World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 16 - Joachim Kroll - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-For three decades, a relentless serial killer was targeting women across the industrial heartland
of West Germany. Between 1955 and 1976, he confessed to killing at least 14 victims, the youngest of them a 4-year-old girl,
but the authorities had no idea. -The fact that he got away with this for so long,
I think we should really ask ourselves a lot of questions. How does somebody like this go under the radar for that long?
-He killed with such stealth that others were blamed for his murders. -[ Speaking German ]
-Everyone kept saying he was the alleged child murderer, and that drove my father to his death.
-In 1976, the police captured the actual killer, a 43-year-old man named Joachim Kroll.
He demonstrated how he'd killed his victims in a series of chilling reconstruction pictures.
-In my view, Kroll is among the most depraved serial killers we've seen in Europe in the 20th century.
-Joachim Kroll, the man dubbed the Duisburg Cannibal, had carved his place in history
as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ It was a series of murders that shocked the whole of Germany.
For 21 years, between the mid-1950s and the mid-'70s, Joachim Kroll murdered at least 14 people
by strangling them to death. His youngest victim, Marion Ketter, was just 4 years old.
The discovery of her dismembered body in the summer of 1976 left the nation in a state of complete disbelief.
For years, Kroll took care to strike away from his home in Duisburg, a town in Ruhrgebiet,
West Germany's industrial heartland, but Marion Ketter lived right on his street.
Police were knocking on doors, searching for the missing 4-year-old girl in July, 1976,
when they made a gruesome discovery. Bernd Jagers was a young detective on the detective
on the Duisburg murder squad. -[ Speaking German ] -The whole thing was only discovered
because Joachim took a girl from the neighborhood. Before that, he would travel further,
and the crime scenes were far away from Duisburg. That is the reason why it took us so long to catch him.
This time, he took a girl from the neighborhood who he knew by sight. He took her to his flat, sexually abused her
and then killed her. When a 4-year-old goes missing, the alarm bells go off everywhere.
Of course, you use a lot of personnel to try and find this girl, and when we got there,
other colleagues were already on the scene, and we then went inside the flat and experienced
something terrible. ♪♪ -The story of this twisted killer begins more than 80 years ago.
Joachim Kroll was born on April 17, 1933, the sixth of nine children. His family lived in Upper Silesia
in the far east of Germany until they got driven out of the end of the second World War.
-Joachim Kroll was the son of a coal miner born in East Germany. Weakly, unprepossessing child, barely intelligent,
he had an IQ of 79. -[ Speaking German ] -They lived in very cramped circumstances,
only two rooms for a family of 11. always in financial difficulties. And also his relationship with the family
weighed heavily on him because he was hardly able to develop any kind of close relationship with his siblings.
Joachim Kroll was lonely in his own family because he learned that he didn't matter much as a human.
He didn't experience any motherly or fatherly love at home, and therefore couldn't develop a feeling of self-worth.
He was withdrawn and shy. He was afraid to even speak because he was physically abused.
-He was a bit of a victim, a bit of an outcast, even within his own family, and then when he went to school,
he didn't really fit in there, either. He had quite a low IQ. He wasn't particularly bright. He was a bit slow.
So that made him a bit of a target there, and then later on, he was drafted into the Hitler Youth.
You know, perhaps his father thought this was a way of sorting him out and making him, you know, a real man,
but that didn't really work out either because he didn't fit in with that particular culture.
So here is somebody who's always been something of an outsider, somebody who doesn't always fit in,
who isn't really accepted anywhere. -[ Speaking German ] -When the Red Army came, all the Germans were driven out,
and for the Kroll family, it was an odyssey because they went from place to place to find
another home somewhere. Kroll had to watch women being raped, people being killed,
how small boys played with explosives and blew themselves up in the process. So as a young man, Joachim Kroll
had already been badly traumatized. -[ Speaking German ] You have to bear in mind
that Joachim had always been teased and bullied. Even in his own family, he was always the loser.
When one of them did something, his siblings would always say "Joachim did it," so he would be beaten again.
-There's quite a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle falling quite neatly into place here for Kroll.
So he started off life as an outsider, not really got many decent social relationships.
