahn's remains on 15 Novem
caption: Maria Hahn
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