Cannibals (21 page)
Joachim Kroll was known as the ‘Ruhr Hunter’ and for nearly 20 years the police of West Germany hunted a sex-killer with a very unpleasant trademark
On April 17, 1933 Joachim Georg Kroll was born in Hindenburg, Oberschlesien, near the Polish border. Sometime during 1947, the Kroll family fled to the West. Kroll’s father was taken prisoner by the Russians during World War II, and he never returned home to his family.
Kroll was only 21 when he committed his first murder, just three weeks after the death of his mother on January 21, 1955. On February 8, Kroll stabbed to death Irmgard Strehl, after raping her in a barn near Lüdinghausen. The following year, Erika Schuleter was raped and became Kroll’s second victim in Kirchellen.
In 1957 Kroll moved to Duisburg, which was a heavy industrial city in the middle of ‘Ruhrpott’, and it was this area that will became his hunting ground for the next 20 years.
On March 24, 1959, Kroll attacked another woman, known only as Erika, near the Moerser Straße in Rheinweisen. A second attack on the same spot took place on June 16, 1959, and this time Kroll was more successful, having raped and strangled Klara Frieda Tesmer.
His next attack took place on July 26, 1959, and the body of 16-year-old Manuela Knodt was found near the village of Bredeney, south of Essen. Medical evidence revealed that she had been a virgin before her killer strangled her into unconsciousness and raped her. There were no bruises or scratch marks around her genital area, which suggested that she had made no resistance to the rape. This time Kroll had left a trademark – he had taken slices of flesh from her buttocks and thighs. A man named Horst Otto was later arrested for this murder, and after initially confessing, received eight years imprisonment for the crime.
Sometime in 1962 Kroll made a journey south to Burscheid, near Köln, where he raped and strangled Barbara Bruder.
On April 23, 1962, 13-year-old Petra Giese went to a carnival at the village of Rees, near Walsum. She had gone to the carnival with a friend, but during the course of the day had become separated, and Petra’s friend had returned home without her. The following day Petra’s body was found in a forest about a mile away from the carnival. The red dress she had been wearing had been ripped from her body, and it appeared as though the killer had been in a state of frenzy. After raping her, he had removed both of her buttocks, her left forearm and a hand, and had taken them away with him.
Two months later on June 4, another 13-year-old girl, Monika Tafel, was on her way back home from school in Walsum. She met a similar fate to Petra, and her body was dragged into a rye field. Once again the killer had cut steaks from her buttocks and the back of her thighs, which indicated that the killer was possibly a cannibal, as these were the meatiest parts of the body.
The police were desperate to track down this perverse killer and arrested a steel-worker for the murder of Petra Giese. However, due to lack of evidence against him they were forced to release him without charge. The man’s neighbours were convinced that he was the killer, his wife divorced him, and he ended up by committing suicide. Fourteen years later, a confession would reveal that he had been completely innocent.
On August 22, 1965 a young couple parked their car in Lover’s Lane in Grossenbaum-Duisburg, but unbeknown to them they were being watched. As Kroll watched the young couple having sex in the Volkswagen, he became sexually aroused and decided he needed to rape the girl, but somehow had to get rid of her boyfriend first. He decided to slash the tyre on the front left of the car and, uncertain of what was happening the boy got out of the car. Kroll immediately jumped on him and stabbed him to death. Meanwhile, the petrified girl jumped into the driver’s seat and managed to drive off almost hitting Kroll in the process. Kroll managed to escape into the nearby woods unnoticed, and this was the only occasion that he actually killed a male as opposed to a female.
Ursula Rohling was Kroll’s next victim on September 13, 1966, and her body was found strangled in Foersterbusch Park. Ursula’s boyfriend, Adolf Schickel, was falsely accused of her murder and subsequently drowned himself in the Main river in Wiesbaden.