He's quite isolated, and he's somebody who is becoming increasingly introverted,
and that's always a dangerous thing. -While working on farms as a teenager, Kroll was regularly beaten by his superiors
whenever he made a mistake. -He went to work on a farm, quite a tough environment.
He didn't get on particularly well socially in this environment. He worked with people on the farm.
This included women, who he would make inappropriate passes at because he just didn't have the social skills
to form normal relationships with the opposite sex. He was quite aggressive in his approach to them.
So he was often rejected by the women that he would try and develop relationships with,
and I think that that served to just isolate him even further. -During his time on the farm, Kroll also developed
a morbid fascination with the butchery of animals. -Back in those days, slaughtering animals on farms
isn't the kind of cold, clinical approach that's taken today. It was incredibly brutal. It was incredibly bloody.
He wasn't repulsed by these scenes of gore and blood and violence that other people might be.
-[ Speaking German ] -When he saw a pig being slaughtered for the first time, it had a lasting effect on him.
He started sweating. His pulse was racing. It was basically a very positive and almost ecstatic experience that he didn't expect to feel.
He was completely overwhelmed by these sensations that were totally unknown to him.
-So he's a bit different, and he's developing a tolerance to violence and to death.
-Kroll's delight in the blood and gore of the slaughterhouse even manifested into sexual acts with animals.
-[ Speaking German ] -If fantasies of sexual violence develop during puberty, and he was in puberty when he was working on farms,
then you can never get rid of them. There, he experienced these sexual things, which aroused him -- the warm blood
and where he satisfied himself. Then afterwards, he lived out his fantasies on the animals
with sexual acts with cows and anything that was available, and something like that will never go away.
-When we look at sex, we look at what is it? What does it represent? Essentially, it represents power.
Now, here's somebody who hasn't had a lot of power, who hasn't had a lot of control over the things
that have been happening in his life, but when he's involved in the slaughtering of animals,
he's feeling in control in this situation. And this is something that he quite enjoys.
It's the first time, I think, in his life that he's got control over what's going on.
-Kroll's fantasies translated into behavior that was becoming more and more grotesque.
When he lived in a hostel for single men, and he took a cat into his room, he had this idea that he wanted to see
what the insides looked like. He took a hammer, struck the cat and skinned it and took a closer look at its intestines.
-And that really does show this kind of childlike curiosity that he's got and the complete lack of boundaries around
how to behave appropriately. -His violence towards animals took a more humanlike turn
when Kroll began experimenting with blow-up dolls. -[ Speaking German ] -Because Kroll didn't manage to get access to women,
he procured himself several rubber dolls instead, which he draped with clothing,
but then also hanged them with a rope and imagined that the women would then die.
He got a particular kick out of that. -It was only a matter of time before Kroll's perverse behavior
would lead him to kill. When he was arrested three decades later for the gruesome murder of 4-year-old Marion Ketter
in July, 1976, the police found communication with Kroll extremely difficult. -[ Speaking German ]
-Well, we just simply thought if someone does something like this, other things or fantasies must have played a part.
-Kroll was so withdrawn that police decided he might open up more if just one detective tried
to form a rapport with him. -[ Speaking German ] -I said to our boss, "I would like to talk to Joachim alone."
So the two of us sat down in the interview room, and I tried with absolute mundane
and trivial subjects to get through to him. To get through to this man now was, of course, not easy.
I then tried with something we found out through interviews with his neighbors --
that he would often work on the moped that he owned, that he would fix it and adjust it,
and that he also repaired his own television, and so I tried to go down this route,
and all of a sudden, I noticed that he realized, "Someone is listening to me when I talk about myself
and is actually asking questions," and that was the moment when trust was gradually built up,
where I was fortunate enough to kindle a spark of trust, so he'd also discussed other things with me.
-Kroll was ready to talk to the police. They had no idea that the quiet man sitting before them
was responsible for the barbaric killing of at least 14 people over the past 21 years.
His confession would stun the whole of West Germany. As detectives continued with their interrogations,
Kroll began to open up. -[ Speaking German ] -My colleague, Bernd Jagers, did it all the right way.
