The decade of the 1940s has many sex murders—more than the previous decade—yet almost no mass murders like those of the 1920s and 1930s. Perhaps the mass slaughter of the Second World War kept potential serial killers otherwise occupied. One of the few exceptions is the German Paul Ogorzov—the ‘S-Bahn rapist’—who, in fact, began his career of violence shortly before the war.
His first victim, a gym teacher named Frieda Lausche, was travelling on the S-Bahn (short for Schnell-Bahn, or fast railway) on the evening of 20 September 1940, when the man sitting opposite her in the dimly lit carriage suddenly flung open the door and hurled her out. Because she was supple and in good training, she succeeded in falling safely, and hurried to the police. They were frankly incredulous. Why should a man simply fling a woman from a moving train, with no attempt at either assault or robbery? And why was she not scratched and bruised? They agreed to look into the case, then quietly forgot about it.
Three weeks later they had to revise their opinion. On 11 October 1940, a secretary named Ingeborg Goetz was travelling on the elevated railway between Rummelsberg and Karlshorst around midnight when a man in the carriage struck her on the head with some sort of club, then slashed her stomach with a knife. After this he opened the door and threw her out. She recovered in hospital, but was unable to describe her attacker, except to say he wore a peaked cap and some kind of uniform with brass buttons.
Now the police were inclined to wonder if the attacker might have been responsible for a murder that had happened a week before the attack on Ingeborg Goetz: a war widow named Gerda Dietrich had been found stabbed to death in her cottage near the S-Bahn, in the suburb of Sommerland. It had been assumed she was the victim of a burglar, but wounds in the stomach—similar to those of Frau Goetz—suggested the madman who hurled women from trains.
Three weeks later, on 3 December, the corpse of a girl was found near the S-Bahn station at Rummelsberg; she was identified as 22-year-old Matilda Hollesch, and she had been clubbed to death with a blow on the back of the head, and then raped. A few hours after this attack, another woman was found by the S-Bahn track nearby; she had been struck violently on the head and hurled from the train. This victim, 20-year-old postal clerk Irmgard Frank, had not been raped.
The following day, a passenger found the murder weapon down the back of a seat: a two-foot piece of lead-covered cable, stained with blood and human hairs. Forensic tests established that it had been used to kill both women.
Nearly three weeks later, at 7 o’clock in the morning on 22 December, the killer bludgeoned and hurled from the train a housewife named Maria Bahr, again killing her.
Now Detective Wilhelm Ludtke, one of Berlin’s leading investigators, decided to try placing decoys on the trains—armed policewomen or volunteers. He also decided that ‘official guides’ would escort young women who had to travel home late at night. But only two weeks later, on 3 January 1941, a man who had claimed to be an official guide pushed a cinema usher out of the train; fortunately, she was only scratched and bruised. But forty-eight hours later, a 23-year-old telephone operator named Sonia Marke died when she was hurled from a train.
The skill shown by the S-Bahn rapist in avoiding traps suggested either a policeman or a railway employee: the description of survivors suggested the latter. But soon after the last murder one of the women ‘decoys’ almost succeeded in arresting the killer. Alone in a carriage with an S-Bahn employee, she became suspicious of his sudden movements and his evident desire to make her nervous, and announced that she was a policewoman and that he was under arrest. The man leapt from the train as it pulled into a platform and disappeared.
On 11 February another woman, Martha Zernowski, was killed as she was clubbed and hurled from a train. On 20 February Lisa Novak, a 30-year-old factory worker, was raped, clubbed and hurled to her death from the train.
This time an arrest was made—a known sex offender named Richard Bauer, whose footprint was found in the girl’s blood. He insisted that he had merely stumbled over her in the dark, but was kept in custody as a suspect.
Another possible suspect—among many—was a 28-year-old railway worker named Paul Ogorzov, a married man with two children. The Rummelsberg Stationmaster admitted that he was friendly with Ogorzov, and often told him what measures the police were planning. But Ogorzov was at work at the time of many of the murders, and workmates vouched for him; he was dropped as a suspect.
The attacks now ceased until 3 July 1941, when a woman named Olga Opell was found dead beside the tracks. Since Bauer was in prison, he was automatically exonerated and released.
