Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 140. The Vampire: Peter Kurten, the Blood Sucking German Serial Killer // MONSTERS SERIES About this episode Heart Starts Pounding is a Signal Awards Finalist! Go tohttps://vote.signalaward.com/ https://vote.signalaward.com/PublicVoting#/2025/shows/genre/paranormal-or-horror by October 9th to cast your vote for the Listener's Choice Award.
In 1929, bodies were turning up all over Dusseldorf, Germany with one horrifying thing in common. It looked like someone had bitten their necks, and in some cases, tried to drain them of blood.
Immediately word of a vampire spread throughout the city, but that did little to stop the attacks, which would eventually point back to one of the most depraved human beings that we’ve covered on this show…
TW: Reference to child harm, sexual assault, incest, and animal cruelty.
https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/vampireofdusseldorf
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kaelyn Moore? Hi guys, it's Kaelyn. I wanted to take a second to let you know that Hard Size Pounding was just announced as a finalist for a Signal Award in the Horror/Paranormal category. I feel so incredibly honored. This little podcast that I still sometimes record episodes of in my closet has truly come such a long way, and it's all thanks to you guys. But I need your help. Being a finalist makes us eligible for the Listener's Choice Award, which is totally dependent on fan voting. So if you have a second, I'm including a link in the description of this episode where you can go vote for Hard Size Pounding. It's pretty easy. You just have to confirm your email, and it would really mean a lot. Thanks, guys. This episode includes material that may be upsetting to some listeners. For more information on our content warnings, you can always check out the episode description.
0:45 Kaelyn Moore? November 9, 1929, in Dusseldorf, Germany. The morning fog was just lifting when a group of police officers arrived at a factory building in the city's industrial district. They didn't know exactly what they were looking for, but they had received a disturbing message from the local paper just a few hours earlier. That's when a junior reporter was sitting at his desk going through his mail, and he saw a letter that really stuck out to him. It was a hand-drawn map that looked like it had been quickly scribbled down. Someone had roughly sketched out an area in the industrial district, and they even labeled parts of the map with "forest," "meadow," "field." But at the bottom, written near a circle that was drawn around the factory, was one word that caused the reporter to phone the police: murder.
1:29 Kaelyn Moore? So the officers were on the scene, and they moved carefully through the area, eyes scanning the ground, expecting the worst, when all of a sudden, an officer screamed at the top of his lungs. He had found something bad. There, face down in the weeds by an outer wall of the factory, was the small body of five-year-old Gertrude Alberman. But it was when they turned her over that all of the officers got a chill down their spines, and one of them even had to look away. See, her neck had the telltale marks that they had been finding on bodies in the area all year. Gertrude had bite marks, deep and
2:10 Kaelyn Moore? Deliberate ones on her throat. This isn't the first body that they had found like this. In fact, it was a pattern that had been haunting them. Women, children, men, all discovered with their throats bearing the same wounds, as if someone or something had been drinking blood from them. One of the officers turned to the group and said the thing that was on all of their minds. The vampire of Dusseldorf has struck again. And somewhere in the distance, barely audible over the industrial hum of the city, one officer swore that they could hear laughter echoing from the trees. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horror hauntings and mysteries. I'm your host, Kayla Moore.