Kroll, who had been given the nickname the ‘Ruhr Hunter’ by the police, abducted five-year-old Ilona Harke on December 22, 1966. First Kroll took her on a train to Wuppertal, and then on a bus to Remscheid or Hueckeswage, but somewhere along the way they got out and walked through dense bush and woods, and down into Feldbachtal. There, in a small ditch, Kroll raped the tiny body and watched his victim drown. Ilona’s body was discovered in a park in Wuppertal, close to a playground, and once again the killer had removed steaks from the buttocks and shoulders.
On June 22, 1967, Kroll lured ten-year-old Gabrielle Putman into a cornfield and showed her some pornographic photographs. The young girl fainted, but as Kroll attempted to rape her, he heard the sirens from a nearby coalmine going off, indicating that the miners would be leaving work. Soon the area was swarming with miners on their way home, but Kroll managed to escape unnoticed, leaving Gabrielle frightened, but still alive.
Two years later on July 12, 1969, Kroll came across Maria Hettgen on a path near the Baldeneysee in Essen. She was not so lucky, he raped and strangled her, leaving his normal trademark.
Jutta Rahn was walking home from school on May 21, 1970, taking the short route between Hösel Railway Station and her house through a wood. She was approached by Kroll, raped and left for dead. Her boyfriend, Peter Schay, was suspected of her murder and spent 15 months in prison.
On July 3, 1976, four-year-old Marion Ketter was playing with friends in a playground in the Duisburg suburb of Laar. It was an extremely hot day and she was only wearing a pair of knickers. As she played, she was approached by a balding, kind-looking man who spoke to her and persuaded her to go for a walk with him. The young girl called him ‘Uncle’ and went off quite willingly, taking hold of his hand as they went. When her mother realized that her little girl had gone missing, she rushed down to the police station and reported that her daughter had been abducted. The police moved into the area in force, and started to make door-to-door enquiries.
During their investigations one of the residents told the police that his neighbour, a lavatory attendant named Joachim Kroll, had just told him not to use the lavatory on the top floor as it was blocked. When the man had enquired, ‘With what?’ Kroll had replied, ‘Guts!’ The man just presumed his neighbour was having a joke with him. A plumber was called out to investigate the problem, and it soon turned out that Kroll was not joking at all. The toilet was in fact blocked with the internal organs of a small child, including the lungs.
The police returned to Kroll’s apartment and asked if they could have a look around. What they found made them sick to the stomach. Inside his deep freeze were plastic bags which contained parcels of human flesh, while bubbling on the stove they found a child’s hand with some carrots and potatoes. Kroll was immediately arrested and the reign of the ‘The Ruhr Hunter’ came to an end.
Kroll, who was a brown-eyed, mild-mannered little man proved to be anything but a monster. It was obvious to the police from their questioning that Joachim Kroll was mentally subnormal, as his admission to his neighbour had indicated. He told the police that he was looking forward to being able to go home, and felt that after he had had an ‘operation’ to make him harmless to women, that he would be allowed to go free.
As the police interrogated the pathetic little man, it became obvious that he had committed many more cannibalistic murders than they had originally thought. Kroll was quite willing, and indeed talked quite freely about his obsession with sexual murders. He told them that he lived alone in the apartment, which turned out to be full of electrical gadgets and rubber sex dolls. He told them that he used to strangle his dolls with one hand whilst masturbating with the other. It became apparent that he was not capable of having sex with a conscious woman, as he was far too nervous and self-conscious, and he started to satisfy his sexual urges with rape. He told them that he had devoted most of his life to this ‘occupation’. He told the police that he would wander around, sometimes for hours on end, waiting to find a girl who was walking on her own. Next he would follow her home, and possibly study her movements over the next few days, waiting for the chance to catch her on her own. He said he couldn’t possibly remember just how many girls he had raped and killed.
Kroll also said that his cannibalism was in no way connected to his sexual urges, he just took the meat as he thought it was a good way of saving money on food. He told the police that he only took steaks from his victims if their flesh looked suitably tender. It was quite obvious that it was a combination of both stupidity and an animal cunning that allowed one of Germany’s worst serial killers to operate for more than 20 years.
