World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 19 - Fritz Honka - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-On July 17, 1975, firefighters sifting through the remains of a fire in a Hamburg apartment block made a gruesome discovery.
-[ Speaking German ] -We found all different kinds of body parts and had to examine them.
We were asking ourselves what was going on. At first, nothing made sense. -And as the police began to search the small attic flat,
the true horror of the discovery became apparent. -[ Speaking German ] -We found a corpse.
We found two corpses. We found three corpses. We have found four corpses. It was a huge story because things like this
don't exactly happen often in Hamburg. -A man named Fritz Honka had been murdering women
and dismembering their bodies in his home for the past five years. He claimed that Jack the Ripper had told him to do it.
-I think it was simply crimes of opportunity, but with a horrible edge. He showed no compassion for the victims.
He didn't respect their bodies or feel remorse, clearly. He just cut them up. -Fritz Honka had carved his name in history
as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ -The brutal murders of 39-year-old Fritz Honka
left the whole of West Germany reeling. When a fire ripped through his apartment block
on the 17th of July, 1975, out of the ashes, the butchered remains of four women were revealed,
hidden away in Honka's attic. Nobody knew they'd been missing from the streets of Hamburg.
It was a shocking crime scene even for the hardened murder squad. The lead investigators on the case
were Jurgen Vierle and Karl Pries. -[ Speaking German ] -They told us where the body parts where,
so inside the building, we went up to the attic, and there were two flats, Mr. Honka's flat and another one,
and then there was a toilet and a loft, and in this loft were the body parts. -[ Speaking German ]
-We were standing outside the door when a small man walked up the stairs. The flat he lived in was completely filled with smoke.
It was right next to the attic that had caught fire. I just happened to be standing right by the front door
of his flat, and he goes, "What's going on here?" "As you can see, there's been a fire," I said.
"Oh," he said. "That's really bad. Looks like I won't be able to live here anymore."
I then asked him, "Who has the key to this attic room, and who owns it?" To which he replied, "This is my attic room,
and I am the only one who's got access to it." And in that moment, there were reasonable grounds
to suspect him of a crime. Consequently, we took him to the offices of the police headquarters at Berliner Tor.
-The story of this elusive serial killer begins over 80 years ago. Fritz Honka was born into a working-class family
in Leipzig, East Germany, on the 31st of July, 1935. -[ Speaking German ] -He had eight siblings.
The relationship with his father was very difficult. He mentions an incident where his father
supposedly wanted to kill him, and the connection to his mother was also rather cold.
When he was 11 years old, she left the family, so he always had a rather crushing relationship
with his parents. -[ Speaking German ] -All the children were given away, which will have had quite an effect on him.
-After his father died in 1946, 11-year-old Honka was left to grow up in an orphanage.
His childhood was far from ideal. -I think he had quite a hard time growing up. These were quite turbulent times in Germany,
but for a young lad who was considerably shorter than his peers, he didn't always fit in very well at school,
and that made him a target for bullies, so he was always the brunt of someone else's joke,
so I don't think he had a very easy time of it at all. -After leaving school, Honka began work
as a bricklayer's apprentice, but it didn't last long. In 1951, aged 16, he fled from Communist East Germany
and headed west. -[ Speaking German ] -He then came over here to West Germany and worked in the farming industry
before relocating to Hamburg, and here in Hamburg, he worked for a security service company as a night watchman.
So this means he always had a steady income, which, of course, gave him, socially,
an advantage with the crowds he hung out with. -Age 22, he meets his wife, and they get married,
and things are quite normal and quite regular, but both of them have a bit of an issue with alcohol.
Both of them tend to drink to excess, and their relationship becomes quite volatile
and quite chaotic. They attract the attention of neighbors and the authorities when they're arguing
and they're overheard having domestic disputes, so it's not a particularly nice household for very long.
-After separating from his wife in 1967, 32-year-old Honka was alone and working the graveyard shift
as a night watchman. -So he rented a small, one-bedroom apartment, which was very close to the red-light district in Hamburg,
and in this apartment, he created his own little world, basically. He wasn't subject to any kind of informal surveillance
of other people who would question, you know, "What are you doing?" So it was his own little zone, essentially,
and this is the place where he would live in something of a little bubble, to be honest,
so I think this is a recipe for disaster for someone like him. -Honka spent his free time drinking in 24-hour bars
around the Reeperbahn in the city's notorious red-light district. -There will be lots of reasons why people turn to alcohol,
but I think in this case, here is an individual who didn't have a lot of control over his life as a child.
There was a lot going on around him that he had very little power over whatsoever,
and what can happen with people who experience circumstances like these is that in adulthood,
they develop an intense need to be in control of what's going on around them, and for some people,
that will manifest itself in self-medication. -[ Speaking German ] -One of the bars was the famous Goldenen Handschuh,
the Golden Glove. It was named like that because it belonged to a famous boxer, and right across was the Elbschlosskeller,
a bar where mainly homeless alcoholics or drifters hung out. Well, they drank plenty of alcohol.