2:53 Kaelyn Moore? This October, we're all going to do something really special. We're exploring real life monsters, killers whose crimes were so horrific, so beyond comprehension, that they resemble the stuff of legend. Men and women who didn't just inspire our nightmares, but who seemed to step right out of them. But that's not the only special thing that we're going to be doing this month. This month, we're also going to re-release our original horror audio drama called The Timekeeper, starring Judah Lewis, Chandler Kinney, and Arjun Atalier, featuring a very terrifying monster at its core. That's going to come out every Friday, and I'm going to actually include a trailer at the end of this episode for you guys to listen to. So make sure you stick around. But in general, this spooky season, our programming is going to be looking at
3:38 Kaelyn Moore? real life werewolves, sirens, boogeymen. And today, to kick off the series, we're going to follow the story of a real life vampire. But before we dive in, I do have another thing that I want to tell you guys about. If you've been looking for an excuse to try out a subscription for this show, we have a limited time extended free trial this month, only on Apple Podcasts. You will get a full month free to check out our entire back catalog of monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes, and more. Again, that is a full month free trial on Apple Podcasts. If you sign up this October, and you can check out the link in the description. And then just a quick reminder, we are reading The Historian by Elizabeth Costava in our Rogue Detecting Society book club this month. You can check out
4:20 Kaelyn Moore? HeartsArePounding.com/bookclub to learn more if you're interested in joining. But for now, let's get back to the story and I want to start with a very brief history of vampires. Now, for centuries, cultures around the world have warned each other of the undead who feed on the living. The ancient Mesopotamians feared the Edimu, the vengeful ghosts of those who weren't buried properly. The Greeks spoke of the Vircholicus, who would feed upon the livers of the living. In China, the Jiangxi hopped through the night, arms outstretched, seeking life forces to steal. And in the 18th century, a vampire panic swept throughout Eastern Europe. In Serbia, it was believed that someone became a vampire after they died.
5:04 Kaelyn Moore? Blood would still course through their veins as they laid in their graves as long as they were stealing the life force of nine unsuspecting townspeople at night. People would awake in a sweat to see their deceased loved one standing in the corner of their room in the dead of night, waiting to feed on them. Then their motionless bodies would be found in the morning, a victim of the vampire. The only way to stop this was to dig up the body of the supposed monster, take out his still bloody heart, and burn it. By the early 1800s, the vampire became more than a life force stealer, he became a bloodsucker. Books featuring these pale, aristocratic, bloodthirsty monsters started becoming really popular.
5:48 Kaelyn Moore? When Polidori wrote The Vampire in 1819, he created Lord Ruthven, who was charming, dangerous, and irresistible to women. Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 cemented this archetype, the foreign nobleman who invades proper society, seduces innocent women, and transforms them through the exchange of blood. But in Eastern Europe, in the 1920s, it had been over 200 years since the vampire panic had caused all those graves to be dug up and caused people to steal the hearts out of the corpses of suspected vampires. And it had been 100 years since those books were really popular. Everyone in the area thought-
6:30 Kaelyn Moore? That vampires were just historical creatures of myth, folklore, and fiction, especially in Germany in the 1920s. Nosferatu had just been released in 1922. So when the citizens of Dusseldorf opened their newspapers in 1929 and saw the word vampire plastered on the front page, they thought that it was promo for a new movie. But it was something much, much darker. The creature from their nightmares had stepped into reality.
7:07 Kaelyn Moore? Now, to understand how a vampire could hunt in broad daylight in one of Germany's most modern cities, we need to understand what Dusseldorf was actually like in 1929. The city sat on the Rhine River, and since 1850, it had transformed from a really modest river town into a bustling metropolis. By 1925, the population had swelled to 430,000 people. The central train station brought in thousands of workers, travelers, and importantly for our story, young women looking for work in the city's factories and households. But Dusseldorf was also a city of contrasts. Yes, there were modern factories, the electric streetlights, bustling beer gardens, but surrounding
7:48 Kaelyn Moore? the city were those ancient German forests I've talked about before, the ones that inspired the Brothers Grimm, the winding paths along the Rhine River where lovers strolled at dusk. These dark spaces existed just minutes from the city center, places where screams couldn't be heard over the industrial noise. And it was by these woods that our story really begins. On a lonely road on the outskirts of the city, around 9:00 PM on February 3rd, 1929, before the body of Gertrude was found by the factory, a young woman named Frau Kuhn was walking home. We don't know much about Frau Kuhn, other than she was young and she was probably heading
8:31 Kaelyn Moore? home late at night after a long day of work, when all of a sudden, she heard footsteps coming up from behind, slow at first, but then faster. She started to turn to see who was behind her when she felt the pressure of someone pulling on the lapels of her coat and a voice whispered in her ear. Don't scream. She couldn't see the assailant's face, but she felt the blades of scissors as they punctured her, first her arms and then her head. Frau Kuhn started screaming, but there wasn't anyone around to hear her. So she started bellowing as loud as she could, crying out like a wounded animal in hopes that someone, anyone, was just wandering along the lonely road at night.
