Vampire Killer, The, See: Haigh, John George.
Vampire of Dusseldorf, The, See: Kurten, Peter.
Van Buuren, Clarence Gordon, 1923-57, S. Afri. On Oct. 2, 1956, Myrna Joy Aken, eighteen, vanished from her home in Durban, S. Afri. A friend reported that she had seen Aken getting into a light-colored car; she had been observed in the company of a man who had come to see her at her office. When the car was traced to a radio shop, the owner of the auto said it had been used by one of his salesmen, Clarence Gordon Van Buuren, thirty-three, who returned it to him the day after Aken vanished, and then disappeared himself. When a search for Aken turned up no clues, her distraught family hired a medium, Nelson Palmer, who went into a trance and said the woman’s body would be found sixty miles away, in a drain under the road. Palmer went with the family to the spot he had described, just north of the village of Umtwalumi; the naked corpse was found there. Aken had been raped and shot.
Nine days after the slaying Van Buuren was picked up near Pinetown. His criminal record dated back to when he was seventeen, with charges of theft, forgery, escaping from custody, and passing bad checks. He claimed to have asked Aken out for a drink; she refused, and he went into a bar alone. Returning an hour later, he explained, he found the car parked fifty yards away, and opened the door to find the young woman with blood on her face. Panicking, he got rid of the corpse by throwing it in the culvert, he said. Tried in February 1957, Van Buuren maintained his innocence. But the fact that he had a large supply of .22-caliber ammunition—the type used to kill Aken—weighed against him, as did the fact that he was the last person to be seen with her. He was found Guilty, and hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on June 10, 1957.
van de Corput, Piet (AKA: John Hendricks), prom. 1915-16, U.S. In Autumn 1915, Barbara Wright, a widow, was walking with her son from the club where she worked in New York City, heading toward the rooming house where she lived. A man sprang out from behind a car and drove a long-handled dagger into her chest. He ran away as terrified onlookers watched. The detective assigned to the case interviewed the eyewitnesses and other roomers at the boarding house, and became convinced that the killer was John Hendricks, a Dutch man who also lived at the house and had attempted to assault Wright three months earlier. At that time he was arrested and found to be carrying a long-handled dagger. He claimed he was drunk at the time and did not know what he was doing. Convicted and sent to the workhouse, he wrote several letters to Wright while there, attemping to force himself on her again a few days before she was slain.
Thousands of flyers picturing the suspect’s face were circulated throughout New York and all major cities in the world, but turned up nothing. A detective went to a home for Dutch sailors in Hoboken, NJ., and learned from a man there that “Hendricks” was really Piet van de Corput, from the town of Breda near the Belgian border. It was a year after the killing when van de Corput was finally arrested in New York City. Not only had he been in New York the entire time, he had been robbed while on a drunken binge in the Bowery, and made a complaint against his assailants, later going before a grand jury and testifying in court.
Eyewitnesses to the Wright murder easily picked van de Corput out of a line-up. Prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney William Edwards, and defended by Bob Moore, who tried to prove that van de Corput’s confession was inadmissable because third-degree methods were used to obtain it, van de Corput himself overruled his defense. When Moore said that the line-up was not fair to the defendant, van de Corput himself announced to the court, “They treated me fairly.” The jury deliberated only a few minutes before finding him Guilty; he was sentenced to’ death. While awaiting execution at Sing Sing Prison, van de Corput obtained a picture of the woman he killed, which he carried with him to the electric chair, saying he would “meet Barbara in heaven.”
van der Merwe, Dorothea, and Swatz, Hermanus Lambertus, prom. 1920, S. Afri. In 1920, a convict named Gibson, also known as Dr. Gibson, who had been employed in a South African prison hospital since the 1918 influenza epidemic, attended a patient named Hermanus Lambertus Swatz. Swatz, who had been convicted of theft and was serving time at the Pretoria Central Prison, confided in Gibson, asking him about the way a body stayed preserved both in and out of a coffin, and what the chances were of fatal wounds being diagnosed after some years. Thinking that this information might lead to a remission of his own sentence, Gibson informed the head warder of their conversations. The body of Louis Tumpowski, a Polish Jew on the Treurfontein farm in the Lichtenburg district of Transvaal, was unearthed. When Tumpowski had disappeared, it was assumed that he had only left the district. Dorothea van der Merwe and Swatz had brutally murdered Tumpowski together. With Gibson’s evidence against Swatz, the killers were convicted and hanged.
