CAREER OF CRIME

Hokitika Guardian, 4 August 1932, Page 2

CAREER OF CRIME

MONSTER OF DUSSELDORF. SERIES OF HORRIBLE MURDERS. LONDON, July 30. Peter Kurten will always be known as “The Monster of Dusseldorf” for Ins series of horrible murders which ternlied the whoie of Germany. He was one of the most abnormal men cf history, and his wholesale slaughter of young women earned for him the title of vampire.

“The most extraordinary and horrible point about Kurten’s nocturnal prowling,” says Margaret Seaton Wagnei in her book, “The Monster of Dusseldori,” “lay in the association with the werwol. and vampire of ancient tradition. It was his habit, and his principal satisfaction, to receive the stream of blood that gushed from his victim’s ■wounds into his mouth.” Kurten was an extraordinary criminal, and “Jack the Ripper,” who scared London frith his fiendish murders, was a child in crime compared with him. Apart, from cases of theft, brutality, arid menaces with intent to do bodily harm, KufteriV record is probably without precedent in history. He was guilty df 69 serious Crimes between i 899 and 1330. His first crime was in i§9i), .when he attempted to strangle an iS-year-old gild. I’rOln that mblneht he llild tt ItlSt fbi‘ bloodialid destruction*, fthtifly all his Victims were women. In 4(1 buses ho either killed or attempted td; kill people, generally by strangulation, but sometimes by' blows of. a hammer or an axe or by stabbing with scissors.

Two Hangman’s Meals. ' Going through his list of murders and attempted murders one is struck by the way in which he kept to one-parti-cular form 0 f attack for a long- time, and then changed, to another. As a relief from murder be found variety, in arson’ and 22 attempts are to his record. The majority of these were between 1927. and 1929, when there was not a single case of direct human violence. Then began that series cf brutal murders of children, women and men in and around Dusseldorf, which startled Germany and eventually aroused the attention of the whole world. “Peter Kurten was born a Cathode, and died fortified by. the rites, of his Church, leaving- letters to'the relatives of his victims expressing his regret at the grief he had caused them. Yet the. doctors who examined him constantly to the end declared that he was iiicapahle of feeling any penitence at all,” Margaret Seaton Wagner. “He claimed at different periods of his examination by jurists and electors to have acted solely ’ from revenge against a, society which condemned him early to the 'rigours of prison, and to have experienced as intense a satisfaction at the sensation aroused by his efimek as lift had at the moment of their committal. He was described bv more than one expert as the most interesting of criminals. He expressed hopes towards the last that too many details should net get into the paners, as he himself had been morally damaged by such reading, but remarked to one of the medical examiners who had brought a woman assistant with him upon the whiteness and temptingness of the lady’s throat, “He was in so collected a frame of mind that he demanded his last meal —the hangman’s meal—twice over, aHc 1 'expressing the wonder whether sufficient consciousness remained to the victims of the guillotine to hear hi:s own blood gush forth. He was a particularly soft-spoken and gentlemannered mail.” In the succeeding chapter is given a list of all the crimes that Kurten committed between February 9, 1929, and the date of his arrest in May, 193 Q. It is extraordinary to read how this man' was able to entice girls' and young women, and either slay them or maim them for life. ■