9:14 Kaelyn Moore? And that was enough to scare her attacker, who ended up taking off into the darkness ahead of her. And as Frau Kuhn lay on the ground, 24 puncture wounds on her body, she could see the assailant well enough to tell that he was a well-dressed man with neatly combed hair. But there wasn't much else she could tell about the man. At least, that's what she was able to tell the police when she somehow managed to pull herself up off the ground and make it all the way to the police station. Now, the police were certainly concerned over what had happened to Frau Kuhn, but they didn't make much of an effort to catch the guy. After all, what was a young girl like herself doing alone on the outskirts of town so late at night?
9:55 Kaelyn Moore? Now, this was a time when crime was rampant in Dusseldorf, and if the victim didn't die, there wasn't necessarily a rush to solve the case. But a few days later, something far worse would occur. On February 9th, less than a week later, a few employees of a local factory were heading into work around 9:00 a.m. when one of them stopped in his tracks near the entrance. He had been absentmindedly looking out into the field next to the factory when he saw what looked like a small foot sticking out of a hedge. Now, he almost walked past it, but something inside of him told him that he should just go look, and afterwards, part of him wished that he never did.
10:39 Kaelyn Moore? Laying on her back in the hedges was the body of an eight-year-old girl named Rose Olliger. Her body was wrapped in a cloak, and when the man peeled it away, he could see that her clothes underneath were burned and her body smelled like petroleum. She was covered in tiny stab wounds, mostly around her chest, but there was no blood surrounding her. Her body. How did someone remove all of the blood from the scene? The worker wondered. No one knew it at the time, but the night before, a stranger, a well-dressed man with neatly combed hair had approached young Rose while she was walking along a secluded path, and he asked her where she was going.
11:21 Kaelyn Moore? "Home," she replied. And the man offered to help her get there, but instead, he led her further along the secluded path, all the way to the side of the factory, and that is where he took her life. Investigators had really nothing to go on. There had been no witnesses to this crime, no murder weapon was found, not really a single clue as to who could have done this. They just had to hope that he wouldn't strike again. The wooded paths on the outskirts of town were dangerous, and it seemed like someone was lurking there. And just four days later, they struck again. On February 13th, just as the sun had come up, the body of a 45-year-old man named
12:04 Kaelyn Moore? Rudolph Sheer was found in a ditch. A long trail of blood ran from the nearby road to his corpse, like he had been dragged there by his attacker. His body was covered in multiple stab wounds, like those of Frau Kuhn, but it was the neck wound that made investigators really pause. Whoever had done this had spent most of their energy attacking Rudolph's neck, mostly with tiny scissors. There were little sharp stab wounds that were similar to what Rose Ollinger had been covered in, but there were also two wounds that didn't match the others. They looked almost like bite marks. And as a group of officers and detectives were gathered around the body, trying to
12:48 Kaelyn Moore? piece together what may have happened, one of them was approached by a man. He was well-dressed, with neatly combed hair, and he seemed unusually calm, but also curious about the crime scene. He started asking the detective specific questions about the murder. How was the body positioned? How much blood was there? The detective, who was suspicious at this point, asked how the man could have known so much about the crime. Well, I heard about it by telephone, the man said. But how could that have been? The only people who knew about this crime were the officers standing over the body. So the detective went back to the group to notify them about this curious man.
13:31 Kaelyn Moore? But by the time they turned back around, he was gone.
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14:41 Kaelyn Moore? A dark cloud descended on Dusseldorf as winter melted into spring and turned into summer. Several other women came forward, saying that they were out on paths on the outskirts of town when a man approached them from behind and tried to strangle them. He only fled when they started screaming or fighting back. But because these women had lived to tell the tale and didn't really get a good look at the guy, the police didn't do much to look into their cases. But later that summer, the attacks started increasing and becoming more barbaric in nature. On August 8th, a 17-year-old girl named Maria Hahn vanished. Witnesses had last seen her with a man at a beer garden, laughing and drinking,
15:26 Kaelyn Moore? but no one noticed as the man convinced her to leave the garden and walk with him down by a secluded path by the river. Maria calmly strolled ahead of him, talking to the man who was just a few steps back behind her, and they walked further and further into the darkness, away from the bustling beer garden. No one saw as the man raised his hand behind Maria's back and grabbed her neck. No one saw as he wrestled her to the ground while she fought him all the way, and no one saw as this mysterious figure clamped his mouth down on her neck, bit until he broke the skin, and then drank enough of her blood to cause him to be sick on the side of the path.
