Dusseldorf’s Mass-Murders Criticism of “Literary Detectives”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1076, 13 September 1930, Page 18

Dusseldorf’s Mass-Murders Criticism of “Literary Detectives”

O sooner had Peter KurkWEwtrSl ten been placed behind the bars at Dusseldorf, MVdl! charged with the series £qjkSri of sensational murders agitating all Europe for months past, than the German Press broke forth into criticism of the “literary school” of detective work. The “Koelnische Zeitung” suspects that the literary school of detective training is responsible for the weight of evidence against a simple-minded, harmless idiot whom the great experts thought guilty. They locked him j up—the wrong man! And in the end, sneers the Berlin “Volks Zeitung,” the mystery was cleared up by the merest accident. A girl misdirected a letter to a friend of hers. The local Dusseldorf police —not the “great detectives” from Berlin nor the writers of “murder mysteries” from Paris and London —unostentatiously ran down the clue. But have the police actually got the man responsible for the 18 murders perpetrated at Dusseldorf, or near it, since February of last year? The question is raised by the "Vcrwaerts” itself. The police insist that the evidence against their prisoner is overwhelming, apart from his own confession, although doubts are cherished in some dailies. Even the “Koelnische Zeitung” is not quite convinced that the accused perpetrated all the crimes. In one case, it points out, two vie-1 tims were done away with, and in a,n- 1 other case three. Nine of the vie- j tims were slain instantly, one a grown t man, four stalwart women, while four wore the merest girls, ranging in age from five to fourteen years. In aix instances the slain were done

to death with knives, and in one instance the victim was strangled. Four women were severely wounded, besides those killed outright. Only slightly wounded were still four other women. To make matters more mystifying, notes the “Koelnische Zeitung,” of Berlin, there never was a murderer who took such pains as did Kurten to provide the detectives with clues. When he found the “literary detectives” quite off his scent, with their trails leading to harmless idiots, he wrote letters to the papers, supplying details about himself which seem, in the light of what has happened* to be accurate enough. Although, says the “Koelnische Zeitung,” the prisoner at Dusseldorf had often been locked up in a local prison, although he had even been sentenced to a penitentiary from which he tried to escape with three other inmates, he was able to wear “a mask of artless simplicity.” He was always kindly, we read, always cheerful, always sweet in manner as well as of voica.