van Heerden, Cornelius Johannes Petrus, 1909-1931, S. Afri. A 22-year-old railway worker who lost his job because of frequent, unexplained absences, Cornelius Johannes Petrus van Heerden lived with his parents in Bethlehem, S. Afri., about one hundred miles from Charleston. On Nov. 4, 1931, van Heerden had his first run-in with the law. Charged on six counts of theft by conversion, his father was the defrauded party who brought charges against him. Although he was found Guilty, the magistrate gave him a suspended sentence, taking his youth and, most probably, his first-time offender status, into consideration. Another charge, that of negligent driving, was still pending. Had van Heerden been found guilty of this offense, his maximum sentence would have been a moderate fine. He had not been arrested, but only summoned to appear in court. But, to avoid another appearance in any court, van Heerden decided to commit suicide, taking several people with him.
On Nov. 25, the unemployed man went to Bethlehem, stayed overnight there, and purchased fifty rounds of rifle ammunition and several revolver cartridges the next day. Looking up T.S. Lessing, an acquaintance, van Heerden informed him he would “be damned it’ he would appear in court, and brought a handful of cartridges out of his pocket, warning, “You watch, there is going to be bloodshed…” Returning home to pick up his father’s rifle, he told his brother he was going out for “a bit of shooting.” During that day, or the night before, van Heerden wrote several letters, including letters to the police, his father, and his girlfriend. He told the police that “though you now contemplate prosecuting me, you will probably have to prosecute my corpse.”
Van Heerden’s first victim was J.E. Darby, a commercial traveler whom he shot through the head when Darby pulled up on the road. Taking his car, the killer pushed Darby’s body down on the seat beside him, and continued on. Coming upon a native woman, he shot at her, continuing to fire on a railway gang as he looked for his father’s group, presumably with the intention of murdering his own father. Not finding him, the enraged killer threw a wallet with his farewell letters into the road. An Anglo-Boer war veteran, A.M. Prisloo, a well-known local citizen, was the next of van Heerden’s rampage victims; he was shot to death along with two of his native servants. Van Heerden killed five people and wounded six others, before finally turning the gun on himself and taking his own life.
van Rensburg, Smartryk Johannes Jacobus Jansen, d.1923, and Gordon-Lennox, Ellen, prom. 1923, S. Afri. Arriving in Upington, S. Afri., in January 1921, handsome and flirtatious Barend van Rensburg was popular with the women. He had an affair with Ellen Gordon-Lennox, daughter of George St. Leger Gordon-Lennox, better known as Scotty Smith, the uncrowned “King of the Kalahari” in the late 1870s. When Gordon-Lennox became pregnant, van Rensberg obtained some pills that terminated her pregnancy.
At the same time, van Rensburg was involved with Rachel de Kock, who also became pregnant. When de Kock revealed her condition to her father, and hinted that van Rensburg had offered to marry her, the seducer reluctantly became a bridegroom, even though he had already arranged a date to marry Gordon-Lennox later that year. On Apr. 25, 1922, de Kock and van Rensburg married. A child was born three months later. Unhappy with his marriage, van Rensburg soon resumed his relationship with Gordon-Lennox, and began asking Solomon Gilinsky, an Upington merchant, what grounds were sufficient for divorce. Gordon-Lennox wrote love letters to van Rensburg, and he was often called in at night to go to “work,” meeting Gordon-Lennox for clandestine evenings. Their love affair became common knowledge, and soon reached Mr. de Kock, who came to complain. His son-in-law denied anything but friendship with Gordon-Lennox.
Soon after Christmas, van Rensburg obtained some strychnine and added it to one of his wife’s headache powders. On Jan. 4, 1923, when Rachael complained of a headache, her husband brought in the box of various powders and she chose one to put in her coffee. She was soon reeling in pain, and Dr. W.M. Brocherds was called in. A neighbor who arrived on the scene, Lena Wylbach, was told by the gasping woman that her husband had given her a headache powder, and that she was sure it contained poison. The doctor arrived to find van Rensburg with his arms around his spouse’s neck, begging her to withdraw her accusation. Her last words to him were, “Kiss me. I’m dying.”
Through the incriminating evidence of love letters between Gordon-Lennox and van Rensburg, both were arrested for the murder, and tried together on Apr. 18, 1923, in Upington. Justice H.S. van Zyl presided, with E. Wingfield prosecuting along with A.J. Pienaar, and C.G. Hall for the defense. Van Rensburg claimed his wife had lied about his giving her a powder. Gordon-Lennox, pregnant again, was found Guilty along with her lover. Van Rensberg was executed on May 26, 1923. Gordon-Lennox had her baby in jail, and was released in 1931 after seven years as a model prisoner.