He's the one who broke the ice because without his special relationship with Kroll,
all these murder confessions would probably never have been possible. So therefore, he deserves the very highest respect.
He gave Kroll the feeling, "I don't see you as a beast or man-eater, but just as a human being,
and that's exactly how I'll treat you. Let yourself go, do that," and Kroll did that,
and then, day after day, he confessed to new murders. -Kroll told detectives that he'd committed his first murder
when he was 22 years old, in February, 1955, just three weeks after the death of his mother.
-[ Speaking German ] -Joachim Kroll's murderous career started when the only person he could relate to,
his mother, died. His mother was, above all, the most important person in Kroll's life,
in contrast with his father, who beat him regularly. She was the only positive figure in his life.
He looked up to her and didn't have to be afraid. So when this pillar broke, there was no halt
to his sexual pathological development. -The victim was 19-year-old Irmgard Strehl.
Kroll had attacked her in the town of Ludinghausen, an hour's drive northeast of Duisburg.
-So he sees this woman, and he tries to make a pass at her, to grab her and kiss her,
and understandably, she doesn't react well to this. -[ Speaking German ] -That rejection stunned him so much that he thought,
"I'm a human being, and I want to live my sexuality, so I have to find another way,"
and so violence was the only solution. -As a result, he kind of shuffles her off into the woods,
where he sexually assaults her, and he kills her, and then he mutilates her body.
So this is somebody who appears to be, you know, kind of sub-human in a way. Why don't we put his first murder in context?
The only way that he's felt powerful and that he's felt in control is when he's been killing animals on the farm.
So when he kills his first victim, this is another exercise of power. It's another exercise of control.
But what's particularly important about this one is that he's crossed a line. He's killed a human being. He's killed an individual.
And I think this is a line that he will cross time and time again. -Kroll began to confess to a murderous career
that had lasted for the previous 21 years. He had developed a familiar M.O. -- sneaking up behind people and strangling them to death.
-Kroll was one of the few people who almost fulfilled the stereotype of a serial killer.
He did have slightly staring eyes and a small, rather weasely, ratlike face. He tended to be furtive in all his movements.
He targeted women, but they had to be inert. Well, the only way that Kroll could be assured
that his female victims were inert was to kill them. He would strangle them rapidly, often by surprise,
usually in isolated places. He was the sort of chap you probably would have wanted
to cross the street to avoid. -The main effect of strangulation is that it blocks the blood supply to the brain
and it blocks the blood coming back from the brain to the body. That's far more immediately damaging
than pressure on the windpipe or blocking off the air supply. So once you've blocked the blood supply to the brain,
once the arteries aren't supplying it with blood, you've literally got about 10 seconds
before you lose consciousness, so it's quick. -As Detective Bernd Jagers continued with his daily interrogation of Kroll,
the story began to captivate the German press, who dubbed the killer "The Duisburg Cannibal."
-His nickname at one point was the Ruhr Cannibal or the Ruhr Hunter because he regularly boasted,
in the wake of his capture, that he ate the victims. He said it was the only meat he could eat.
-[ Speaking German ] -You have to explain that back then, there were all kinds of stories published in the press,
wild stories, none of which were true. Let's say that<i> Bild-Zeitung</i> published interviews word-for-word in the newspaper,
but we never actually talked to the<i> Bild-Zeitung.</i> They published such things as, "Now Joachim Kroll
is being given cake or potato fritters so that he will confess to the next murder."
This is, of course, total nonsense. Now we were there every day, also the weekends in order to keep Joachim's spirits up.
So I just asked him, "What would you like to eat?" Which is quite normal. He would say, "I would like a piece of cake."
Then of course, we would go and get cake, but that was just about being human and not to get a murder confession.
No one would confess to murder because of that. -[ Speaking German ] -You have to imagine Kroll is built up in the media
as a monster, a man-eater, a cannibal, and then the police go and serve him with his favorite food.
In the end, it was also just a tactic to get Kroll to talk, and using these means has to be allowed.
