THE SADIST

Book excerpt: In 1929, the German city of Dusseldorf was afflicted by a horrifying series of brutal, random and often fatal attacks upon women and young girls. With weapons ranging from knives and hammers to his bare strangling hands, a shadowy predator left a mounting trail of sexual assault, carnage and murder in his wake, fomenting mortal terror amongst the local populace. Police finally arrested Peter Kurten, a convicted felon, in connection with the crimes; his subsequent confessions revealed a staggering career of evil, documented in at least 69 cases of theft, arson, rape, throttling, stabbing, hammering, hacking, mutilation, blood-drinking and corpse immolation spanning some 30 years. THE SADIST, an in-depth forensic and psychiatric report on Kurten by Dr. Karl Berg, was published in 1931 in the "Deutschen Zeitschrift fur die Gesamte Gerichtliche Medizin”, revealing fully for the first time the irreconcilable lusts, compulsions, obsessions, pathologies and atrocities of a remorseless and psychopathic sex-killer – the inhuman monster known as the Vampire of Dusseldorf. The report is illustrated by 8 pages of detailed and disturbing forensic photographs.