The preferred drink was grain schnapps with lemonade. There was dancing, and it didn't get cleaned very often.
It was open all hours, around the clock, and looked accordingly. You had to be careful not to stick to the floor,
and those were the surroundings and conditions. These people had reached rock-bottom,
at least the women who went there, and now and then, the men would take the women home
with them to play sex games. -The Golden Glove soon became one of Honka's favorite haunts.
He would regularly visit after finishing his shift as a night watchmen. The owner of the bar, Jorn Nurnberg,
became friendly with the man his regulars knew as Fite. -[ Speaking German ] -When he came in wearing his uniform,
you could see that he was very proud of himself, but he was never pushy. People who didn't know him, who just saw him briefly,
thought he looked a bit odd because Fite wasn't exactly a pinup. At times, he looked a bit creepy.
-A traffic accident in his 20s had left Honka with a crooked nose and a pronounced squint.
-Well, he's an individual who has never really had a very positive relationship when it comes to women.
So he was abandoned by his mother. The relationship that he had with his wife was quite chaotic and quite unstable,
so there isn't a really positive association with women in his mind at this point in time.
-Honka is a mentally unstable, intellectually challenged runt of a man who has profound sexual problems.
He finds sex with a women almost impossible and therefore demands oral sex. He is a drunk, a loner, who has had almost no paternal,
maternal caring as a child. He was no one's idea of Mr. Universe, but he was, clearly or at least able,
could afford to hire prostitutes. -Honka had taken a liking to older prostitutes
who could often be found in the bars around the Reeperbahn. -[ Speaking German ]
-These were homeless women who had no income. He had money. He could offer alcohol.
He could offer a place to stay, and that made it quite easy for him. I wouldn't say to make friends,
but certainly to make the acquaintance of people, whether that would be female or male,
and as a result, he was well-known in these circles he moved in. The lowest class of society, that was his world.
-And it was a world that was about to implode. On the 17th of July, 1975, a fire in Honka's apartment block would lead
to a startling revelation -- the dismembered bodies of four women. -[ Speaking German ]
-The fire service responded to the fire incident, and when they found the bodies in the attic,
they called us, the homicide squad, so myself and the rest of the on-duty team made our way to the crime scene.
-The police waited for Honka to arrive home from his shift as a night watchman. He was immediately arrested
and taken to the police station for questioning. -[ Speaking German ] -We set out to do our work and walk through the crime scene
and during the crime-scene investigation, a mummified corpse was found, and underneath this mummified corpse
lay a partly decomposed torso. We broke down walls, broke through the floor and searched.
Throughout the whole flat, we noticed this very strong smell. I'd say the typical smell of decay
mixed with that of burning. Very unpleasant. And so this led us to search more, and we found a hatch facing the side of the roof
that had been covered with wallpaper, and then we broke into the side of the roof
and found a large object wrapped in bed linen with a corpse inside. We took it out and announced
that we had discovered another body. -The press soon got wind of this shocking discovery
and headed for the crime scene. Lutz Jaffé was a newspaper photographer at the time.
-[ Speaking German ] -We always listened to the police radio. Back then, it was possible to do that,
and you could hear where things were happening. That's how we found out about the fire in Zeissstrasse.
We heard a residential building was burning, and, of course, I headed right out.
The fire brigade was already there. You obviously wait a little because you never know
what's going on inside the house. Is anyone hurt? Did someone die? Well, firefighters have a good nose,
and they can, of course, pick up the smell of decaying bodies. And then I think they found Honka's bags.
We were downstairs getting information from the police. "We have found a corpse. We have found two corpses.
We have found three corpses. We have found four corpses." Well, of course, for us, it was a huge story
because things like this don't happen very often in Hamburg. Up and down the street,
the news that this wasn't just a fire spread quickly, and a lot of people turned up.
You can see in the photo that they looked into the police car, this cluster of people left and right.
It was just sensational. Also, for the people who lived there, it was simply unbelievable.
They probably knew him. They knew Honka. The following day, it was on the front page
of all of Hamburg's newspapers. -As forensic experts work tirelessly at the crime scene,
detectives at the police station were beginning to question Honka about the gruesome discovery.
-[ Speaking German ] -During the interrogation, you have to try to get a confession or at least try to get clues
that explain the evidence found at the crime scene. Only this evidence from the crime scene
can help to confront him with allegations that eventually lead to charging him. So I explained the situation.
We had found four bodies in his living room and the adjoining rooms of his flat,
and I confronted him with that. He had nothing to say about it. Then he said, "I don't know.
I've got nothing to say about this, and I don't know what you want from me." Of course, in that moment, you accuse him, and you say,
"How is it possible that we found a wrapped-up body behind the disguised wall in your living room?