But investigators now learned that Paul Ogorzov had slipped away from his job as a telegraph operator at about the time of the murder of Olga Opell—he had been seen climbing over a fence. Under interrogation, Ogorzov admitted this, and explained that he had a girlfriend who lived nearby. This proved to be true; moreover, the girl declared that Ogorzov had been with her at the time Olga Opell was attacked. But when traces of blood were found on Ogorzov’s tunic, the questioning was renewed. He explained that one of his children had cut his finger. But Ludtke now took a long look at the map showing where attacks had taken place, and observed that most of them were along the route between the Rummelsberg station and Ogorzov’s home. This seemed too much of a coincidence, so he began pressing Ogorzov about reports from women that a man had shone his torch in their eyes. Ogorzov finally admitted that he had done this on two occasions. Pressed to name precisely where this had happened, Ogorzov became confused, then mentioned a location where, in fact, a rape had occurred.
The victims who had escaped were brought in to confront Ogorzov; one positively identified him, and mentioned that he had worn a coat with a very wide collar; when police found such a coat in Ogorzov’s home, he admitted to attempted assault on four women. Asked to pinpoint the places, he mentioned Sommerland, where Gerda Dietrich had been stabbed to death in her cottage. His state of confusion was now so great that he admitted that Gerda Dietrich had been one of the women he had beaten with his fists. This left Ludtke in no doubt that there had been so many victims that he was mixing them up.
Finally, shock tactics worked where long questioning had failed; when Ludtke showed him the smashed skulls of several victims, the harassed Ogorzov suddenly broke down, and admitted that he was the S-Bahn killer. He also admitted that he had been guilty of a number of sexual attacks on women since 1939, mostly in the course of attempts to pick them up.
The incident that had turned him into a killer had occurred a few weeks before he threw the first victim—the gym teacher from the moving train. He had accosted a woman near the Rummelsberg station, and she had screamed, bringing her menfolk from a nearby house. They beat up Ogorzov so badly that he had to spend a week in bed. He emerged vengeful and ruthless. Women would pay for this affront to his dignity…
And so the first two victims were hurled from the train, an act that he confessed gave him sadistic pleasure—his voice became hoarse as he described the sensation of opening the door and throwing them out into the darkness. But he quickly progressed to rape and murder, killing most victims with a tremendous blow from the lead-covered cable.
Perhaps because Ogorzov was a member of the Nazi Party, and the authorities wished to avoid embarrassment, his trial (on 21 July 1941) was rushed through in one day, and he was beheaded the following day.
The same embarrassment seems to have led the Nazis to hush up the crimes of another serial killer, Bruno Lüdke.
Lüdke was born in 1909; he was definitely mentally defective, in the same way as Earle Nelson. He began his murders at the age of 18. During the war he found it easy to kill. He was arrested for a sexual assault and sterilized by order of Himmler’s SS. He was a petty thief (like Kürten) and a sadist who enjoyed torturing animals and (on one occasion) running down a woman with his horse-drawn delivery van. (He worked as a laundry roundsman.)
On 29 January 1943, a 51-year-old woman, Frieda Rösner, was found strangled on the outskirts of a wood near Berlin where she had been collecting fuel. Kriminal Kommissar Franz, in charge of the case, examined all the known criminals in Köpenick, the nearby village. These included Lüdke, who lived at 32 Grüne Trift. When he was asked if he had known the murdered woman, Lüdke admitted that he had, and that he had last seen her in the woods. Asked if he had killed her, he sprang at his interrogator and had to be overpowered; he then admitted he was the murderer, and added that under Paragraph 51 (concerning mental defectives) he could not be indicted for the crime. Lüdke went on to confess to killing eighty-five women throughout Germany since 1928. His normal method was strangulation or stabbing with a knife, and although he stole their belongings, rape was the chief motive. Franz investigated the murders and after a year, reported that it seemed to be true that Lüdke was responsible for all the crimes he confessed to. But it is also true that local police chiefs blamed all their unsolved murders on Lüdke, the ideal scapegoat.
Lüdke believed that he could never be indicted because he was insane. In fact, the embarrassment of various police forces who had arrested innocent men for Lüdke’s crimes led to the case being hushed up and treated as a State secret. Lüdke was sent to a hospital in Vienna where he was a guinea-pig for various experiments, and one of the injections killed him on 8 April 1944.
In London during the days of the blitz, another sadistic killer was responsible for a brief reign of terror that was comparable to that of Jack the Ripper.
