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Peter Kürten: The 'Vampire of Düsseldorf' and the Birth of Criminal Profiling

Jun 16
3 min read

Updated: Jun 25

In 1929 the German city of Düsseldorf was seized by a panic unlike anything it had known. A shadowy figure was attacking and killing men, women and children in the streets, seemingly at random, and the press soon gave him a name that captured the public's horror: the Vampire of Düsseldorf. When he was finally unmasked, he proved to be a mild, well-dressed factory worker named Peter Kürten.

Kürten's calm, analytical confessions made him one of the most closely studied murderers in the early history of forensic psychiatry. This article examines his brutal origins, the 1929 terror, his capture and trial, and the long shadow the case cast over criminology and cinema.

Peter Kürten: The 'Vampire of Düsseldorf' and the Birth of Criminal Profiling

Key Facts at a Glance

Full name: Peter Kürten
Born: 26 May 1883, Mülheim am Rhein, near Cologne, Germany
Known as: The Vampire of Düsseldorf; the Düsseldorf Monster
Convictions: Nine murders and seven attempted murders
Executed: 2 July 1931, by guillotine, Cologne

A Childhood of Brutality

Kürten was born in 1883 into grinding poverty, the eldest of thirteen children crammed into a single room. His father was a violent alcoholic, and Kürten later traced his own cruelty back to the abuse and deprivation of those years. He accumulated a long criminal record in early adulthood for theft, arson and assault, cycling in and out of prison.

He also confessed that his violence began far earlier than 1929, claiming responsibility for the killing of a young girl as early as 1913. To neighbours and to his wife, however, he presented as a tidy, courteous working man — a respectable mask that helped him hide in plain sight.

The 1929 Reign of Terror

Between February and November 1929, Kürten launched a sustained series of attacks across Düsseldorf. He used whatever came to hand — hammers, knives, scissors — and struck victims of widely differing ages and both sexes, with no consistent pattern. The nickname “vampire” arose from reports that he drank blood from his victims' wounds.

Because the methods and victims varied so dramatically, investigators at first believed several different killers were at work. The uncertainty deepened the panic and produced one of the largest manhunts Germany had yet mounted, drowning police in thousands of tips and false confessions.

Contemporary accounts captured the strangeness of the terror. In December 1929 Kürten was said to have seized a swan in a Düsseldorf park, cut its throat and drunk its blood — an image that fixed the “vampire” label in the popular imagination. The variety of his weapons and the apparent randomness of his targets meant the city could find no pattern to protect itself against, and ordinary life narrowed under a blanket of fear.

A Lucky Escape and the Arrest

Kürten's downfall began when a young woman, Maria Budlick, survived an encounter with him and a letter she wrote describing it reached the police. She led officers to his neighbourhood, and when Kürten realised the net was closing he confessed everything to his wife. She, in turn, went to the authorities, and on 24 May 1930 Kürten was arrested without resistance.

In custody he confessed, with unsettling precision, to dozens of offences — reportedly some seventy-nine in total, including nine murders. He showed no remorse, framing his crimes as revenge against a society that had brutalised him. Observers were struck by his fixation on his wife: Kürten said one reason he confessed so fully was to ensure she could claim the reward money offered for the killer’s capture and live out her old age in some comfort.

The Trial of 1931

The trial opened on 13 April 1931. Such was the public fury that a special shoulder-high cage was built in the courtroom to hold the defendant, while the grisly exhibits of evidence — skulls, weapons and clothing — were displayed nearby. The jury needed little time to convict, and Kürten was handed nine death sentences.

Execution

On 2 July 1931, Kürten was executed by guillotine in the yard of Klingelpütz Prison in Cologne. In a detail that has haunted the case ever since, he reportedly asked the prison doctor whether, after the blade fell, he might still hear the sound of his own blood for a moment — calling it the pleasure to end all pleasures.

Legacy in Criminology and Film

The psychiatrist Karl Berg studied Kürten at length and published an influential analysis of his psychology, helping to establish the modern profiling of sexual murderers. The atmosphere of the Düsseldorf manhunt also helped inspire Fritz Lang's 1931 classic film “M,” cementing Kürten's place in both criminal history and popular culture.