Peter Kürten (German: [ˈpeːtɐ ˈkʏʁtn̩]; 26 May 1883 – 2 July 1931) was a German serial killer, known as The Vampire of Düsseldorf and the Düsseldorf Monster, who 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 murder of a nine-year-old girl in Mülheim am Rhein and the attempted murder of 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 via guillotine 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. He also became known as the "Düsseldorf Monster" both because the majority of his murders were committed in and around the city of Düsseldorf, and due to the savagery he inflicted upon his victims' bodies.
Peter Kürten was born into a poverty-stricken, abusive family in Mülheim am Rhein on 26 May 1883, the oldest of thirteen children (two of whom died at an early age). Kürten's parents were both alcoholics who lived in a one-bedroom apartment, and Kürten's father frequently beat his wife and children, particularly when he was drunk. When intoxicated, Kürten's father often forced his wife and children to assemble before him before ordering his wife to strip naked and have sex with him as his children watched. He was jailed for eighteen months in 1897 for repeatedly raping his eldest daughter, who was aged 13. Shortly thereafter, Kürten's mother obtained a separation order, and later remarried and relocated to Düsseldorf.
In 1888, Kürten attempted to drown one of his playmates. Four years later, he befriended a local dog-catcher who lived in the same building as his family and began accompanying him on his rounds. This individual often tortured and killed the animals he caught, and Kürten soon became an active and willing participant in torturing the animals.
Being the eldest surviving son, Kürten was the target of much of his father's physical abuse and frequently refused to return home from school as a result. Although he was a good student, he later recollected his academic performance suffered due to the extensive physical violence he endured. From an early age, Kürten often ran away from home for periods of time ranging from days to weeks. Much of the time Kürten spent on the streets was in the company of petty criminals and social misfits. Via these acquaintances, Kürten was introduced to various forms of petty crime, which he initially committed as a means of feeding and clothing himself when living on the streets.
Kürten later claimed to have committed his first murders at the age of nine, when he pushed a school friend whom he knew was unable to swim off a log raft. When a second boy attempted to save the drowning youngster, Kürten held his head under the water so that both boys drowned. Both deaths were ruled by authorities as being accidental.
At the age of thirteen, Kürten formed a relationship with a girl his age and, although she allowed Kürten to undress and fondle her, she would resist any attempts he made to engage in intercourse. To relieve his sexual urges, Kürten resorted to acts of bestiality with sheep, pigs and goats in local stables, but later claimed he obtained his greatest sense of elation if he stabbed the animals just before achieving orgasm. Kürten claimed he began stabbing and slashing animals with increasing frequency to achieve orgasms, although he was adamant this behaviour ended when he was observed stabbing a pig. He also attempted to rape the same sister his father had earlier molested.
In 1897, Kürten left school. At his father's insistence, he obtained employment as an apprentice moulder. This apprenticeship lasted for two years before Kürten stole all the money he could find in his household, plus approximately 300 gold marks from his employer, and ran away from home. He relocated to Koblenz, where he began a brief relationship with a prostitute two years his senior whom, he claimed, willingly submitted to every form of sexual perversion he demanded of her. He was apprehended four weeks later and charged with both breaking and entering and theft, and subsequently sentenced to one month's imprisonment. He was released from prison in August 1899 and reverted to a life of petty crime.
Kürten claimed to have committed his first murder in adulthood in November 1899. In his 1930 confessions to investigators, he claimed to have "picked up an 18-year-old girl at the Alleestraße" and persuaded her to accompany him to the Hofgarten. There, he claimed to have engaged in sex with the girl before strangling her into unconsciousness with his bare hands before leaving the scene, believing her to be dead.
No contemporaneous records exist to corroborate Kürten's claims. If this attack did take place, the victim likely survived this assault. Nonetheless, Kürten later stated that, via committing this act, he had proven to himself that the greatest heights of sexual ecstasy could only be achieved in this manner.
Shortly thereafter, in 1900, Kürten was arrested for fraud. He would be rearrested later the same year on the same charge, although on this second occasion, charges pertaining to his 1899 Düsseldorf thefts, plus the attempted murder of a girl with a firearm, were added to the indictment. Consequently, Kürten was sentenced to four years' imprisonment in October 1900. He served this sentence in Derendorf, a borough of Düsseldorf.
Released in the summer of 1904, Kürten was drafted into the Imperial German Army; he was deployed to the city of Metz in Lorraine to serve in the 98th Infantry Regiment, although he soon deserted. That autumn, Kürten began committing acts of arson, which he would discreetly watch from a distance as emergency services attempted to extinguish the fires. The majority of these fires were in barns and haylofts, and Kürten would admit to police he had committed around twenty-four acts of arson upon his arrest that New Year's Eve. He also claimed these fires had been committed both for his sexual excitement and in the hope of burning sleeping tramps alive.
As a result of his desertion, Kürten was tried by the military court and convicted of desertion in addition to multiple counts of arson, robbery and attempted robbery (the latter charges pertaining to acts he had also committed that year), and was subsequently imprisoned from 1905 to 1913. He served his sentence in Münster, with much of his time spent in solitary confinement for repeated instances of insubordination. He would later claim to investigators and psychologists this period of incarceration was that in which he first encountered severe forms of discipline, and as such, the erotic fantasies he had earlier developed while incarcerated in Derendorf expanded to include graphic fantasies of his striking out at society and killing masses of people; these fantasies became ever more paramount and overbearing in his mind, and Kürten later claimed that he derived the "sort of pleasures from these visions that other people would get from thinking about a naked woman", adding that he occasionally spontaneously ejaculated while preoccupied with such thoughts.
The first murder Kürten definitively committed occurred on 25 May 1913. During the course of a burglary at a tavern in Köln-Mülheim, he encountered a nine-year-old girl named Christine Klein asleep in her bed "in a room above the inn". He would later recollect to investigators: "[The child's] head was facing the window. I seized it with my left hand and strangled her for about a minute and a half. The child woke up and struggled but lost consciousness [...] I had a small but sharp pocketknife with me and I held the child's head and cut her throat. I heard the blood spurt and drip [onto] the mat beside the bed. It spurted in an arch, right over my hand. The whole thing lasted about three minutes."