In the early hours of 9 February 1942, a 40-year-old schoolmistress, Miss Evelyn Hamilton, was found strangled in an air-raid shelter in Montagu Place, Marylebone. Her handbag was missing; she had not been sexually assaulted. On 10 February, Mrs Evelyn Oatley, known as Nita Ward, a 35-year-old ex-revue actress, was found dead in her Wardour Street flat. She was found naked on the bed; her throat had been cut and the lower part of her body mutilated with a tin-opener. Fingerprints were found on the tin-opener and a mirror.
On 11 February, a Tuesday, another woman was murdered, although the police did not find out about it until three days later. She was Mrs Margaret Lowe, aged 43; she lived alone in a flat in Gosfield Street in the West End. She had been strangled with a silk stocking, and mutilated with a razor blade in the same way as Mrs Oatley. She was discovered on Friday by her 14-year-old evacuee daughter who came to pay a visit.
Some hours after Mrs Lowe’s body was found, the fourth victim was also discovered. She was Mrs Doris Jouannet, whose husband was the night manager of a Paddington Hotel. When he returned home on Friday evening he noticed that the milk had not been taken in. Mrs Jouannet had been strangled with a stocking and mutilated with a razor blade. It soon transpired that Mrs Jouannet had been in the habit of picking up soldiers in Leicester Square pubs while her husband was on night duty; he had last seen her alive at ten o’clock on the previous evening.
Shortly after Mrs Jouannet’s body was discovered, a young airman tried to accost a Mrs Heywood in a pub near Piccadilly. She refused, and he followed her out into the blacked-out street, saying ‘You must at least kiss me good night.’ He dragged her into a doorway and throttled her into unconsciousness. A passer-by heard the scuffle, and investigated; the man ran away, leaving behind his gas-mask. This had his service number stencilled on it.
The young airman immediately picked up another woman and drove with her in a taxi to her flat in Southwark Street, Paddington. She was Mrs Mulcahy, known as Kathleen King. In her room, the light failed, and the airman seized her by the throat. Her terror of the ‘ripper’ who had already killed four women made her fight violently and scream. The airman fled, leaving behind his belt.
From the gas-mask case, the attacker was identified as Gordon Frederick Cummins, a 28-year-old RAF cadet, married and living in North London. He was arrested within twelve hours of the attack on Kathleen King, on returning to his billet in St John’s Wood.
Cummins had a curious record. Although he came from a good family and was well educated, he had been dismissed from a series of jobs as unreliable and dishonest. He had married in 1936 the private secretary of a theatrical producer. One of his companions declared he was a ‘phoney’, that he spoke with a fake Oxford accent and claimed he had a right to use ‘honourable’ before his name because he was the illegitimate son of a member of the House of Lords. He was known as ‘the Duke’ to his companions.
His fingerprints corresponded with those on the mirror and tin-opener; also, like the killer, he was left-handed. It appeared later that another prostitute had had a narrow escape from death; Cummins had accompanied her home on the night he killed Mrs Oatley, but she had mentioned that she had no money, and Cummins, who killed for cash, left her alone.
He was sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, and executed on 25 June 1942, during an air raid. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, who had performed the post mortem on Mrs Oatley, also performed one on Cummins.
Like Cummins, Neville Heath would have undoubtedly gone on to commit more murders if he had not been caught—or, in fact, virtually given himself up. Born in 1917, Heath was one of those men who seem to be born to be petty crooks. By the age of 20 he had been dismissed from the RAF for bouncing cheques and stealing a car. After that, posing as ‘Lord Dudley’, he bounced more cheques and received probation; still under 21 he was sent to Borstal for three years for stealing jewellery from a family he was staying with—he was engaged to the daughter. (Heath was immensely attractive to women—one brother officer called him the male equivalent of the femme fatale.) At the outbreak of the war he was allowed to join the army, but was soon in trouble in Cairo for somehow getting the paymaster to give him two salaries, and was again cashiered. On his way back to England on a troopship, he seduced a mother and her 17-year-old daughter, and terrified the daughter by hitting her as he made love, inflicting some unpleasant bruises. He decided to remain in South Africa, and swindled a bank in Durban by producing an apparently genuine letter on Air Ministry notepaper authorizing a bank to pay him money. When Durban began to see through him he moved to Johannesburg and swindled hotels with plausible stories about money that was on its way from England. Then, incredibly, he was admitted into the South African Air Force, and even when they learned that he was a con-man, they allowed him to remain. By this time he had married a girl from a wealthy family, and for a year at least, the marriage was happy. Then, in 1944, he was seconded to the RAF again, and at Finmere, Oxfordshire, succeeded in getting engaged to nine girls at the same time. (The reason, almost certainly, is that ‘respectable’ girls would only go to bed with a man when he had promised marriage.) When the body of a WAAF was found not far from the station, with bruises and injuries to her genitals, Heath was suspected, but never charged. Back in South Africa, he was involved in a car accident that left a young nurse burned to death—Heath claimed he had been thrown out of the car by the crash. His wife divorced him. Arrested again for dud cheques and posing as a lieutenant-colonel, he was cashiered from the South African Air Force and deported to England.
