ABSTRACT
Eight-year-old Rose Ohliger was strangled before she was stabbed. Forensic reconstruction of the crime indicated that the murderer had stabbed the child in the chest while she was unconscious on the ground; there were no defence wounds on the hands. The close grouping of 13 knife blows to the left breast appear to have been delivered in rapid succession. There was evidence of trauma near the vaginal entry; the hymen was torn about one centimetre; traces of sperm were detected inside her underpants although they had not been removed. Ejaculation could not have occurred into the vagina. What appeared to have happened instead was that the perpetrator inserted a finger smeared with semen into the vagina; pelvic bruising suggested this was done with force. The clothing of the Ohliger child had been soaked in petroleum and set afire; that they were only charred owes largely to the damp chill of that February day in 1929. Six days earlier, a woman had been attacked from behind and stabbed 24 times; 18 of the wounds were directed to the head with those to her temple being particularly severe. The victim, who survived, reported that her attacker had dealt the stab wounds in quick succession. Both victims appeared to have been stabbed with a long, narrow-bladed knife, indicating a common assailant.*Five days later, the body of a 45-year-old retired mechanic, Rudolf Scheer, was discovered in the same neighbourhood on the edge of Dusseldorf. He was last seen leaving a local pub in a drunken state late the previous night. It appeared he was approached from behind — again, there were no defence wounds — before being stabbed some 20 times. An autopsy revealed that a gash to his brain through the left temple, one in the neck and another in the back resulting in a pneumothorax caused his death. As with the earlier victims, no robbery took place. The choice of victim in Rose Ohliger and Frau Kuhn, and the manner in which they were
attacked, suggested that an “ordinary” kind of sex pervert was at work. This supposition of motive was dispelled, however, by the third victim. What the police knew was that there were three attacks, all taking place within ten days, at dusk, in isolated regions of the Flingem suburb. Each victim was stabbed in a manner that suggested rapid knife thrusts. One of the wounds was always in the temple. What was absent from the three crime scenes was apparent evidence of a common motive.