The trial against Joachim George Kroll started on October 4, 1979, in Saal 201 of the Duisburg Schwurgericht. He was charged with eight counts and 1 attempt of murder. The trial lasted for 151 days and on April 8, 1982, Kroll was sentenced to nine terms of life imprisonment. Kroll died on July 1, 1991, at Rheinbach prison, of a heart attack.
Stanley Dean Baker was no ordinary cannibal – he was actually proud of his eating habits
Baker, unlike Kroll, was not a shy cannibal, and loved to boast about his fetish. He claimed to have developed a taste for human flesh while undergoing electroshock therapy for a nervous disorder.
It was Saturday, July 11, 1970, at around three o’clock in the afternoon. A man was relaxing on the banks of the Yellowstone River in Montana, pursuing his favourite pastime, fishing. All of a sudden he saw his float bob and presumed he had got a bite. He reeled in his line but instead of a struggling fish on the end, he had snagged a human body. He stood frozen to the spot for a short while, but on regaining his composure he drove to the nearest ranch to call the police. Deputy Bigelow was stationed at the entrance to the Yellowstone National Park, and he responded to the call.
The deputy waded into the turbulent river and, with the help of some local men, managed to drag the body out onto the bank. Accustomed to routine cases of drowning, Bigelow was shocked to find that the head was missing and immediately knew that he had a murder case on his hands. The Deputy phoned the Sheriff who subsequently bought the coroner to the scene. The victim was a male, clad only in shorts and, apart from the missing head, the arms had been severed at the shoulders and the legs chopped off at the knees. His abdomen and chest were covered with stab wounds, and there was a particularly large, gaping wound on his chest.
Even the Coroner had to admit that he was shocked by what he saw, and told his colleagues that he had never seen anything like it before. He said he felt the man was possibly in his early twenties and, apart from the fact that he had been stabbed around 25 times, his heart was missing. The chest had been cut open and the heart had been removed.
The Sheriff knew that it was going to be very difficult to identify the body, because all the usual means of identification had been removed. He felt that it was probably some form of cult murder, as there had been a number recently that had been connected with a secret group of devil-worshippers.
The torso was taken away so that a proper autopsy could be carried out, in the hope that it might throw some light on what had happened to the man. The Sheriff sent details of the victim to other neighbouring states in the hope that someone had been reported missing. Despite thorough searching of the banks and the river in and around Yellowstone Park, no traces of the missing limbs were found. Meanwhile, the police had to wait until someone was reported missing.
Monday morning threw some light on the case of the headless torso. A message came through to the Sheriff’s office in Livingstone, concerning a missing person who resembled the description of the body in the morgue. His name was Michael James Schlosser, aged 22, and he had been reported missing from the town of Roundup, about a hundred miles away, that very same morning. Apparently he had set out on the Friday to Yellowstone Park in his Opel Kadett sports car, but had failed to turn up for work the following Monday. His office colleagues went round to see his landlady, but she told them that he had not returned home that weekend. The description of Schlosser – 6 ft tall and weighing around 200 lbs – fitted the considered age and size of the torso. The Sheriff immediately put out an alert for any sightings of the Opel car, which could possibly have been dumped in the area of Yellowstone Park.
Just one hour later a report came in of an accident involving a yellow Opel Kadett sports car that had been in a collision with a pick-up truck on a dirt road in Monterey County, California. The car had been reported travelling at speed on the wrong side of the road. The truck only suffered a dented bumper, but the car was a complete write-off. The driver of the truck, who was a businessman from Detroit on holiday, got out of the cab and approached the car. As he approached the Opel, two young men climbed out, both apparently unhurt, and both with the appearance of typical Californian hippies, with long hair and beards. One was blond and one was dark. The blond man was about 6 ft tall and very powerfully built, and the businessman was prepared for trouble. However, to his surprise, both the men were friendly, and he asked them if they could exchange driver’s licences. When the hippies replied that neither of them had one, the businessman took the registration number of the vehicle and suggested that they accompany him to the nearest telephone so that they could notify the police of the accident. Both the hippies agreed to this and climbed into the front of his truck. When they arrived at a service station in the town of Lucia, instead of accompanying the businessman to the telephone, both the young men jumped out of the truck and ran off into some nearby woods.
