#otherwise you’ll be arrested and tried on neglect and abuse charges

[amaru-sage]

drawing Líf with a mask without vents??? is the equivalent of an anime girl without her hair vents

HE’S GOING TO OVERHEAT AND DIE

[thekillerblogofkillers]

Peter Kurten (1883-1931) PART THREE

Following his arrest (orchestrated by himself and his wife in an attempt to win her the reward money for his capture) Peter Kurten admitted his guilt in all of the crimes police had attributed to the Vampire of Dusseldorf, along with further confessing to the unsolved murders of Christine Klein and Gertrud Franken in 1913. Kurten admitted a total of  68 crimes, including 10 murders and 31 attempted murders. He gave no reasons or excuses for his crimes, but justified them by the perceived injustices he had endured throughout his life. He was adamant in pointing out that he had not tortured any of his child victims. He admitted to both investigators and psychiatrists that even just the sight of his victims’ blood was occasionally enough to bring him to orgasm, and that sometimes, if he experienced orgasm while strangling a woman, he would immediately become apologetic, saying, “That’s what love is all about”. Kurten claimed he drank the blood from the throat of one victim, from the temple of another, and licked the blood from a 3rd victim’s hands. On one of these occasions he had drunk so much blood from the neck would he had inflicted on Maria Hahn that he vomited. He admitted to decapitating a swan in the spring of 1930 in order to drink the blood from the animal’s neck – he ejaculated in the process. While awaiting trail, and later awaiting execution, Kurten was repeatedly interviewed by Dr. Karl Berg, stating to him that his primary motive in committing any of his criminal activities was sexual pleasure, and that he had begun associating sexual excitement with violent acts and the sight of blood using both daydreams and masturbation fantasies. Most of his assaults and murders were committed when his wife was working nights, and the amount of stab wounds and bludgeoning wounds Kurten inflicted on a victim had varied depending on how long it had taken him to achieve orgasm.  The sight of his victims’ blood had been a vital part of his sexual stimulation. Kurten told Dr. Berg that once he had committed an attack, the tension he felt beforehand would be relieved for a day. In regards to the choice of weapons for the attacks, Kurten said that although he had changed his method of attack to deceive police, the weapon was actually inconsequential when it came to the ultimate objective of seeing his victims’ blood. He said: “Whether I took a knife or a pair of scissors or a hammer in order to see blood was a matter of indifference to me or mere chance. Often after the hammer blows the bleeding victims moved and struggled, just as they did when they were throttled.” He also said that although he sometimes raped his female victims, he only did so to feign the act of sex as a motive for his crimes. He confessed that many of his later strangulation victims had only survived his attacks because he had orgasmed early on in the experience. Both Dr. Berg and other psychologists concluded that Kurten was not insane, was able to fully control his actions, and appreciated the criminality of his conduct. Each agreed that Kurten was legally sane and competent to stand trial.

On April 13, 1931, Peter Kurten stood trial in Dusseldorf, charged with 9 counts of murder and 7 of attempted murder. He was tried before Presiding Judge Dr. Rose. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and aside from when he was delivering testimony, he would spend the duration of the trial surrounded by a heavily guarded shoulder height iron cage, built to protect him from attack by the relatives of his victims, with his feet shackled. The trial began with the prosecution reciting each charge against Kurten before reading the formal confession he provided to police after his arrest. When asked by the presiding judge to describe why he had continued committing acts of arson throughout 1929 and 1930, Kurten said: “When my desire for injuring people awoke, the love of setting fire to things awoke as well. The sight of the flames excited me, but above all, it was the excitement of the attempts to extinguish the fire and the agitation of those who saw their property being destroyed.” Several says into the trial, after claiming that his initial confession was only given to allow his wife to collect the reward offered for the capture of the Vampire of Dusseldorf, Kurten instructed his defence attorney to change his plea to one of guilty, telling the court: “I have no remorse. As to whether recollection of my deeds makes me feel ashamed, I will tell you thinking back to all the details is not at all unpleasant. I rather enjoy it.” When asked if he had a conscience, Kurten stated he did not, and when asked about his motivation for confessing, he said: “Why don’t you understand that I am fond of my wife, and that I am still fond of her? I have done many wrongs; have been unfaithful over and over again. My wife has never done any wrong. Even when she heard of the many prison sentences I have served, she said: ‘I won’t let you down, otherwise you’ll be lost altogether.’ I wanted to fix for my wife a carefree old age.” To counteract the insanity defence, the prosecution introduced 5 prominent doctors and psychiatrists to testify – each stated Kurten was legally sane and had been in perfect control of his actions and impulses at all times. Professor Franz Sioli testified as to Kurten’s actual motives for the crimes being the desire to achieve sexual gratification that could only be achieved by acts of brutality, violence and Kurten’s knowledge of the pain and misery he had caused others. Dr. Karl Berg testified that Kurten’s motives were 90 percent sadism and 10 percent revenge in relation to his perceived sense of injustice for both the neglect and abuse he had received as a child and whilst incarcerated. He also stated that despite Kurten admitting to embracing and digitally penetrating Maria Hahn’s corpse, and to having spontaneously ejaculated while holding the soil covering the grave of Christine Klein, he believed Kurten was not a necrophiliac.