In February 1946 the police were called to the Strand Palace Hotel in London, where Heath had been caught—naked—whipping a nearly unconscious girl. Because she refused to lodge a complaint he was released. Soon after this he was fined ten pounds for posing as an Air Force officer. Not long after, he was again caught flogging a naked girl, who was tied to a bed in a hotel bedroom; again the woman refused to charge him.
Finally, on 21 June 1946, Heath was carried away as he flogged a 32-year-old artist named Margery Gardner, and this time no one interrupted them—perhaps because he made sure that her face was rammed into the pillow. She suffocated to death—but not before Heath had flogged her with a riding whip, bitten her nipples until they were almost detached, and rammed a poker into her vagina. The body was discovered the next morning by a chambermaid. By that time Heath was already on his way to the Ocean Hotel at Worthing, from which he telephoned the girl who had spent the previous Saturday night with him in the same hotel where he had killed Margery Gardner—the Pembridge Court in Notting Hill. On a visit to the girl’s parents, he learned that the police wanted to question him about the murder, whereupon he wrote them a letter claiming that he had lent his room key to Margery Gardner and a male friend, and found her body when he visited the room early the next morning.
A week later, on 3 July, he was staying in the Tollard Royal Hotel in Bournemouth, posing as Group Captain Rupert Brooke. There he met a pretty ex-Wren named Doreen Marshall. He persuaded her to have dinner with him, and to allow him to walk her back to her own hotel, the Norfolk. Witnesses who saw them together could see that she was nervous and tense. Five days later, Doreen Marshall’s body was found in a wooded dell called Branksome Dene Chine, beaten, mutilated and stabbed to death. The major injury was a Jack-the-Ripper-type slash from the inside of the thigh to the breasts. By then, Heath had already volunteered his help to the local police, and they had recognized him as the man wanted by Scotland Yard. A cloakroom ticket in Heath’s pocket led them to a briefcase that contained the riding whip with which Margery Gardner had been lashed.
Heath was tried for the murder of Margery Gardner—an odd decision, since her death was probably accidental—and executed at Pentonville on 16 October 1946. If, as seems likely, he was also guilty of the two earlier murders, then he certainly qualifies for a place in this book as a serial killer.
Even Germany—with its astonishing record of serial murder, from Grossmann to Ogorzov—became relatively quiescent in the 1940s. Apart from Lüdke, there is only Rudolf Pleil, a sex murderer who committed suicide in his cell in 1958. Pleil was a habitual criminal, a burglar among other things, who began by attacking women in order to rob them. (He always robbed his female victims as well as raping them.) Since 1945 he reckoned to have killed fifty women. He was a small, fat man with a friendly face (although he had a receding forehead which produced an ape-like effect).
Pleil, like Kürten, enjoyed murder, and referred to himself boastfully as ‘der beste Totmacher’ (the best death-maker). Full details of his crimes are unfortunately not available at the time of writing. Like Kürten, he used many weapons for his murders—stones, knives, hatchets and hammers to kill and mutilate his victims. When in prison he often wrote to the authorities, offering to reveal the whereabouts of another murder; in this way he would get an ‘airing’ to the town where he had buried one of his victims. On one occasion, he wrote to the mayor of a town offering his services as hangman, and telling him that if he wanted to study his qualifications, he should look in the well at the end of the town; a strangled body was discovered in this well. Pleil was a vain man who took pleasure in the horror he aroused and described himself as ‘quite a lad’. He is quoted as saying: ‘Every man has his passion. Some prefer whist. I prefer killing people.’