16:08 Kaelyn Moore? After this attack, the figure fled, and Maria's body wouldn't be found until, once again, a cryptic letter was sent to the local paper with a hand-drawn map. But that wasn't until months later. It led police to Maria's body, but by that point, she had been moved off the path, which probably meant that her killer had returned at some point to try and cover his tracks. Her body also revealed that she had been stabbed all over, and blood had been drank from her neck. There were stab wounds on her temple, her chest, her neck, and some of these stab wounds were classified as, quote, "for pleasure," meaning that they weren't the ones that killed Maria and were most likely for the enjoyment of the killer.
16:52 Kaelyn Moore? The letter that was sent to the paper was also signed "DMM," which the police believed stood for Dusseldorf's mention murderer, or Dusseldorf's man murderer, though the public was already calling him something far more frightening. Word that a vampire was actively hunting in Dusseldorf spread like a virus. Multiple victims in the same year, all found with mysterious bite marks on their necks, their bodies almost completely drained of blood, or- Blood from them, missing from the scene. News started spreading around all of Germany and then the world. Parents stopped letting their children out of their sight and people started locking their
17:37 Kaelyn Moore? doors and not going out at night. And every now and then, someone passing a graveyard would gaze into it just to see if the earth near a headstone was overturned, as if they would find a clue that someone had stepped straight out of their grave and into the streets of Dusseldorf. But while all of this was going on, there was one woman in town who was having a very different experience. One local woman named Augusta Kurten read the headlines and could not believe what she was reading, not because of the horror of the situation, but because it triggered in her a strange memory.
18:19 Kaelyn Moore? See, on the night of August 8th, the very night that Maria Hahn vanished from the beer garden with a man, Augusta was waiting by the door for her husband. It was getting increasingly late and she was wondering where he could be, when all of a sudden, in the early morning hours, she heard the lock turn. "Where have you been?" she asked him, but he didn't answer. He almost didn't need to. Even in the darkness, Augusta could tell that his clothes were filthy, his shoes tracked mud all over the house, and there was something dark covering his clothing. In the dim light, it could maybe have been dirt, but something told her it wasn't.
19:02 Kaelyn Moore? Her husband walked to the back of the house, where he grabbed a shovel. "I'm working the late night shift," he said. And then he disappeared outside into the darkness. When he returned, which was hours later from what he said was his groundskeeping job, Augusta was still awake and she noticed his shirt had changed. And the old one, when she found it stuffed into the back of a closet, had stains that just would not come out, stains that looked suspiciously like blood.
19:34 Kaelyn Moore? Over the next few months, Augusta watched as her community became more and more terrified, as more and more stories started spreading. She heard the story of Ida Ruder, who was a young servant girl that was found murdered on the paths near the Rhine River. Someone had approached her from behind and hit her over the head with a hammer multiple times. There was also the young servant girl named Doria, who was killed on another path in a similar way. Both crime scenes were exceptionally bloody and had sexual components to them that happened after the crime had taken place. And it was someone who seemed to be very excited by the blood that was found
20:16 Kaelyn Moore? at these crime scenes. Augusta also watched as her husband, over those few months, became increasingly paranoid, watching over his shoulder constantly, locking their front door, and then continually checking to make sure it was secure. Was he afraid of becoming a victim, Augusta wondered? Or was there something else? Months passed with no answers and no movement in the police investigation. Eventually, the winter turned back into the spring, and people started feeling more comfortable leaving their homes. And that is when a young woman named Maria Bootlis took a train from Cologne to Dusseldorf. It was May 14th. She was a young woman looking for work,
20:59 Kaelyn Moore? and she was totally unfamiliar with the city, which was probably why two men immediately approached her when she got off the train. They asked where a pretty girl like her was headed, and if she wanted to come with them. Maria, who was starting to get very uncomfortable, tried to get away from the men, but they just kept pestering her. And that's when she heard another voice. "Can I be of assistance, miss?" A well-dressed man nudged the two men to the side. Maybe he had a trustworthy face, or maybe Maria was just desperate to get away from those guys, so she happily took this new man's offer to help. He told her that where she needed to go was actually in a different direction than what her map showed, and she should just follow him there, down a secluded alleyway that fed into the neighborhood.
