The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (8 page)

The threat of imprisonment appears to have had no effect on Haarmann. As he awaited sentencing, he returned to the streets, parks and squares of Hanover, looking to have sex with boys and young men. His favourite hunting spot, however, was the city’s main railway station. It had always been a fertile territory, made even more so by the economic upheavals of the First World War and its aftermath. During one visit, sometime around his 40th birthday in the autumn of 1919, Haarmann was approached by a young male prostitute named Hans Grans. It would not be fair to say that Grans was everything Haarmann was not, but there certainly was a contrast. The middle-aged Haarmann was a pleasant-enough-looking man. Average in height, with a round face described as friendly-looking, he wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd. Grans, on the other hand, was remarkably handsome, with the chiselled blond features that would later come to be idealized and exploited by the Nazis. Although Grans was less than half Haarmann’s age, the two soon became constant lovers and close friends.

In March 1920, Haarmann finally began the nine-month sentence stemming from the police raid that had taken place 19 months earlier. Grans spent the remainder of the year roaming about Germany, supporting himself through thievery and prostitution. The two were reunited on Christmas Day and soon thereafter moved into an apartment together. They appeared as two respectable, well-dressed men, all the while stealing laundry from clothes lines. Their ill-gotten gains were sold in the market across from the station in which they had first met. Haarmann further contributed to the household finances through a disability pension. While the state may have considered him unable to work, Haarmann found employment with the local police. This man, whom the authorities had sent to prison the previous year, became one of their most valuable informers – Haarmann appeared to have no hesitation when it came to turning people in. As hyperinflation and economic collapse caused turmoil in the lives of their neighbours, Haarmann and Grans managed to maintain a comfortable, if modest, lifestyle in their little one-room Neuestrasse apartment.

Whether Grans knew of his partner’s 1918 murder of Friedel Roth is a matter of speculation. What is certain is that by early 1923, the prostitute knew his partner to be a murderer. In February, Haarmann detained two boys in his favourite train station. The less attractive of the pair he dismissed. The other, Fritz Franke, was made to accompany Haarmann to his home. When Grans arrived home later in the day, the body of the dead boy was lying in the room.

From this point, the murders continued at a frequent and steady pace. Haarmann’s method had little variation and was extremely effective. On some occasions he would pick up boys by offering employment or a place to stay. Other incidents would begin with Haarmann approaching his victims with the claim that he was a police officer. The latter pretence was used so frequently, and with such effect, that at least one guard at the station thought Haarmann was a police detective.

Sexual frenzy

The boys would then be taken to the Neuestrasse apartment where Haarmann would kill them by biting through their throats in a moment of sexual frenzy.

As he preyed on runaways, it was quite some time before the authorities began to suspect that something untoward was taking place. It wasn’t until 17 May 1924, when a skull was found by children playing along the Leine, that the fate of missing children and young men began to become apparent. Within a month, three more skulls had been discovered along the riverbank. Autopsies indicated that they belonged to young males ranging in age from 12 to 20 years. Following the discovery of a sack filled with human bones, the Leine was dammed and the riverbed inspected by police and municipal workers. Over 500 body parts were found.

Haarmann, like the whole city of Hanover, was well aware of the investigation. Although he was on the police payroll as an informer, he was among the suspects. In fact, he was investigated in May and again in June – but still he continued to kill. His last known murder took place in June 1924. The victim was a young man named Erich de Vries, whom he had picked up at the train station with an offer of cigarettes.

As many of the disappeared had last been seen at the train station, the site became a focus of the investigation. In June, two of the youngest members of the force were sent by train from Berlin to Hanover. By pretending to be homeless, it was hoped that they would come into contact with the killer.

The luck that had six years earlier prevented the discovery of Friedel Roth’s severed head returned to Haarmann. At the station, the murderer met with a 15-year-old boy named Karl Fromm, who had once stayed with Haarmann and Grans. Irritated by the boy’s attitude, Haarmann sought to make things difficult by claiming to railway police that the boy was travelling under false papers. Fromm turned the tables on his former host by charging that he had been molested during his stay at the Neuestrasse apartment. As the young police officers waited in the train station, hoping to be approached by the killer, Haarmann was arrested.

