The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases by John Marlowe Page B

travelled to Winnipeg, where Nelson stood trial for the murders of Lola Cowan and Emily Patterson. It was hoped that their testimonies would help bolster the argument put forward by the defence that Nelson was not sane.
    On 13 January 1928, he was hanged by Arthur Ellis, the pseudonym used by the Official Executioner for the Dominion of Canada. Appropriately, the official cause of death was recorded as ‘death by strangulation’.
    PETER KÜRTEN
    ‘Just you wait a little while,
    The nasty man in black will come.
    With his little chopper,
    He will chop you up!’
    So begins M, the first sound film by the great German director Fritz Lang. The speaker is a young girl who is playing a schoolyard game. Although she is not seen again in the film, one presumes that she remains quite safe. The same cannot be said for another character, a schoolgirl named Elsie Beckmann, who soon falls victim to a serial killer of children. The murderer is portrayed by Peter Lorre, and the character he plays, Hans Beckert, is thought to have been based on a man named Peter Kürten. Lang always denied that he’d used Kürten as a model – and it must be said that there are great differences between the two, the foremost being that Kürten’s crimes were so much more horrific than anything that had been portrayed on film.
    Born on 26 May 1883 at Müllheim, Germany, the man who has come to be called the Vampire of Düsseldorf was the third of 13 children. Raised in poverty, as a child Kürten witnessed his alcoholic father’s repeated sexual assaults on his mother and at least one of his sisters. He himself suffered through years of vicious beatings by the head of the household. Kürten turned to petty crime and several times attempted to run away from home.
    Late in life, Kürten claimed that as a child he had actually murdered two young friends while swimming in the Rhine, holding each under water until they drowned. He also claimed to have befriended a local dog-catcher, who taught him how to masturbate and torture the dogs they caught together. It is thought that during this period he also engaged in bestiality.
    In 1894, the family moved to Düsseldorf. He continued in his petty thievery and was soon serving the first of what would be a series of 27 short prison sentences. In fact, Kürten would spend most of his life incarcerated in one institution or another. While in custody he would make a point of committing minor offences in order to be placed in solitary confinement. Once alone, Kürten would dream of mass murder – he found these fantasies sexually stimulating. For a time, beginning in 1899, he lived with a masochistic prostitute who was twice his age.
    On 25 May 1913, Kürten committed his first provable murder during what would otherwise have been a routine burglary. His victim, a 13-year-old girl named Khristine Klein, was strangled and sexually assaulted. She died after Kürten cut open her throat. The next day, he sat drinking in a café across the street from the murder scene, reading descriptions in the newspaper, and eavesdropping on the conversations going on about him.
    In addition to murder and stealing, Kürten had for many years been committing acts of arson. It was the sight of destruction, including that of human life, which excited him to the point of climax. His 1921 marriage had no erotic appeal. He would later say that the union had been made for companionship alone.
    For many years, it seems that arson and quite likely rape satisfied his desires. This changed suddenly and dramatically on 8 February 1929 when he sexually assaulted and killed an 8-year-old named Rosa Ohliger. Found the next day beneath a hedge, the body of the dead girl bore 13 stab wounds. Kürten had doused the corpse with gasoline and set it alight – an act that brought him to orgasm.
    Five days later he grabbed a woman off the street and stabbed her 24 times. Incredibly, she survived the assault. Kürten found that visits to the scene of the