21:44 Kaelyn Moore? That she was looking to go to. So Maria followed this man. But as they headed down the alley, she became more weary of the situation. Where was he taking her? Eventually, they ended up at an apartment. And even though she was unfamiliar with the area, she knew that this was not where she was supposed to be. And that's when she started getting a really, really bad feeling. So she asked the man gently if he could just please take her to the neighborhood where she was supposed to be. And the man gave her this disappointed look, but he obliged and they were back off. Still only walking through the secluded alleyways, though. Before Maria even realized what was happening, once there was no one else around, the man overtook her.
22:27 Kaelyn Moore? But it was what he did next that really terrified her. He grabbed her by the throat and he pulled at the back of her hair, which tugged her head back until it hurts and exposed her neck. And then he just longingly gazed at her neck to the point where she wondered if he was salivating. This very clearly excited the man and he started to violate Maria. But she screamed and was able to run away from him. And not really knowing what else to do and not knowing anyone in the area. That night, she wrote a letter to her friend explaining the whole strange situation. And her friend luckily had been reading the newspapers in a way that Maria had not. So immediately when she got the letter, she was reminded of the vampire of Dusseldorf.
23:12 Kaelyn Moore? She told Maria that she should contact the police right away. And then the next day, as Augusta Kurten was coming home, she saw young Maria Bootley's with officers standing outside of her apartment door. The two looked at each other for just a moment and Augusta knew exactly why they were there. Now Augusta Scharf Kurten was not a woman you could easily frighten. She couldn't really afford to be. She was born in 1880 and she already lived through more than most people could ever bear. She had shot her former fiance when he jilted her after eight years together. And she ended up serving five years in prison for it. She knew what it was like to have blood on her hands and maybe.
23:54 Kaelyn Moore? That's why when she met Peter Kurten in 1921, his intensity didn't scare her off like it did other women. Their courtship, if that's what you could even call it, was really intense and really dark. But there was something about it that excited Augusta. He told her the first time they ever met, "If you don't have sex with me, I will push something in between your ribs and kill you." Most women would have run away from that, but Augusta saw something inside of Peter. Maybe she recognized some sort of fellow darkness and she stayed. The couple ended up marrying in 1923, and for a while, things almost seemed normal. Peter worked in construction and as a groundskeeper,
24:39 Kaelyn Moore? and they moved to Dusseldorf in 1925. He was, as Augusta would later tell investigators, quote, "home-loving and sometimes took part in club life." But there were signs early on that something was just not right with Peter. He would fly into rages over nothing. He demanded sex constantly and often violently. And then there were his strange absences, nights where he just wouldn't come home, days when he would disappear with no explanation. At first, she was able to brush these moments off, but the first real crack in Augusta's denial came in 1927. She had known that Peter was seeing other women on the side, but she ran into him on the street with a young woman named Tita,
25:23 Kaelyn Moore? and something just snapped. The girl didn't even know that Peter was married, and neither did another servant girl that Peter had begun a relationship with. Now, both of these women would later accuse Peter of sexual assault and also of cutting them. Tita would go on to tell the police that whenever she protested his violence, Peter would grab her by the throat, gazing at it with an almost sadistic lust, and say, "That's what love means." Peter served eight months in prison for these affairs, and when he got out, he promised his wife Augusta that things would be different. And for at least a little while, it seemed like they were, until that night. In August of 1929, when he came home looking for a shovel.