-Having gained the confidence of Kroll, the police got a clear insight into the perverse fantasies
that ultimately motivated him to commit his appalling crimes. -[ Speaking German ]
-He needed this killing. He needed this seeing how to kill, and that gave him sexual gratification,
but the corpses in themselves no longer interested him. He just left them. He did not cover them up, nothing at all,
and then he got the bus or train or whatever home in a completely normal way. -Kroll tended to minimize his behavior,
and, as criminologists, we call this techniques of neutralization. So rather than describing them
as the horrendous things they are, he described them as these funny feelings, you know, something that was a bit of a quirk
or something that was a bit odd. So he's minimizing what he's doing by describing it in that way.
-Between 1955 and 1976, Kroll told detectives that he'd killed at least 14 people
and that he could take them to some of the crime scenes. Officers decided to drive him to a series of
cold case locations throughout the Ruhrgebiet region. They hoped by allowing him to reenact the murders,
it may help them identify his unknown victims. The police captured photographs of these macabre reconstructions.
-[ Speaking German ] -We as interrogators had no files, nothing at all. We drove behind them.
They stop somewhere, then Joachim got out, and we asked, "Joachim, have you been here before?"
and if he recognized something, then he said, "Yes, I have been here before." He then looked at it all and went with us into the forest
depending on what crime scene it was. He then could describe how it had looked at that time.
That was incredible. He had a photographic memory. He did not know where he was,
but he just had this photographic memory. -Kroll would try and identify a specific tree or shrub,
but he couldn't always find what he was looking for. -We would find a few places where a forest used to be,
but now they were high-rise buildings. Then he didn't know anymore, and he said, "I'm sorry.
I can't say if I was here. I don't know." Of course, this was sometimes frustrating,
but you have to live with that after such a long time. -Kroll took the police to the town of Essen,
half an hour's drive from his home in Duisburg where he told them how he killed 61-year-old Maria Hettgen
outside of her house in 1969. -[ Speaking German ] -He walked around the lake all day.
It was nice weather and had this feeling. It had slowly turned to dusk, and he wanted to go home,
but then he saw the old lady, whom he immediately addressed and said, "Do you want to have sex with me?"
She did not want to, of course. He snatched her and pulled her into a wooded area,
and then he killed her there. -He doesn't seem to have a particular victim type,
which is something that we do tend to see in serial killers. So this could suggest that these crimes
are completely opportunistic, that he's not consciously targeting a particular group of people.
-Using the information gathered in these fact-finding missions, the police were able to piece together
Kroll's history of murder. -[ Speaking German ] -We could only use what Joachim Kroll told us
during the reenactment during the interrogation, and we would ask a few questions
about whether or not anything more had occurred. Well, we asked, "Joachim, what did you do then?
What happened then?" Questions like that. These answers convinced us that he is not inventing the stuff
and that he really wants to get it off his chest. After spending three months with Joachim
and looking into more than 100 cases, at some point the defense said, "That's enough. Joachim Kroll will no longer
go into the car with the police." So we could not continue to go to all the unsolved crime scenes.
This may have also resulted in solving other unsolved cases. That was a shame. -As new crimes were revealed to detectives,
they soon realize that Kroll was confessing to murders that had already been solved.
Some of these innocent men who had been wrongly accused were in prison and some had even ended up dead.
He had confessed to the murder of 14 people and led detectives to the location of many of the crime scenes.
One of these victims was 13-year-old Jutta Rahn. Kroll had strangled and killed her in the town of Breitscheid
in 1970, six years before his arrest, but in a time before DNA evidence existed,
the police had focused their investigation on Jutta's boyfriend. -[ Speaking German ]
-For the police and also for the prosecutor, the matter was resolved, and because of that, it was not on the list,
and then Joachim went with us into the forest and explained what he had done. This was the first story where we then said,
"Hey, we have somebody here who is in the know. We're not here with somebody who is not quite so clever.
He wants to show us what he's done, and now we have a crime for which someone else
has almost been sentenced, and he has another 20 to 30 people that he might have killed."
-A blood group classification expert later confirmed that Jutta's boyfriend could not have been the perpetrator,
and he was acquitted, but he was not the only man who had been mistakenly accused of a Kroll murder.
One man had even made a false confession about killing 16-year-old Manuela Knodt,
who was in fact murdered by Kroll in 1959. -[ Speaking German ] -After some time, this man went to the police
and told them that he killed this girl. He really went to prison for the crime but then said during his trial, "It wasn't me.