Vaquier, Jean Pierre (Vacquier, AKA J. Wanker), c.1878-1924, Brit. An impassioned French hotel clerk, a British matron on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and a drunken husband who managed an inn in Surrey comprised an unusual love triangle that culminated in murder in early Spring 1924. Jean Pierre Vaquier had served as a telephone operator in the French Army during WWI. After the war his skills with a wireless won him a job at the Hotel Victoria in Biarritz, demonstrating the entertainment potential of the radio to curious vacationers staying at the hotel. Using his own receiver Vaquier beamed musical concerts directly into the hotel salon.
In January, Mabel Theresa Jones registered at the Victoria to recover from the emotional shock of a serious business reversal which had left her nearly bankrupt. Jones was attracted to the middle-aged Vaquier and after a week they had begun an affair. Jones was only mildly drawn to Vaquier, and when her husband, Alfred George Poynter Jones, sent a telegram urging her to come home, Mabel broke off her relationship with Vaquier. Although Vaquier begged her not to go she remained firm on her resolve. She did permit Vaquier to accompany her to Paris but from there continued to Surrey alone.
The next day after parting with Jones in Paris, Vaquier headed for London. He dispatched a telegram to Jones from the Russell Hotel in Bloomsbury. “Arrived from Paris on business. Shall be very pleased to see you and to meet Mr. Jones. Perhaps you will inform me which evening.” Without waiting for a reply Vaquier turned up at the Joneses’ Blue Anchor Inn at Byfleet, Surrey, on Feb. 14, 1924. Although Jones paid his hotel bill and attempted to make him comfortable, it became evident to Vaquier that her ardor had cooled. When Jones refused to go away with him, Vaquier became increasingly desperate and finally decided to kill his rival, in the misguided hope of regaining Jones’s affection.
On Mar. 1, Vaquier called on an apothecary on Southampton Row, London. Vaquier told the clerk in French that he required two grains of strychnine—enough poison to kill four healthy men—for a wireless experiment he was conducting. After completing the purchase, Vaquier signed the register under the alias, “J. Wanker.” Back in Byfleet he waited for the right moment to administer the poison to the unsuspecting Mr. Jones. The opportunity came on the evening of Mar. 28 when the innkeeper threw a big party.
Guessing that Mr. Jones, an inveterate drunk, would probably wake up with a terrible hangover, Vaquier laced the hotel bar’s bromo salts with strychnine. The next morning Mr. Jones did wake up with a hangover and as Vaquier had anticipated, took some of the medicine. Vaquier was actually present at the bar as Mr. Jones took the salts and complained they were bitter. His wife immediately examined the blue bottle and found they had been tampered with. Vaquier obligingly helped carry Mr. Jones up to his bedroom, but the innkeeper was dying. When Dr. Frederick Carle arrived, he was unable to help Mr. Jones who died minutes later. Although Vaquier had removed the bottle, Carle noticed several crystals lying on the floor near the bar. A chemical analysis revealed the presence of strychnine.
Vaquier remained at the Blue Anchor for a few more days. He was about to move to the Railway Hotel when Jones confronted him with her suspicions. The Frenchman moved to Woking on Apr. 4. When a picture of Vaquier was printed in the paper, the Southampton chemist who sold Vaquier the poison, recognized it and notified Scotland Yard. Vaquier was arrested at the Railway Hotel on Apr. 19, and tried at the Guildford Assizes the following July before Justice Horace Avory. He was found Guilty of murder and hanged at Wandsworth Prison on Aug. 12, 1924.
Vasil, George T., 1959- , U.S. In Fort Pierce, Fla., George Vasil, a slight boy of fourteen, tried to rape 12-year-old Pamela Vasser on Sept. 19, 1974. Physically unable to commit the act, Vasil crushed Vasser’s skull with a rock, sexually assaulted her with a branch, and hid her corpse in the grass. Because of the “brutal and vicious” nature of the crime, Vasil was tried as an adult in a local circuit court three months later. He was found Guilty by a jury and, on Dec. 12, 1974, was sentenced to death in the electric chair. He had just turned fifteen. On Oct. 10, 1979, Vasil’s sentence was changed to life in prison.