26:09 Kaelyn Moore? Augusta knew that she should have interrogated her husband harder, that something was definitely wrong. She felt like her wifely intuition was telling her something. And now, the police were standing at her door, asking her where Peter was. Now, the following night, Augusta and Peter sat in the apartment in silence. The police ended up opting to not speak to either of them that day. They just made notes of their location, spoke to Maria a bit more, and then they left. But then, out of this silence, Peter cleared his throat and said that there was something he wanted to tell Augusta. And she got really flushed. Was he about to confess something to her? He told her that the young woman who stopped by the
26:53 Kaelyn Moore? apartment that day was probably going to accuse him of something horrible, but to not worry about it because he would figure it out. He was just worried because he had already gone to jail for the assault of the two women he was having an affair with, and he knew that he would go to jail again if this other girl accused him. Augusta just looked at him and said, "Peter, you must have done something really awful." She was staring at him now, but all of the headlines, all of the bodies being found around Dusseldorf, all of this talk about blood and a vampire, all of that was in the back of her mind. And something inside of her husband just snapped. Maybe it's because he knew that his wife had caught
27:37 Kaelyn Moore? on, or maybe he was finally ready to tell someone. Maybe he was just saying this as a threat to Augusta. But he looked her in the eyes and said, quote, "I have done everything that has happened here in Dusseldorf." And Augusta asked him, "Everything? The murders, attacks, and those innocent children too?"
27:59 Kaelyn Moore? And he just said, yes, I don't know myself. It just came over me. And that is how Augusta Kurten came to know that she was living with a monster. But do monsters appear out of nowhere, or are they created? In modern vampire lore, a vampire is created when one bites a living person and the infection takes over them. And for Peter Kurten, some psychologists have suggested that there may have been things that happened in his childhood that somewhat contributed to what he became. To understand Peter Kurten, we need to go back to May 26, 1883, in Cologne, Moleheim, where he was born, the third of 13 children, into a hell that would forge a monster.
28:42 Kaelyn Moore? Now Peter's entire family lived in one room, led by a father who was not just a maniac, but a predator. Now, his father would have probably blamed all of this on the alcohol. It wasn't really him. It was the ale that changed him, similar to how the full moon transforms a werewolf. But the children knew that the darkness inside of their father was always there, just waiting for an excuse to come out. From a young age, Peter watched as his father absolutely brutalized his family with his words, with his fists, and with worse. The only break that the children got from this cruelty was when he served 18 months for incest after abusing Peter's sister.
29:27 Kaelyn Moore? But that darkness that lived inside of Peter's father, lived inside of him as well. He committed his first murders at just nine years old, when he pushed a schoolmate of his off of a raft into the Rhine River, knowing for a fact that the boy could not swim. There was another child in the area watching this happen, who went and tried to help him. He dove into the water to save the boy, and Peter held down his head until he stopped moving as well. Both boys drowned and their deaths were ruled accidental. That same year, Peter began torturing and killing animals. And he would go on to say that it wasn't really the pain he was inflicting, or the actual killing of the animal that excited him.
30:10 Kaelyn Moore? No, it was the sight of blood. It excited him in a way that nothing before ever had. And he decided that he would do whatever it took to experience that feeling again. By 1899, when he was 16 years old, he tried to strangle an 18-year-old girl. He would go on to commit other crimes that would land him small stints in jail, like deserting the army in 1904. And it really seems like Peter's prison sentences only made him worse. The German prison system in the early 1900s was totally brutal, as I'm sure you can imagine. Peter experienced what he called, quote, "disciplinary punishment of the severest kinds." Things like solitary confinement, beatings, psychological torture
30:53 Kaelyn Moore? that made him want to take his life multiple times. And each stint in prison made him even angrier. Each release would see him commit even worse crimes than before. He said that this system that was designed to punish him was just feeding his bloodlust and his insatiability. In 1913, when Peter was 30 years old, he committed what he considered his first perfect crime. He'd been breaking into a home because he wanted to rob it. But that's when he found a 10-year-old girl named Christine Klein asleep in her parents' bed. He strangled her, he assaulted her, and then he cut her throat with a pocket knife.
31:36 Kaelyn Moore? And the sight and the sound of blood was almost erotic to him, he would go on to recount. That crime went unsolved for decades. But Peter found other ways to wind up in jail. He served eight years for petty crimes. And it seems like he had a lot of time in those eight years to think about his own life and to consider what wasn't working about it. He realized that it was easier to act out your wildest fantasies while blending into society when no one suspects that you're capable of committing those atrocities. So when Peter was released in 1921, Everyone thought that he had gotten his life together.