I only said that because I had financial problems, family problems. I was on the street.
I needed somewhere to go and confessed to this crime." It was, of course, no longer treated as an unsolved case
by the police. The case had been closed. It had come to a trial, and he had been convicted.
-Following Kroll's arrest in 1976, the convicted man wrote an astonishing letter,
which was published in the press. -[ Speaking German ] -This man had already turned to our boss at the murder squad.
He wrote a letter then saying that he was not the perpetrator, and that the perpetrator must still be walking around free.
We went to that scene, to the crime scene, and Joachim got out and said, "Yes, I was here, too."
He went into the forest and again looked for a very specific bush and a specific place, and he said, "Here it was,"
and we immediately did a reconstruction. So that was the second story where an innocent person
had served time in prison, and the matter was considered as solved. -Another man who was falsely accused was Walter Quicker,
a farmer from Walsum, a suburb of Duisburg. He lived less than a mile from the spot
where 11-year-old Monika Tafel was killed in June, 1962. -[ Speaking German ] -The young happened to be out and about that day
and bumped into Joachim Kroll, who was out looking for a new victim to kill and rape.
Without the slightest hesitation, he kept turning around to check if anyone could see him,
approached the girl, dragged her into a field, strangled her, and then sexually assaulted her.
-But in 1962, Joachim Kroll was just a phantom, and a few days after the brutal killing of Monika Tafel,
the police arrested Walter Quicker. His daughter, Marlies, was just 6 years old at the time.
-[ Speaking German ] -My father was suspected of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl 150 meters from his family home.
People who lived in the area and also from among his acquaintances made claims. They expressed suspicions, which the police reacted to.
And I think it was five days after the child's body was found, they arrested him at his workplace.
No one could have seen him because on the day of the disappearance, he was at work.
So in that sense, he also had a kind of alibi. He was accused, and I know that some people
who were very close to me made negative comments about my father. -The murder of Monika had left the community
in a state of shock. People were keen to keep their children within sight because no one knew where the killer lived
or when he'd strike again. -[ Speaking German ] -This created an oppressive atmosphere in the area,
and at the same time, people voiced their suspicions. One person suspected the next.
It was a hard time for everyone, and no one insisted that it wasn't him. The accusations were there, apart from my mother.
She always said, "It wasn't him." -Walter was only held in police custody for a few days before being released without charge,
but people in the area continued to see Marlies' father as the killer. -[ Speaking German ]
-So after he was released, people avoided him, and people called out behind him, "Murderer,"
and stuff like that. It was the case that people really avoided him in the area.
-Just six months after his arrest, the false accusations became too much for Walter to take.
-[ Speaking German ] -On the evening of the 10th of December, he left the house, and that was the last time he was seen.
On the 15th of December, 1962, he was found hanging from a tree by some children.
I was 9 years old when I really grasped what had happened, and it appalled me. It touched me inside, and I often stood
and looked at the spot where the girl was murdered. -When Kroll confessed to the murder
of 11-year-old Monika Tafel following his arrest in 1976, it came as a huge relief to Marlies,
but in a way, Walter Quicker had become yet another victim of Joachim Kroll. -[ Speaking German ]
-My grandmother came out with the remark, "So it wasn't him after all." This remark affected me very deeply,
and I didn't ever discuss it with anyone else because I had to process the fact that the pressure of being the daughter
of a suspected murderer had disappeared. My father had been rehabilitated. I don't know what other people said about that afterwards.
I only know what I heard and what I felt myself, and that's the only thing that counted for me.
-Before Kroll was arrested, a whole series of other men came under suspicion as part of the investigation,
and that is of course particularly tragic because these were always men who, at the end of the day,
had nothing to do with the crime. -Kroll saw no problem with that. No, that's their problem.
That would be their difficulty. I can get away with it. And to get away with it for 21 years
so consistently, with so many deaths, in such a small area is horrifying, but also remarkable.