As he was still a suspect in the disappearances, police took the opportunity to search Haarmann and Grans’ apartment. There they found clothing belonging to many of the missing and murdered boys. While Haarmann admitted to having sex with several of the missing boys, he maintained that he’d had nothing to do with their disappearances. He insisted that the items of clothing, which numbered in the hundreds, were just a part of his business as a dealer in used clothes. Gradually, however, evidence from other quarters was being gathered. Among those connecting the clothing dealer to the murders was a boy named Fritz Kahlmeyer who identified Haarmann as the police officer who had accompanied him and his friend to a local circus on the evening of the latter’s disappearance.

After weeks of interrogation, with evidence mounting, Haarmann confessed.

On 8 July 1924, 15 days after Haarmann’s arrest, police took Grans into custody.

The subsequent trial, beginning on 8 December 1924, was as spectacular as it was bizarre. Haarmann conducted his own defence in a casual manner, as if oblivious to the seriousness of the charges. Smiling, he told little jokes, smoked a cigar and complained about the number of women in the courtroom. As always, Grans appeared in stark contrast. Charged with two counts of murder, he was serious and intense. The two men turned on each other, the bitterness escalating after Haarmann accused his former lover of taking part in certain murders. When the trial drew to an end nine days later, both men received death sentences.

What followed was a twist worthy of de Maupassant. While working one day, a messenger came across a letter lying on a Hanover street. Addressed and ultimately delivered to Albert Grans, the father of Hans, the letter was a lengthy and detailed confession from Fritz Haarmann in which he, the Butcher of Hanover, revealed that he had framed his former lover. After his father passed the letter on to the authorities, Grans was retried and received a sentence of 12 years.

On 15 April 1925, Haarmann was beheaded. His life and crimes were adapted to the screen in the 1973 Ulli Lommel film
Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe
(The Tenderness of the Wolves). In 1995, Haarmann’s story returned to the screen in
Der Totmacher
(The Deathmaker). Starring Götz George, the script often uses the Butcher’s own words as recorded in the files of Erich Schultze, one of the psychiatric experts who interviewed Haarmann during his last days.

But what of Hans Grans? After his release from prison he returned to Hanover, where it seems he probably lived out the rest of his life. He is known to have been living in the city as late as the 1970s.

EARLE NELSON

In Edgar Allan Poe’s classic 1841 short story
The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
detective C. Auguste Dupin is baffled by the strangulation of two women in what appears to be an inaccessible room off a street in Paris. His conclusion? The deaths were suffered at the hands of an orang-utan, the escaped pet of a French sailor. Earle Nelson’s victims were also women – at least 20, murdered in both the United States and Canada. Like Poe’s orang-utan, Nelson killed with his hands. Such was his strength that he earned the moniker ‘The Gorilla Man’.

It cannot be said that Earle Leonard Nelson ever really knew his mother and father; both died of syphilis within 18 months of his birth on 12 May 1897. He was raised by his widowed grandmother in San Francisco, the city in which he was born. A devout Pentecostalist, Jennie Nelson was described as a distant woman. Most of her time and energy was spent in a constant struggle to maintain a household which included Earle and two of her own children. Nelson picked up on his grandmother’s religious devotion, developing something of an obsession with the Bible. This did nothing to prevent him stealing from shopkeepers or behaving badly at school. He was expelled for the first time at the age of 7.

Four years later, Nelson suffered a horrific accident which some speculate may have contributed to his actions later in life. Riding a bicycle, he passed in front of a streetcar and was hit. He landed on his head, creating a wound that left him unconscious. It wasn’t until ten days later that he was able to leave his bed.