32:17 Kaelyn Moore? He got a job, he married Augusta, he was a productive and respectable member of society, at least on paper. But, as we know, while a vampire may don nice clothes and seem charming, just like Jerry Dandridge in Fright Night, the bloodlust-ing monster still lives inside. And in 1929, it was hungrier than ever.
32:46 Kaelyn Moore? Over the next few months, anytime Augusta tried to bring up Peter's crimes, or ask him more questions about them, he would fly into a violent rage. She was afraid to live in her own home, and every time he would leave the house for the night, she wondered where he was going, if there was another young girl that he was going to go attack. Finally, it seems like she just came to a breaking point. On May 24th, 1930, she walked down to the police station, checking over her shoulder the whole way, afraid that somehow Peter would find out what she was about to do. And she just told the officers everything. The night he came home after Maria's murder, grabbing the shovel, his confession to her, everything.
33:31 Kaelyn Moore? She then led them to a church where Peter was attending mass, and pointed him out to the officers. And all of the people in their pews watched as the man who sang hymns behind them was arrested because he was the true vampire of Dusseldorf. Within days, the story hit the headlines. Vampire characterized as most ruthless criminal of the century, a monster in human form, and also, man confesses to killing 11 at Dusseldorf. A psychiatrist named Dr. Carl Berg sat down with Peter once he was behind bars, and he did a full psychological exam on him, which he ended up cataloging in a book called The Sadist, a book that we used a lot for this episode.
34:15 Kaelyn Moore? This book would go on to be banned by the Nazis for breaking their moral code. So of course, my associate producer and I read the whole thing. Peter confessed everything to this doctor and it's all written down in this book. He talks about how he was walking with the 17-year-old Maria Hahn after the beer garden when this insatiable bloodlust took over him. He wasn't planning on killing her, he said, but something just took over. He also confirmed that she wasn't actually dead after he had attempted to drink her blood, making himself sick. But when he returned to the crime scene the next day to move her body, she was. He then talked about how he stalked the five-year-old Gertrude Alberman for weeks before her murder,
34:58 Kaelyn Moore? and how he sent the letter to the officers. He even talked about how he went back to the crime scene and watched from the woods as police discovered her body. And it made him laugh so hard that he was sure the officers had heard him. He talks about how Rudolph Sheer clung to his legs as he delivered the blow to his head that killed him. He admitted that he returned to talk to the police because he wanted to see them discover the body. He wanted to watch the blood drain from their faces as they saw the wounds on Rudolph's neck. Peter would go on to admit to a lot in this book. He would ultimately confess to over 50 crimes, a number so high, police actually had trouble believing it.
35:42 Kaelyn Moore? When she heard that number, Augusta actually suffered a mental break and was committed to an asylum. This number is most likely false. It was probably made up by Peter as a way of self-aggrandizing. Eventually, he did confess to just nine murders. I say just as if that's only a little. But the ones that police are most certain he committed are the ones that we discussed in this episode. And on July 2nd, 1931, in Klingelpoot's Prison, Cologne, Peter Kurten walked to the guillotine with the same meticulous attention to appearance that he had maintained his entire life. His suit was pressed, his shoes were polished, his hair was carefully combed.
36:23 Kaelyn Moore? He had just finished his last meal, Wiener Schnitzel, fried potatoes and white wine, and he enjoyed it so much, he actually asked for seconds. Apparently, his looming Death was not enough to stop his appetite. And the crowd outside the prison that day was enormous. Some people called for absolute bloodshed. Others came simply because they wanted to see the end of Germany's most notorious killer. Up until that point. Inside, only a select few people were present. The executioner, the priest, the prison officials, and Dr. Carl Berg, the psychiatrist who spent the last year trying to understand Peter's mindset. And as Peter approached the scaffold,
37:05 Kaelyn Moore? he turned to Dr. Berg with a question that would go on to haunt the doctor for the rest of his life. "Tell me," Peter asked, almost conversationally. "After my head has been chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck?" Berg didn't have an answer for that. So Peter continued. "That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures." Even facing death, Peter Kurten's final thought was about blood. The execution was swift. The blade fell at 6:00 a.m. precisely, and Peter Kurten, the vampire of Dusseldorf, was dead at 48 years old.
