Further Reading For Peter Kürten
Monster: The True Story of Serial Killer Peter Kurten by CL Swinney
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Peter Kurten was a German serial killer that confessed to killing as many as 10 victims and attempting to murder an additional 31. Kurten’s methods were often so incredibly brutal that prior to his arrest, police and the press would refer to him as The Dusseldorf Monster and after his arrest and conviction when it was revealed that he would sometimes drink the blood of his victims directly from their wounds, Kurten was given the ghoulish name of The Vampire of Dusseldorf.
Kurten was sexually excited by the sight, and specifically, the sound of blood leaving the body and his murders were committed as a replacement for ordinary sexuality which held no appeal for him. Kurten’s obsession with blood put him in the realm of Richard Trenton Chase but he lacked that wild insanity that drove Chase. Instead, Kurten is closer in practice to Andrei Chikatilo.
After his arrest and conviction in April of 1931, Kurten was sentenced to die by guillotine. Just before he was to have his head place on the chopping block, he asked Karl Berg, the psychologist that had been studying him:
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.
When asked by the executioner if he had any last words, he simply replied, “No.”
Episodes: 339 & 340
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