Always a poor student, at 14 years of age Nelson left school for good. During the same year, his grandmother died and he went to live with his Aunt Lillian and her husband. He began to work, but seemed incapable of maintaining employment. Often he would simply wander away from a job, never to return. Although his aunt would later say that he was like a child in this respect, Nelson soon adopted some very adult habits. When he was 15 years old, he began to drink heavily and frequent the brothels of the city’s Barbary Coast district. He would go out on binges for days – even weeks – at a time. These disappearances, Nelson explained to his aunt and uncle, were simply a result of his looking for work. Indeed, he always managed to contribute financially to the household. However, in the spring of 1915, a partial explanation for their nephew’s absences was revealed when Nelson was caught after burgling a cabin in northern California. At 18, he was sentenced to two years at San Quentin Prison.

His release took place in April 1917, just weeks after the United States entered the First World War. Nelson enlisted under his name at birth, Earle Leonard Ferral, but soon lost interest. Mere weeks after enlisting, he went AWOL. Nelson made his way to Salt Lake City where, rather incredibly, he enlisted in the United States Navy. By May, he was in San Francisco, working as a cook at the Mare Island Naval Base. He again deserted. However, these two experiences did not prevent Nelson from enlisting for a third time. As a private in the Medical Corps, his third attempt at service lasted a total of six weeks and ended in desertion. In March 1918, he returned to the navy. This time Nelson chose not to desert, rather he simply refused to work. The next month he was placed under observation in the Mare Island Naval Hospital.

After three weeks, as his 21st birthday approached, Nelson was transferred to the Napa State Mental Hospital.

He escaped three times from the hospital, a feat that earned him the nickname ‘Houdini’. After the third success, instead of attempting to track him down, officials chose to simply let Nelson go.

He returned to San Francisco and the home of his Aunt Lillian, who helped him get janitorial work at nearby St Mary’s Hospital. It was there that he met and fell in love with a maternity ward cleaning woman named Mary Martin. A 58-year-old grey-haired spinster, she must have appeared an odd match for the 22-year-old Nelson. On 15 August 1919, the couple wed. As might be anticipated, the marriage was a disaster. When not demanding sex, Nelson preferred to place his wife in the position of a maternal figure. Mary struggled to deal with these roles, while being exposed to her husband’s bizarre habits. He often went days without bathing, yet changed his clothing several times a day. Many of his outfits he made from Mary’s old dresses; invariably, the results were laughable.

As the relationship deteriorated, affection was replaced by jealousy. The level of Nelson’s rage seemed to increase in the summer following the marriage after he fell from a tree, landing on his head. He suffered a severe concussion and was hospitalized. Two days later he fled the hospital, arriving home with a turban of gauze around his head. Mary’s brother encouraged her to divorce Nelson, but as a devout Catholic she would not hear of it. Before the end of the year, they had moved in with his Aunt Lillian. Back in the house, Nelson resumed some of his old habits, among them disappearing without explanation for days on end.

In the spring of 1921, the couple relocated to Palo Alto, where they both found jobs cleaning and maintaining a private girls’ school. Within days, Nelson had demonstrated to all concerned that he was unbalanced. After one particularly frightening and violent scene, witnessed by the girls eating in the school dining hall, Mary asked her husband to leave their home. The next day, Nelson returned to the school and threatened his wife. He ran off before the police arrived.

Now without a job or a home, his marriage for all intents and purposes over, Nelson was adrift. Within a few days, on 19 May 1921, he attempted to commit his first murder. The intended victim was a 12-year-old girl named Mary Summers. Nelson had gained access to the Summers’ home by pretending to be a plumber sent to fix a gas leak. Not more than a few minutes into his visit, Nelson’s hands were around the young girl’s neck. Mary Summers’ cries quickly brought her 24-year-old brother, who fought the assailant. Although he managed to flee the scene, Nelson was soon captured by police. The next month he was declared ‘dangerous to be at large’ and was sent to Napa State Mental Hospital. It was the very same facility from which he had escaped three times; the last time only two years earlier.

Diagnosed as a psychopath, he appeared impervious to treatment. Early in his third year at the hospital, he gave warning that he would soon escape. On 23 November 1923, he did just as he’d promised, showing up in the middle of the night at his Aunt Lillian’s house. She gave her nephew some clothing and, arguing that he would be tracked down to the house, urged Nelson on his way. The aunt then called the authorities.