37:50 Kaelyn Moore? Now, today, if you visit Ripley's Believe It or Not and Wisconsin Dells, you can see Peter Kurten's mummified head, bisected and preserved. Scientists tried to study his brain after he died, but they didn't really learn a lot, other than the fact that he had an enlarged thymus gland. They wanted something that they could point to and say, "Look, this is what made the monster. This is where he came from." But today, we know that it was most likely a combination of things. A terrible childhood and a darkness that came from somewhere that you just cannot see on an MRI. But Peter's violence would go on to shape Dusseldorf forever, because vampires are fiction. They're bound by rules. Sunlight, crosses, holy water, that kind of thing.
38:34 Kaelyn Moore? The vampires from Eastern European legend can be understood. They can be categorized. They can be defeated. But Peter Kurten was, in fact, human. He walked in daylight. He had a job. He had a wife. He had a seemingly normal life that he wore like a mask. He could have been anyone's neighbor, anyone's husband. But if he found you alone on a secluded path on the outskirts of town... It was over for you. And in the end, maybe that's why we need our monsters to be supernatural. Because the truth that ordinary humans can become something so evil is more terrifying than any legend.
39:17 Kaelyn Moore? Peter Kurten proved that vampires might just be real. Our exploration into real-life monsters has only just begun. Next week, we're going to listen to the siren song of one woman who lured men from all over the country to her farm, only for them to vanish. See, sirens are not just out on the rocks in the sea. And we're going to explore that in next week's episode. You're not going to want to miss it. For now, enjoy the special trailer for The Timekeeper. The first episode drops right here on Friday. And until then, stay curious.
39:55 Speaker 01 You ever heard about Shady Pines?
39:56 Speaker 02 Research place out by Borden.
39:58 Speaker 01 The guy running it goes insane. Locks everyone inside, sets the whole place on fire, burns them all alive.
40:04 Speaker 02 What does that have to do with the game?
40:06 Speaker 01 The game is Shady Pines.
40:08 Speaker 03 Good, I was scared there for a second with the lightning and the creepy murder ghost game.
40:11 Speaker 02 Just pause it.
40:12 Speaker 01 There is no pause. There is play or do not play. I stop playing, clock starts ticking.
40:17 Speaker 02 What, you have to play until you beat it?
40:19 Speaker 01 Exactly.
40:20 Speaker 03 Tim's missing.
40:20 Speaker 04 You think it has something to do with the game?
40:22 Speaker 03 Yes.
40:22 Speaker 02 No, it's just a game.
40:24 Speaker 05 How does it know who's playing? Ghosts. Not ghosts. Then what is it?
40:27 Speaker 02 The Timekeeper is always watching.
40:29 Speaker 05 The Timekeeper doesn't exist.
40:31 Speaker 03 Fairchild says the people he worked with called him The Timekeeper.
40:34 Speaker 05 Fairchild is dead.
40:35 Speaker 02 He takes your days, he takes your nights, and then he takes your life. He's always watching.
40:41 Speaker 03 Everyone who plays this game dies or disappears.
40:43 Speaker 04 It's just a game, G.
40:45 Speaker 02 I thought I was the only one at risk because I was the only one playing, but now I don't know.
40:48 Speaker 04 We need to get to Shady Pines and get the server back on.
40:56 Speaker 03 We have to destroy it. No one else could ever play. If you don't play, you die. And if you do play, you die.
41:21 Kaelyn Moore? Hearts Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Hearts Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hops. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe. Have a heart pounding story or a case request? Check out heartstartspounding.com. Do you want more Darkly Curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com/hartstarts pounding.
42:05 Kaelyn Moore? But whatever you do, stay curious.
Previous 139. Reddit Scary Stories: Reddit Stories That Could Be True Crime Docs (feat. Annie Elise) Next HSP Presents: The Timekeeper Ep. 1 "It's Just a Game." Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated