Peter kurten biography

Peter Kürten 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.
Peter Kürten was a German serial killer, known as The Vampire of Düsseldorf and the Düsseldorf Monster, who committed a series of murders and sexual.
Peter Kürten was a German serial killer whose widely analyzed career influenced European society's understanding of serial murder.

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Peter Kürten

Abstract

IN “Peter Kürten”, George Godwin has given us an account of one of the most horrible series of crimes in history. Peter Kürten, who was a sadist of the worst type, kept Düsseldorf in a state of terror. His record of crime went back to his childhood, when he pushed two boy friends off a raft on the river and drowned them. When tried, he was charged with ten murders and convicted of nine of them. The medico-legal experts came to the conclusion that the Düsseldorf 'monster' was suffering from no organic mental disease or from any functional mental disease, and was therefore responsible in law for his crimes.

Peter Kürten:

a Study in Sadism. By George Godwin. Pp. 60. (London: The Acorn Press, 1938.) 5s. net.

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Peter Kürten. Nature141, 997 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141997b0

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141997b0

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Peter Kürten

German serial killer (1883–1931)

Peter Kürten (German:[ˈpeːtɐˈkʏʁtn̩]; 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^[4] of a 17-year-old girl in Düsseldorf.^[5]

Described by Karl Berg [de] as "the king of the sexual perverts",^[6] 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.^[7] 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;