-In total, two men were falsely accused or imprisoned, and three men committed suicide in relation to Kroll's murders,
another five victims of the callous killer. After his arrest in July, 1976, it appeared to detectives
that Kroll was almost relieved to be captured. -[ Speaking German ] -He wanted this sensation gone,
which had always led him to commit these crimes. So he really felt the need, and he thought that
when he told his story that it would go away somehow. -In terms of what Kroll expressed about his punishment,
it is quite childlike and quite immature in a way because he thought that he would just go to hospital
and his funny feelings would be cured, and then he'd be able to go home. So this implies quite a kind of simplistic interpretation
of his own problems. -But Joachim Kroll could not make these murders simply disappear.
He would have to face justice for his crimes. Kroll may have gone on to kill many more women,
but one costly mistake had led to his capture, and a gruesome discovery in his home had stunned the country.
-He presented to the world as friendly, plausible, agreeable to his neighbors in Duisburg.
The local children would visit him, although I think sometimes their parents must have been a little suspicious.
He was known as Uncle Joachim. -[ Speaking German ] -We also tried to speak to those around the neighborhood,
asked who knows him, who had contact with him. People said he was a bit weird, a bit odd somehow,
but he was dear old Uncle Joachim, and in reality, he was a wolf in sheep's clothing.
-Behind this facade of Uncle Joachim and, "Oh, I like to look after you girls and boys,
and they come around to see me, and I'll give them sweets," was this man who was very, very angry,
who wanted to make society well aware that they were living by a thread, and he could cut it at any moment that he chose.
-Kroll usually did his killing miles away from his Duisburg home, but in July, 1976, suffering with a bad leg,
he finally struck within his own community when he kidnapped and murdered 4-year-old Marion Ketter.
It was the mistake that led to his capture. -[ Speaking German ] -His crime scenes got closer and closer,
and therefore it was the dumbest thing he could really do was take a girl from the direct neighborhood,
but as I said, his feeling was greater, and if he had thought about it, he should have said,
"This, what I am doing now, is nonsense. They will catch me." -Door-to-door questioning throughout the neighborhood
led the police directly to Kroll. Inside his home was an horrific crime scene. Detectives found a saucepan on the stove with body parts in it.
Worse still were the contents of the refrigerator. -There was this girl completely dismembered,
upper arm, forearm placed on corresponding shelves so that he only had to take something out
and add it to the pan. That was unfathomable for us. -When we look at cannibalism,
we're essentially looking at those who consume the bodies of other humans, and this is something that we do see
sometimes in cases of serial murder, and it is about power, and it's about control again.
It's about completely possessing your victim. So not only have you taken away their life,
you're now mutilating their body and consuming it. -Kroll disposed of other parts of the body
by flushing them down the lavatory. -[ Speaking German ] -But that blocked the toilet
and that of his neighbor below, as well. The neighbor approached him and said, "Hey, something is blocked here."
-One of the horrifying things of Kroll's crimes was that he took pleasure in taking out the intestines of his victims,
and he told a neighbor who was asking him what the smell was, and he said rather flippantly, "Oh, it's guts,"
which it literally was intestines, and the neighbor complained. Kroll was nothing if not brazen.
-Kroll claimed he had butchered a rabbit and would make sure the remains were removed from the pipe.
-[ Speaking German ] -He did that, too, and he took it to the waste bins in the courtyard where he disposed of it.
He was seen by this neighbor, who then told our colleagues, who were walking around, asking questions,
"Who has seen this girl last?" This neighbor told them of his observations, and so they checked the waste bin
and found that this was not from a rabbit, but that they were human innards. -Kroll had kidnapped and murdered
the helpless 4-year-old just days before. -[ Speaking German ] -He felt particularly attracted to this young girl.
He always stood up in the attic looking down into the playground, saw Marion playing, and got this funny feeling,
"I want to have this girl, and I will snatch her up at the next opportunity," and the 4-year-old girl did then come into his flat with him,
and then he strangled her, and after that did all these awful things that one can scarcely bear to talk about.
-[ Speaking German ] -Well, I was shocked because I had a son who was not that much older.
I had not been in the homicide division long, only for two years. That was something where you had to more than just swallow.
I have seen many things, but this was something completely new to me that a human being was able to do such a thing.
-Kroll had evaded detection for so long and had no remorse whatsoever for the suffering he'd caused.