Velez, Luis S., 1949- , U.S. On the night of Sept. 16, 1975, Manhattan police officers Sergeant Frederick Reddy and Andrew Glover were checking a car parked in front of one of the tenement buildings on East Fifth Street between avenues A and B. Luis S. Velez pulled out a loaded revolver and shot both officers before they could draw their guns. He later said that he was afraid they would arrest him on bank robbery charges. Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau recommended that Velez be allowed to plead to lesser charges of second-degree murder, rather than face the death penalty if convicted. In requesting that Judge Burton B. Roberts of the State Supreme Court accept the plea, Assistant District Attorney Robert J. Lehner cited a June 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which raised questions about the constitutionality of the mandatory statute in New York which demands execution in cases of the murder of prison guards or police officers.
At a two-hour hearing, during which Velez repeatedly laughed whenever the crime was mentioned, Justice Roberts explained, “…It is in the public’s interest to accept the plea.” The prosecutor feared that the state’s newdeath penalty law might be invalid or that a first-degree murder conviction would have resulted in a costly retrial. Velez remained standing with his arms folded throughout most of the hearing and told Roberts he shot the officers after they called him racist names. Criticism of the reduced charges plea came from the officers widows and from U.S. Senator James Buckley who called it “an affront to every policeman, every wife of a policeman, and every widow of an officer slain in the line of duty.” On Nov. 22, 1976, Justice Roberts sentenced Velez to a 25-year-to-life jail term. When Velez told Roberts in court, “I have no regrets,” Roberts called the convicted man a “lying, despicable, cowardly, brutal, thieving human being.” Velez maintained that he had been the victim of the inequitable rules of a “police state,” adding, “If I don’t get dignity, I take it.” District Attorney Morgenthau recommended that Velez never be granted parole.
Vernon, Roger (Robert, AKA: Charles Lacroix; Georges Lacroix), prom. 1936-37, Brit-Fr. On Jan. 24, 1936, the body of 56-year-old Max Kassel, also known as Red Maxie or Scarface, was discovered by a carpenter riding his bicycle outside St. Albans, Hertfordshire. The maker’s labels had been removed from his clothing and, although no money was in his pockets, an expensive ring remained on his finger. Marks on his knuckles and face indicated that he had struggled for his life. Scotland Yard Inspector Sharpe obtained a photograph and fingerprints of the man. He had been both a pimp and a white slave trader in earlier years, and owned a small jewelry shop which served as a front for his fencing. Under the alias of “Allard,” Kassel had pretended to be a French Canadian. Scotland Yard was soon on the trail of Roger Vernon, an ex-convict who had some business dealings with Kassel. The two had fought about the debt on the Jan. 23, 1936. Vernon’s girlfriend, Suzanne Bertron, a prostitute, was implicated in the crime; it was later deduced that the murder had taken place in her London apartment in the Soho district. Vernon and Bertron were arrested at a Paris Hotel, where they had gone after they fled Great Newport Street. Both were tried in Paris, because of a French law which prohibited their extradition. On Apr. 29, the Paris jury deliberated for forty minutes before finding Vernon Guilty of premeditated murder but with extenuating circumstances. He was sentenced to ten years hard labor. Bertron was acquitted on charges of being an accessory.
Veronica Mutineers, 1902-03, Brit. In October 1902, the barque Veronica set sail on a voyage filled with mutiny and murder. Under the command of Captain Alexander Shaw, the Veronica, with a crew of twelve, set sail from Ship Island in the Gulf of Mexico for Montevideo. The captain and his officers were known as rough taskmasters of the old school. The remainder of the crew included Gustav Rau and Otto Monsson, the ringleaders of the impending mutiny. Their intentions were clear when they both brought guns on board. Another rough character, Willem Smith and 19-year-old Harry Flohr, eventually joined the Germans in the mutiny.
Although it definitely was not a happy ship, things went well until they were becalmed in the Atlantic off Brazil. On Dec. 8, 1902, after a minor altercation, First Officer Alexander MacLeod was beaten and thrown overboard. After holding the captain and second mate hostage for several days, the men killed them and put the other four seamen overboard. That left Rau, Monsson, Smith, Flohr and the ship’s cook. After setting the ship afire, they set sail in a lifeboat and were picked up by a passing ship which took them to a Brazilian port. From there they boarded a British ship, and on the way back to England Harry Flohr and the ship’s cook confessed. The remaining three mutineers were tried for mutiny and found Guilty. Monsson was let off because of his youth, but Rau and Smith were hanged at Liverpool’s Walton Prison on June 2, 1903.
