Joachim Kroll

Birth name	Joachim Georg Kroll
Also known as	The Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale) The Ruhr Hunter (Ruhrjäger) The Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger Menschenfresser) Uncle Joachim (Onkel Joachim)
Born	17 April 1933 Hindenburg O.S, Oberschlesien, Nazi Germany
Died	1 July 1991 (aged 58) Rheinbach, Germany
Cause of death	Heart attack
Conviction	Murder
Sentence	Life imprisonment
Killings
Number of victims:	Murders: 14 confessed 14 Attempted: 1 Sexual assaults: unknown
Span of killings	8 February 1955–3 July 1976
Country	Germany
State(s)	North Rhine-Westphalia
Date apprehended	3 July 1976

Joachim Georg Kroll (17 April 1933 - 1 July 1991) was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale), Ruhr Hunter (Ruhrjäger) and the Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger Menschenfresser). He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a total of 13.

Crimes

He began killing in 1955, after his mother died. Around 1960, Kroll went to Duisburg and found work as a toilet attendant for Mannesmann. Afterwards he worked for Thyssen Industries and went to 24 Friesen street, Laar, a district of Duisburg. At that time he resumed killing people.

List of victims

• 8 February 1955 - Irmgard Strehl, 19, raped and stabbed to death. Her disemboweled body was found in a barn in Lüdinghausen.
• 16 June 1959 - Klara Frieda Tesmer, 24, murdered in the meadows of the Rhine, near Rheinhausen. A mechanic, Heinrich Ott, was arrested for the crime. He hung himself in jail.
• 26 July 1959 - Manuela Knodt, 16, raped and strangled in the City Park of Essen. Slices of flesh were carved from her buttocks and thighs.
• 1962 - Barbara Bruder, 12, abducted in Burscheid. Her body was never found.
• 23 April 1962 - Petra Giese, 13, raped and strangled in Dinslaken-Bruckhausen. Vinzenz Kuehn is arrested and convicted.
• 4 June 1962 - Monika Tafel, 12, killed in Walsum, slices of flesh carved from her buttocks. Walter Quicker is arrested for the crime. He is released but is driven by neighbors to suicide in October.
• 22 August 1965 - Hermann Schmitz and his girlfriend Marion Veen were attacked as they sat in a car in a lover's lane in Duisburg-Großenbaum. Hermann - Kroll's only male victim - was killed, but Marion escaped.
• 13 September 1966 - Ursula Rohling, strangled in Foersterbusch Park near Marl. Her boyfriend Adolf Schickel committed suicide after being falsely accused of the crime.
• 22 December 1966 - Ilona Harke, aged 5, raped and drowned in a ditch in Wuppertal.
• 12 July 1969 - Maria Hettgen, 61, raped and strangled at Hückeswagen.
• 21 May 1970 - Jutta Rahn, 13, strangled walking home from a train station. Peter Schay was arrested and eventually released. He confessed to the crime in 1976 after being hounded by his neighbors.
• 1976 - Karin Toepfer, 10, raped and strangled in Voerde.
• 3 July 1976 - Marion Ketter, 4. Parts of her body were in the process of being simmered when Kroll was arrested.

Method

Kroll was very particular about where he killed, only killing in the same place on a few occasions years apart. This, and the fact that there were a number of other killers operating in the area at the time, helped him to evade capture. Kroll would surprise his victims and strangle them quickly. Afterward he would strip the body and have intercourse with it, often masturbating over it again. He would then mutilate and cut off pieces to be eaten later. Upon returning home, he would have intercourse again with a rubber sex doll he had for this purpose.

Capture

On 3 July 1976, Kroll was arrested for kidnapping and killing a four-year-old girl named Marion Kettner. As police went from home to home, a neighbor approached a policeman and told him that the waste-pipe in his apartment building had blocked up, and when he had asked his neighbor, Kroll, whether he knew what had been blocking the pipe, Kroll had simply replied; "Guts". Upon this report, the police went up to Kroll's apartment and found the body of the Kettner girl cut up: some parts were in the fridge, a small hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water and the entrails were found stuck in the waste-pipe.
Kroll was immediately arrested.

Trial and death

He admitted killing Marion Kettner and gave details of 14 other murders and one attempted murder over the previous two decades.
Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery bills. In custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted murder. In April 1982, after a 151-day trial, he was convicted on all counts and was given nine life sentences.
He died of a heart attack in 1991 in the prison of Rheinbach.

Ed Gein (Killings between 1947 and 1957)

Known as history’s most inspirational killer, his character became a central element in many films, including Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Psycho and the character of Buffalo Bill  in The Silence of the Lambs, among others.
Modus Operandi
Gein was a serial killer who skinned his victims, exhumed corpses, and decorated his home with parts of his victims’ bodies. Human skin was used to make dust bins, furniture, and even clothes.
Background
Gein was born in 1906 as the younger of two boys. He had a weak alcoholic father and a domineering mother who was deeply religious. He was said to be very attached to her. She taught them about immorality and the evils of women and sex and discouraged their sexual desires. He turned into an effeminate and shy boy.
His father died as a result of his alcoholism and later his brother Henry, who used to criticize his mother about Gein’s unhealthy attachment to her, died in a mysterious fire. The younger boy was later suspected.
Fantasies
With nobody to control him after his mother passed away, Gein became obsessed with sexual fantasies and female anatomy. Fascinated by the human experiments performed in Nazi camps, he started robbing graves to perform experiments of his own, including exhuming his own mother’s body. The experiments became gruesome and cannibalistic. He had the desire to turn himself into a woman and would create breasts out of human skin and drape them over himself. He believed that for a sex change, he would need fresh bodies and thus started his killing spree, which was said to be because of his love-hate relationship with his mother.
House of Horrors
When police finally caught up with him, they found a variety of gruesome sights — hanging corpses with their throats and heads missing, bowls made of skulls, pieces of jewelry made of human skin, hanging lips, skin upholstery for chairs, and masks made of facial skin and vulva (including his mother’s) that were painted silver. The most shocking discovery was perhaps his mother’s heart, which was found in a pan on the stove.
Killings and Sentence
Police counted 15 women as his victims. Gein told the police that he never had sex with any of the dead women as “they smelled too bad.” His fascination with women was because of the power they held over men. Gein was admitted to Waupan State Hospital and died of cancer at the age of 78.