Peter Kürten was a serial killer dubbed The Vampire of Düsseldorf by the contemporary media. He committed a series of sex crimes, assaults and murders against adults and children, most notoriously from February to November 1929 in Düsseldorf.

Kürten was born into a poverty-stricken, abusive childhood in Köln-Mülheim on May 26, 1883, the third of thirteen children. Disturbed from an early age, he grew into a petty criminal and often ran away from home. He later claimed to have committed his first murders at the age of nine, drowning two young friends while swimming. He moved with his family to Düsseldorf in 1894 and received a number of short prison sentences for various crimes, including theft and arson. His behaviour became more cruel, and his violent tendencies increased as he progressed from the torturing of animals to attacks on people. He committed his first provable murder in 1913 during the course of a burglary, by strangling a young girl. His crimes were then halted by the war and an eight year sentence in prison. In 1921 he left prison and moved to Altenburg where he married and became a trade unionist. He returned to Düsseldorf in 1925, to later begin the series of crimes that would last until his capture.

He viciously assaulted a woman and then the sexually molested and murdered an eight-year-old girl on February 8, 1929. On February 13 he murdered a middle-aged mechanic, by stabbing him twenty times. Kürten did not attack again until August, stabbing three people in separate attacks on the 21st; murdering two sisters, aged five and fourteen, on the 23rd; and stabbing another woman on the 24th. In September he committed a single rape and murder and in October another, also attacking two women with a hammer. On November 7 he killed a five-year-old girl and sent a map to a local newspaper disclosing her grave. The variety of victims and methods lead to the assumption that there had to be more than one killer at large, and over 900,000 different names were given to the police as potential suspects.

The November murder was Kürten's last, although there were a spate of non-fatal hammer attacks from February to March, 1930. In May he accosted a young woman called Maria Budlick (or Budlies), and took her first to his home and then to the Grafenberger Woods where he raped her, but did not kill her. Budlick led the police to Kürten's home. He was concerned over the sentence he would receive for the rape and avoided the police. Kürten told his wife of the rape and also of his other crimes, and he told her to inform the police. On May 24 he was located and arrested.

Kürten confessed to almost eighty offences, and was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders. He went to trial in April, 1931, and initially he pleaded not guilty but after some weeks changed his plea. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed by guillotine in Cologne on the morning of July 2, 1932.

That same year, the movie M was released. It told a fictionalized story of a serial child killer and was in part based on the crimes of Peter Kürten.

References

• The Monster of Dusseldorf: The Life and Trial of Peter Kürten by Margaret Seaton Wagner, 1932.
• The Sadist by Karl Berg, 1945.