Vidal, Ginette, 1931- , Fr. Although Gerard Osselin had signed a contract giving his lover the right to kill him if he was unfaithful, the contract did not keep her from being tried for murder in a court of law. Osselin and a somewhat older neighbor, Ginette Vidal, fell in love and left their families to set up housekeeping together. The pair entered into a contractwhich provided that if either of them was unfaithful, the aggrieved party could kill the guilty party.
In November 1972, Ginette found evidence that Osselin was seeing his former wife. In keeping with the terms of the contract, she picked up a gun and shot him to death as he slept. After staying alone with the corpse for a number of days, acting as if he were still alive, the police, alerted by the Osselin family, broke in and arrested Vidal. Vidal proudly displayed the contract which she believed was complete justification for her actions. The French courts did not agree. She was convicted and sent to prison.
Vollman, John Jacob, 1938- , Can. On May 13, 1958, 16-year-old Gaetane Bouchard of Edmundston, New Brunswick, failed to return home after a shopping trip. Her father, Wilfrid Bouchard, contacted his daughter’s 20-year-old boyfriend John Vollman. Vollman said he had broken off their relationship, and planned to marry someone else. After notifying police of his daughter’s disappearance, Bouchard and his 15-year-old son, Jean Guy Bouchard, went down to the local lover’s retreat area, a gravel pit on the outskirts of town. They found a suede slipper, and then the body of the murdered girl. She had been stabbed and her body dragged over the ground. Plaster casts were made of automobile tire tracks found near the pit, and two minuscule chips of green paint were discovered.
A farmer remembered seeing Bouchard and a friend get into a green Pontiac with Maine license plates, and two other witnesses recalled seeing Bouchard sitting next to the driver in the same car. One of Bouchard’s schoolmates later claimed that Vollman had a reputation for wanting to “go too far.” Questioned by officers, Vollman denied any involvement, but the paint chips found at the scene fit spots on his car, and a strand of his hair was found clutched in Bouchard’s fist. Tried on Nov. 4, 1958, in Edmundston, before Judge Arthur L. Anglin, Vollman pleaded not guilty. He was defended by attorney J.A. Pichette. Albany M. Robichaud handled the prosecution. Vollman later claimed a loss of memory resulting from psychic shock as explanation for why he could not remember the events of the day of the girl’s death. The jury found him Guilty of murder and he was sentenced to death. On Feb. 14, 1959, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
von Sydow, Frederick, prom. 1932, Swed. On Mar. 4, 1932, a triple murder was committed on the small resort island of Mortnas, off the Swedish coast near Stockholm. The victims, Mr. and Mrs. Zetterberger, and Mrs. Zetter-berger’s sister, were beaten to death with a piece of iron pipe. Their house had been ransacked and the contents of their safe stolen. Chief Police Inspector Thour soon learned that Zetterberger had loaned money recently, and that several of his investments were failing. A bank guard and a cab driver informed the police inspector that Zetterberger had visited the home of Swedish aristocrat Baron Hjalmar von Sydow not long before he was killed. Von Sydow contributed no new information, but Thour observed that he seemed overwrought and unnerved. A new twist in the case developed when von Sydow was found dead, killed with his housekeeper and a maid. There was evidence of an intense struggle, and a crushed piece of silk from a woman’s slip was found under the murdered man’s body. The murder weapon, an iron rod, was found in the manager’s office of the Tanger restaurant. A cab driver recalled picking up an attractive young couple and taking them to von Sydow’s address, where they told him to wait, reappearing a half hour later and ordering him to drive them to the Tanger. Baron von Sydow’s son, Frederick von Sydow, a student at Upsala University, came to Stockholm, and talked to police, but was unable to add anything to the investigation.
Inspector Thour went to Commissioner Gustavason and said he believed he knew the identity of the murderers and would need to use the baron’s son to capture them. Gustavason agreed, with misgivings, to the plan of having the son stay at the baron’s apartment. At 10 p.m., Thour and Gustavason walked to the door of von Sydow’s apartment and heard a stifled scream from inside. Thour lunged for the door, broke it open, and watched a young woman felled by a gunshot. Rushing towards the door where the gunfire had come from, Thour was stopped by Frederick von Sydow, who told him he was too late, then turned his gun on himself and fired. With his wife as an accomplice, von Sydow had committed all of the murders. The couple, who had been heavy drinkers and lived wildly in the two years since they met and wed, had turned to Zetterberger to borrow money when the baron, disgusted with their lifestyle, had finally refused to finance them any longer. When Zetterberger went directly to the baron to demand payment, he told the money lender to have his son arrested for the debt. Rejecting the idea of jail, the son had chosen murder, and suicide, as his way out.