America has no cases of mass murder that date from the war years. But in June 1946, an 18-year-old Chicago student named William Heirens was caught as he tried to burgle an apartment building, and was grilled by the police until he confessed to three murders: those of Josephine Ross, a widow who was stabbed in the throat on 3 June 1945; Frances Brown, who was shot and then stabbed in her apartment; and Suzanne Degnan, a 6-year-old girl who was removed from her bed on 7 January 1946 and dismembered. Heirens claimed that the murders were actually committed by an alter ego called George, and explained that he had started burgling apartments to steal women’s panties. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. In recent years, Heirens’ defenders—like Dolores Kennedy (author of William Heirens: His Day in Court)—have argued that the confession was forced out of him by threats of the electric chair; Heirens himself continues to insist that he is totally innocent of everything but burglary. He also claims that the famous inscription written in lipstick about the body of Frances Brown—‘For heaven’s sake catch me before I kill more I cannot control myself’—was written by a reporter. In an anthology called Murder in the 1940s, I have printed Heirens’ own account of the case, which makes some telling points in favour of his innocence. If he is innocent, of course, this would be one of the most disturbing miscarriages of justice in legal history. But even if not, it could be argued that a man who has served more than forty-five years in jail has more than paid for crimes committed as a teenager, and deserves to be paroled. (In fact, Heirens has had his application for parole rejected several times.)
The crimes of Marcel Petiot, a French doctor who, under the pretence of helping Jews to escape from occupied France, murdered them in a gas chamber and stole their possessions, belong to the realm of mass murder for profit rather than serial killing. So do the murders committed by Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the ‘Lonely Hearts’ killers. Fernandez answered ‘lonely hearts’ advertisements, seduced the women, then absconded with their savings. A woman he married in 1947 died on their honeymoon in Spain under mysterious circumstances, almost certainly poisoned by her husband. When Fernandez met Martha Beck, he was hoping to swindle her; in fact, she fell frantically in love with him, and all his efforts to escape were a failure. Together—with Martha posing as his sister—they plotted the death of Fernandez’s latest bride, Myrtle Young, who died of a brain haemorrhage after a massive dose of barbiturates. The next bride, Janet Fay, was murdered by Martha with a hammer after a quarrel, and was buried in a cellar in Queens, New York. Fernandez then married a widow with a 2-year-old daughter, Delphine Dowling. Delphine was despatched with her former husband’s service revolver, and her daughter Rainelle was drowned in a washtub. Suspicious neighbours alerted the police, who soon uncovered the two bodies in the basement. The two killers, labelled ‘America’s most hated murderers’, were electrocuted in March 1951.
The main interest of the case in this context is that Fernandez had been a normal, law-abiding citizen until he received a heavy blow on the head from a falling hatch on board a ship, and that it was after this that he turned into a ‘sex maniac’, an insatiable seducer of lonely women who kept many affairs going at the same time—in one case he even seduced a seriously deformed woman. When we recollect that Earle Nelson and Albert Fish had suffered similar accidents (and that the same is true of the 1970s serial killer Henry Lee Lucas), it raises the interesting question of whether such a blow could stimulate sex hormones to a degree that would turn such a person into a ‘sex maniac.’ (Ken McElroy, the town bully of Skidmore, Missouri, who was murdered by angry fellow citizens in 1981, also received a severe head injury when he was 18, and turned into a thief and rapist.) It is a question that is worth bearing in mind in the investigation of serial killers.
Another American murderer who deserves a brief mention in this survey is Howard Unruh, as the first of the ‘crazy gunmen’—men who go berserk and kill at random. Unruh was an ex-GI who returned to his home in Camden, New Jersey, after the war. He enrolled at the university, and spent all his spare time studying the Bible. Over the years he became increasingly paranoid, developing a particular hatred of various neighbours who had treated him with what he considered to be a lack of respect. He began to collect high powered weapons. When, on 5 September 1949, some prankster removed a gate he had installed in his garden fence, his control snapped, and he left the house with two loaded pistols. In the next twelve minutes he shot to death thirteen people—Unruh was a crack shot—then barricaded himself in his bedroom until the police persuaded him to surrender. He was found to be insane and committed to an asylum.
Unruh was not a serial killer—in the perfectly obvious sense that all his murders were committed at the same time; he was what FBI agent Robert Ressler calls a ‘spree killer’. But the resentment, the smouldering hatred of ‘society’, is typical of the serial killer, and during the next four decades, the ‘crazy gunman’ syndrome would become almost as familiar as the closely related problems of the political terrorist and the serial killer.