-He was not capable of feeling any sort of empathy towards anybody, especially his victims.
They were simply objects to him that he wanted to manipulate and kill, and then he was content.
-Joachim Kroll never cared about what he did. He did not even ask what her name was.
He did not care. His tingling feeling was gone. Her body remained there. He got up, possibly cleaned himself up,
and then the matter was done for him. There was not even a reaction like, "When I count them up, you'd be able to prove so many.
That is so bad." Such things we did not hear from him. In that regard, he was totally emotionless.
-Although he had confessed to killing at least 14 people, the police officially charged Joachim Kroll
with eight murders. -On the 4th of October, 1979, Kroll's hearing began in Duisburg.
As the details of Kroll's gruesome sexual deviance were revealed, the case caught the public's imagination
in a way few others have. -[ Speaking German ] -The, in some cases, excessive media coverage
obviously contributed to Kroll becoming a case of the century, but on the other hand,
from a criminologist's perspective, one has to say that there hasn't been a comparable case
in Germany at least since the second World War where so many people have been killed over such a long period.
-Over the next two and a half years, the court was only in session 151 times, but in April, 1982,
Kroll was convicted of all eight murder charges against him. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The 49-year-old was immediately sent to Rheinbach Prison. -[ Speaking German ] -In my view, Kroll wasn't mad or bad,
but was a human being who had failed in social terms, sexually and in his work life,
and who on this basis committed the most terrible crimes. In my opinion, Joachim Kroll
would not have become a serial killer if he had been valued as a human being. -Whilst most of his victims were young,
there was somebody who was in their 60s. So there was an array of victims. It wasn't a particular type,
and the fact that he got away with this for so long, I think we should really ask ourselves a lot of questions,
you know, as a society. How does somebody like this go under the radar for that long?
-On July 1, 1991, nine years after being convicted, Joachim Kroll died of a heart attack
in Rheinbach Prison. He was 58 years old. -I think Kroll did some incredibly evil things
which really do kind of breach not just legal codes, but social and moral ones, as well,
and what's interesting for me is what made him into this person that did these evil things?
He didn't really have very much in the way of monitoring of his behavior or any breaks on his behavior.
So I think when you have a situation like that, you can have somebody who turns into someone capable of real evil.
-The news of Kroll's demise was of scant consolation to Marlies Woywod. -[ Speaking German ]
-After I heard about it, I felt hatred for Kroll and would have liked to wish on him
that everything he did to the children at to the adults would be done to him, and I'm sorry that he died so early,
and this anger I have will probably never go away. -Had he not kidnapped Marion Ketter close to home
in one of his very few mistakes in this killing spree of 20 years or more, then I'm absolutely sure he would have continued to kill.
If there is ever anyone who could be said to epitomize what the word "evil" means,
I would say it was Joachim Kroll, a genuinely evil man who defiled the world he inhabited.
-For 21 years, West Germany was haunted by an almost-invisible killer. Joachim Kroll was so ordinary
that he blended into the background. While other men were accused of his most vile crimes,
he continued to murder for his own gratification, regardless of the consequences.
His capture came as a shock to the whole country, who will remember Kroll as one of the world's most evil killers.
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Joachim Kroll murdered at least thirteen people during a span of over twenty years.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Joachim Kroll, the Duisburg Cannibal, killed at least 14 women in West Germany, evading capture for over two decades.

Key points

The Duisburg Cannibal. Joachim Kroll, known as the Duisburg Cannibal, confessed to killing at least 14 people.
The Discovery of Marion Ketter. The discovery of 4-year-old Marion Ketter's body shocked the nation in 1976.
Kroll's First Murder. Kroll's murderous career began with the death of his mother, leading to his first murder.
Confessions and Reenactments. Kroll confessed to numerous murders, leading police to cold case locations.
The Impact of Kroll's Crimes. Kroll's confessions revealed he had confessed to murders already solved, impacting innocent lives.
The Innocent Accused. Jutta's boyfriend was wrongfully accused, revealing a pattern of mistaken identity in Kroll's case.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He was a bit of a victim, a bit of an outcast.

5:01WatchJul 28, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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