Vontsteen, Franciscus Wynand, prom. 1971, S. Afri. A real estate agent in Pretoria, South Africa, Franciscus Wynand Vontsteen met Sonjia Raffanti in 1967, and became her lover. Vontsteen was jealous and possessive of Raffanti, who married police officer Francois Swanepoel two days after meeting Vontsteen. When her husband was posted to official duties on the northern border of South Africa, Vontsteen and Raffanti moved in together, and she became pregnant with his child. When the child was born, Swanepoel accepted it as his own, and Vontsteen became increasingly jealous.
On July 3, 1971, the Swanepoels came back to their house to discover that they had been robbed, and a pistol stolen. Four days later, Raffanti claimed she had been accosted on the street by a native who carried her husband’s gun, and threatened to shoot her. On the night of Aug. 2, she was heard shouting that there was a native in the house, just before her husband was found dead from gunshot wounds. A local man soon came forward to say that Vontsteen had asked him to help murder Swanepoel. Told that Sonjia had confessed, Vontsteen admitted stealing the pistol and firing two shots into Swanepoel’s head while his wife lay beside him in bed. They were tried together for murder in Pretoria in 1971, a trial that resulted in Sonjia receiving a fifteen-year prison sentence and Vontsteen hanging for his crime in October 1971.
Vucetic, Slobodan, 1944- , and Simic, Slobodan, 1949- , and Potkonjac, Vjekoslav, 1942- , Ger. At the very beginning of 1971, Werner Schmidt and his wife were driving home from a New Year’s celebration in Hennef, Ger. To avoid the drunks on the autobahn, the Schmidts took a seldom-used country road that led through the villages of Neunkirchen, Wohlfahrt, and Much. It was a cold, blustery night with temperatures near zero.
Suddenly a naked man appeared before them in the roadway, waving frantically. Mrs. Schmidt, who had been dozing, did not see the figure in the snow and encouraged her husband to keep driving.
At 5 a.m., Hans-Dieter Mueller drove down the same road on his way to work. Although Mueller saw a man lying beside the road, he did not stop. When he later reported the incident to Constable Gunther Weber in Wohlfahrt, police investigated and found the body of a young man dressed in only a pair of briefs with his feet tied together with baling wire.
The victim was 18-year-old Ulrich Nacken, an electrician who had failed to come home the night before after celebrating the new year at the Toeff-Toeff Discotheque in Cologne. His parents told police that he had left his home in the 1966 gray Ford automobile he had purchased a month earlier. It was determined that death was caused by freezing, not by the blows to the face which Nacken had suffered. A trail led 200 yards back into the woods from where the body was found. The evidence indicated that the victim had been tied to a tree, but had managed to extricate himself and hop to the side of the road. A bulletin was issued in the surrounding area for the gray Ford. Two junior patrolmen, Arnold Klein and Leopold Brettweiler, spotted the vehicle between Wohlfahrt and Neunkirchen.
The driver attempted to escape from the pursuing officers, but was trapped on a dead-end road. The operator of the vehicle was a Yugoslav national named Slobodan Vucetic. A quick search of the car uncovered Ulrich Nacken’s driver’s license in the glove compartment. It was apparent that one or more accomplices had escaped just before the police arrived. Police dog patrols easily tracked down the second man who was identified as Slobodan Simic. Vucetic immediately accused Simic of killing Nacken.
By the time they had reached the police station, a third man, 29-year-old Vjekoslav Potkonjac, was also implicated in the murder. According to the confessions of the three men, they were drinking beer at the Toeff-Toeff when Nacken stopped by. On the spur of the moment they decided to abduct Nacken and steal his car. They forced him to the car at knifepoint, bound him with wire they found in the car, and put him in trunk. After visiting Simic’s girlfriend in Siegburg, they stripped Nacken, beat him, and tied him to a tree in the woods. The three Yugoslavians might have slipped through the police dragnet and returned to Yugoslavia undetected, but they became curious and were returning to the scene of the crime when they were spotted by the two officers.
On Nov. 30, 1971, Vucetic, Simic, and Potkonjac were found Guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. Werner Schmidt received six months for failing to assist a person in danger, a serious crime under German law.