Further proof of Kurten’s awareness was seen in the premeditated nature of his crimes, his ability to abandon a planned attack if he felt in danger of being disturbed, and his perfect memory of both his crimes and their chronological detail. Also revealed in the first week of trial were the deaths of 2 boys Kurten had confessed to drowning at the age of just 9, with the prosecution claiming that these deaths indicated Kurten’s homicidal propensities showing much earlier than 1913. This claim, however, was disputed by medical witnesses, who suggested that although they did indicate a certain depravity, these deaths shouldn’t be compared to Kurten’s later murders because to a child, the death of a friend may seem inconsequential. On cross-examination Kurten’s defence attorney, Dr. Alex Wehner, challenged these conclusions, arguing that the sheer range of perversions Kurten engaged in argued insanity, but each doctor and psychiatrist remained certain that Kurten was legally sane and responsible for his actions. In an attempt to discredit many of the charges levied against Kurten, Wehner also questioned whether the occasional physical inconsistencies described by his client in his confession equated to him having invented at least some of the crimes, therefore supporting the contention of a diseased mind. One expert, Dr. Karl Berg, agreed that sections of Kurten’s confession were false or inaccurate, but argued that the knowledge he possessed of the murder scenes and the wounds inflicted on the victims left him in no doubt that Kurten was guilty, and that the minor exaggerations in the confessions could be attributed to Kurten’s narcissistic personality.

The trial lasted 10 days. On April 22, the jury retired to consider their verdict – they deliberated for less than 2 hours before finding him guilty. He was sentenced to death on 9 counts of murder and 7 counts of attempted murder. Kurten showed no emotion as the sentence was passed, but in his final statement to the court, he stated that he now saw his crimes as “so ghastly that [he did] not want to make any sort of excuse for them”. He didn’t appeal his conviction but did submit a petition for a pardon to the Minister of Justice (who was known to be against capital punishment) but this was formally rejected on July 1. He remained composed on hearing the news and asked for permission to see his Confessor to write apology letters to the relatives of his victims, as well as a final farewell to his wife. All requests were granted. The same evening, Kurten received his last meal – wiener schnitzel, a bottle of wine, and fried potatoes. He ate the entire meal and requested a second helping. Prison staff granted his request. At 6am on July 2, 1931, Peter Kurten was beheaded by guillotine in the grounds of Klingelputz Prison, Cologne. He walked unassisted to the guillotine, accompanied by the prison psychiatrist and a priest. Just before his head was placed on the guillotine, Kurten asked the psychiatrist: “Tell me...after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures.” Following the execution, Kurten’s head was dissected and mummified, his brain removed and subjected to forensic analysis in order to try and explain his personality and behaviour. The examinations revealed no abnormalities. The autopsy of Kurten’s body revealed that his only physical abnormality was an enlarged thymus gland. Just after WWII, Kurten’s head was transported to America, where it is currently displayed at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! museum in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.