The businessman phoned the police and told them what had happened and gave them the registration of the Opel car. It turned out to be the car that belonged to the missing Schlosser, and the California Highway Patrol were told to be on the lookout for two hippies who were possibly wanted in connection with a murder. A patrolman, Randy Newton, on receiving the call on his radio, decided to turn off the highway onto a dirt side-track, figuring that the two men couldn’t have got too far on foot. Just as he suspected, he came across the two hippies about two miles further on, trying to hitch a lift. Although they carried no identification, they openly admitted that they were the two men who had been driving the Opel Kadett that had been involved in an accident. Patrolman Newton arrested both men and radioed for assistance. When the other officers arrived, the two men were handcuffed and advised of their rights.
The blond man seemed very willing to talk, in fact almost too eager, and identified himself as 22-year-old Stanley Dean Baker. His companion was 20-year-old Harry Allen Stroup, and they were both from Sheridan, Wyoming. He told the police that they had been travelling companions since June 5, and got around by hitching rides. The two men were searched and in Baker’s pockets the police found small lengths of bone. Patrolman Nelson was curious and studied the bones more carefully and then asked Baker what they were.
‘They ain’t chicken bones,’ blurted out Baker. ‘They’re human fingers.’ He paused for a moment, stared at the patrolman and then added, ‘I have a problem. I’m a cannibal’.
The patrolman was taken aback, and ordered the two men to get into the back of his patrol car. On their way back to the police station in Monterey, Baker talked quite freely about his compulsion to eat human flesh. He told Nelson that he had developed the taste for it when he was 17, following electric shock treatment for a nervous disorder. He also referred to himself as ‘Jesus’.
Back at the police station the two men were questioned by Detective Dempsey Biley. Baker, still very eager to talk, almost bragged about how he had killed the owner of the Opel Kadett. He made it clear that his companion, Stroup, had not been with him at the time and that he had had nothing to do with the murder. Apparently the two men had split up at a place called Big Timber, because Baker had managed to hitch a ride with James Schlosser. When Schlosser told Baker that he was going to Yellowstone Park for the weekend, Baker asked if he could go along for the ride, and the two men eventually set up camp for the night close to the river.
Baker went on to say that in the middle of the night he had stealthily crept over to his sleeping companion and shot him twice in the head with a .22 pistol that he always carried with him. Next he proceeded to cut the body up into six parts, removing the head, arms and legs. When the Detective asked Baker what he had done with the man’s heart, he replied, ‘I ate it. Raw.’
He told Biley that he had removed the man’s fingers so that he could have something to chew on later on. Then he dumped the remainder of the body in the river, together with the pistol, and then drove off in his victim’s car.
Some time later he met up with Harry Stroup who was walking along the highway, and offered him a lift. He continued to insist that Stroup had had absolutely nothing to do with the murder of James Schlosser.
Both the men were thoroughly searched and among Baker’s possessions was a recipe for LSD and a book called The Satanic Bible. It turned out to be a handbook of devil-worship, which gave instructions on how to conduct a black mass.
Baker described to the police the location of the camp where the murder had taken place and, following a thorough search of the area, they found sufficient evidence to charge Baker. The earth was splattered with dried blood and a bloodstained hunting knife was found nearby. They also found human bone fragments, teeth, skin and a severed human ear.
Baker and Stroup were flown back to Montana and were brought before District Judge Jack Shamstron on July 27, 1970. They were both remanded in custody and Baker was sent to Warm Springs State Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. Harry Stroup, who had remained silent throughout the whole proceedings, was apparently guilty of nothing more than having become friends with a homicidal maniac. The pieces of bone that were found in Baker’s pocket were sent to a pathologist, and they proved to be the bones from a human right index finger. There appeared to be no motive for the crime, other than the fact that Baker had a lust for human flesh.
Stanley Dean Baker was judged to be insane and confined to a mental institution.