Nine-Lived Fiend

Confessing to eleven murders, to seven attempted murders, to a grand total of nearly 100 crimes, Peter Kuerten, a workman aged 47, sat in a neat blue serge suit, in the dock at Duesseldorf last week. A year and a half ago all Germany shuddered at the gruesome exploits of the "Duessel-dorf Murderer." Until he was jailed Duesseldorf children went to school in busses guarded by policemen with pistols (TIME, Jan. 13, June 9, 1930).

"I had to kill," confessed the Duesseldorf Murderer with stark simplicity. "Anybody would do as a victim. It was all the same to me whether they were women or girls or children or men. . . .

"I did not kill either people I hated, or people I loved. I killed whoever crossed my path at the moment my urge for murder took hold of me."

As he talked, Peter Kuerten's eyes often winked rapidly, his hands often fluttered. "These symptoms," Teuton psychiatrists at the trial told Teuton reporters, "betray a lust to kill."

Unnerved by the prisoner's mild but fluttery behavior, several women whom he had stabbed and left for dead but who turned up as witnesses at the trial had hysterics, screamed, fainted in the court. But no less calm than the prisoner was one stolid, buxom peasant wench. She told how Kuerten had got her down, pierced her 30 times with a dagger "until the blade broke."

"No, not with a dagger," objected Peter Kuerten. "I used one blade from a pair of scissors."

Asked when he committed his first murder, Kuerten said reminiscently, "Just before the War, in 1913 at Mulheim near Cologne. I had entered a house to rob, but I found a little girl there asleep.* I forgot my intention of stealing as a blood lust came over me for the first time. I strangled her. Then I cut her throat.

"In recent years I became tired of such murders. I planned to blow up railroad trains and buildings to cause large numbers of people to perish at the same time.

"But I never did," concluded Peter Kuerten wistfully, "and I suppose now I never shall."

Fascinated, the criminologists, psychiatrists and judge prolonged the trial with enthusiasm and curiosity. Although the prisoner had already confessed to every charge, Teutons hoped that further probing would bring to light details precious to Science.

Example: As an afterthought Peter Kuerten said: "I suppose my first murder was really committed when I was a boy of nine. I pushed two of my playmates into the Rhine and kept them under water with a pole."

"And did you feel remorse?" At this the psychiatrists poised pencils above notebooks.

"Well," said the Duesseldorf Murderer, scratching his head, trying to think back 38 years, "I remember that for a long time after that I was afraid of dark places."

Eventually the prisoner was convicted of nine murders and--as though he were a cat--was sentenced nine times to death by the thoroughgoing Duesseldorf Court.

As the judge droned monotonously "death . . . death . . . death . . . death . . . death . . . death . . . death . . . death . . . death," even crazy Peter Kuerten gradually became excited, volunteered at last his first expression of real remorse.

"My crimes seem so awful," he cried, "that I can find no excuse for them. I am ready to take the consequences."

Germans are executed with axe and chopping block by a brawny man bedight in evening clothes and black gloves. Seemingly Peter Kuerten's neck cannot escape the axe. But the Duesseldorf Court, unwilling to take the smallest chance of the nine death sentences being set aside by pardon or reprieve, wound up by sentencing the prisoner to toil 15 years at hard labor if not executed, deprived him of all his rights as a German citizen, ordered him to pay all the costs of his trial--one of the most expensive in German criminal history.

*Christine Klein, 10.

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