The Only Real Vampire in True Crime
If you think vampires are only found in movies and TV series, then I have to tell you about one of the most vicious and infamous serial killers who terrorized Germany in the 1920s: Fritz Haarmann. His notoriety isn't just because he was a brutal, sadistic killer who murdered over 70 people, but simply because he was a real vampire.
Before we talk about his crimes, I'd like you to get a quick overview of him: Fritz was a soldier in the German army. One day, he fell and hit his head, and his comrades say that his personality changed drastically afterward. He became a completely different person. Due to epileptic seizures, he was discharged from the army and worked in a confectionery factory. After he molested a child, he was arrested and committed to a mental institution because doctors determined he had a mental disorder. A month later, he escaped to Switzerland and then returned to Germany to pursue a life of swindling and fraud.
In 1918, he met an unemployed young man named Hans, became his lover, and moved in with him. Then he would help him hunt his victims in exchange for money, and he wouldn't hesitate to take some of the victims' clothes. Fritz hunted his victims at train stations, specifically homeless children searching for shelter after the war. He would lure them with the promise of a hot meal, and after taking them home and the victim had eaten and relaxed, he would suddenly attack, tie them up, and sexually assault them. Then the real ordeal would begin.
Fritz had a bizarre method of killing: he would sink his teeth into the victim's neck, targeting the larynx, sometimes even tearing it out with his teeth. The victim would bleed profusely, and he claimed that seeing the blood would send him into a frenzy of intense pleasure. This would begin with him drinking the victim's hot blood and end with him cutting the body into small pieces, starting with the skull and ending with the genitals. He would keep the heart and kidneys in the refrigerator to feed his next victims, and throw the rest of the body into the river.
One day, some children were playing checkers by the river when one of them found a long, protruding bone. From the ground, and when his parents were informed, they in turn notified the police, who found the remains of human bones belonging to about three people. The news spread, the press sensationalized the story, and people began connecting the mystery of the children's disappearances with the buried bones. They called him a "werewolf," and the whole town was turned upside down, to the point that the police forbade any child from going out alone after 8 PM.
The incident that led to his arrest was a strange coincidence. A policeman found a man in his forties and a seventeen-year-old boy arguing loudly. When the boy asked them, he said that the man had met him at the train station, promised him a job, taken him home, drugged him, and raped him. He was about to kill him, but he escaped, and the man chased him. The policeman took him to the station, where a woman was filing a report. She noticed a man wearing her son's jacket, which had been missing for a week. From there, the police began interrogating him, and he confessed to killing about 70 people, earning him the title of Germany's most infamous and brutal serial killer. The Release...
Fritz was executed by guillotine, and scientists took his skull for study. They discovered he suffered from a then-unknown syndrome called Renfield's Syndrome, a brain disorder that causes a person to experience an insane craving for blood.
This villain's story has been made into five films, the first in 1931 called "M," and the most recent in 2010, "Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer." Around ten studies have been written about his case, along with five books and novels, the latest being "The World's Most Evil Murderers."