And what about the two body parts we found in the covered hole behind your toilet,
the mummified corpse and the torso? You see? And what about the fact that we found loads of women's dresses,
and that initial examinations of the wrapped-up body show that it is a woman? So is the mummified body, just as the chopped-up body
we found under the coals also belongs to a woman?" When we confronted him and asked him,
"What have you got to say to that," he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "No idea."
And there you are, the officer leading the interrogation, and you need to prove to him
that he does have something to do with it. -With Honka not giving them any information,
the police began the arduous task of trying to identify the remains of all four women,
and they got a big break early on. Missing parts of one of the bodies had been discovered four years previously.
-[ Speaking German ] -In November 1971, a worker at a factory yard in the Gausssirasse came across some junk,
and when he rummaged through it, he found body parts. He saw a hand sticking out of a pile of rubbish.
He immediately informed the police, and the local officers on duty who were the first to arrive at the scene informed us
that the findings were, indeed, body parts. We went to investigate further and spotted
several chopped-up body parts. Only the torso and the right leg were missing. Everything else was there, but cut into pieces.
Besides the body parts, we found breasts that had been cut off, suggesting that this was, in all probability,
related to a sex offense. -Although the head was badly decomposed, in 1971, experts were able to reconstruct it well enough
to enable the police to provide a photo to the press. The victim was identified as 42-year-old prostitute Gertraud Brauer.
Before the fire at Honka's apartment, the case had remained unsolved. -[ Speaking German ]
-We had come full circle, from the body parts found in the Gausssirasse to the torso found on the premises
of Honka's living quarters, and subsequently, we could charge him with this crime.
-Honka had murdered Gertraud in December, 1970, after picking her up in the Golden Glove.
It was the first time he'd killed someone. Investigators believe he strangled the 42-year-old to death
because she refused to have sex with him. He dismembered her body using a saw. -To simply cut off a limb
is a fairly straightforward procedure. You need a knife to get through the flesh
and a saw to get through the bone. It doesn't have to be a complex thing to do. It's not like you're a surgeon doing an operation.
-Golden Glove barman Jorn Nurnberg had unknowingly assisted Honka in meeting his victims.
-[ Speaking German ] -He always said in a sneaky way, "Hey, Jorn, give that one a little drink,
but don't tell her it's from me." "Okay, Fite, no problem," gave the drink. "Who's that from?" "From someone."
"Oh, okay. Good." They didn't ask much, as long as they had something to drink. -Gertraud Brauer, a hairdresser and part-time prostitute,
was a regular in the bar. -Time after time, prostitutes are killed because no one reports them missing.
They live on the edge of the law. They're long past in connection with their families.
They are living in a twilight world, and, well, you miss a prostitute? Well, she could've given up,
or she could've gone to another city, or she could've gone back to her mother, or whatever it may have been,
and so they're very seldom tracked. -Even though Honka refused to cooperate with the police,
they had now identified one of his victims. Each time they interrogated him, detectives tried to find out
more about the other three women. -[ Speaking German ] -"You frequently go to St. Pauli.
You're still going to the Elbschlosskeller and other bars in St. Pauli. You drink vast amounts of alcohol.
We found a lot of alcohol in your flat. And we've seen the walls in your place. They're full of pornographic posters."
Well, we also found a plastic doll he probably used to satisfy himself when no woman was around.
The aim was to unsettle him. The uncertainty produced insecurity. His replies to specific questions were different
to those he had given the previous day. -After taking the life of another human for the first time in December, 1970,
Honka wouldn't kill again for almost four years. -What happened to start him off again in August, 1974?
I would argue that Honka's alcoholism had probably got so intense by that time that he was desperately out of control,
and perhaps he just had genuinely some kind of psychotic break, some kind of brainstorm that led him to kill.
-The police had a wealth of evidence against Honka, but they were desperate for him to make a full confession.
If he continued with his silence, they may never identify the other three murdered women.
-[ Speaking German ] -It smelled really odd in the house. There were also foreigners living there,
and Honka always said, "The foreigners cook in a funny way. They use strange spices in their food, and that's why it stinks."
None of the neighbors suspected that it wasn't the foreigners, that the smell came from the body parts in Honka's flat,
and they had started to reek. -Once somebody dies, decomposition will begin. There will be an increase, to start with,
in particularly the smell that comes from the body. As the body functions render down, things start to decompose.
-[ Speaking German ] -Everywhere in the flat were scented stones, all around the skirting boards.
The toilet was full of them. They were everywhere. -The longer the bodies had remained in Honka's attic,
the harder it was to get rid of them. -A dead body is difficult to move, and once rigor mortis starts to set in
and the body becomes stiff, it's not even flexible to move. It can be very hard to do.
-This is really illustrative of the type of serial killer he was. He wasn't massively organized in terms of covering up his crimes.
You know, he would have the corpses of his victims right there in his flat. He didn't actually dispose of them,
so this was something that he was doing just kind of short-term, reactionary, just kind of coping with each day as it arose.
-When the police went to Honka's favorite bars and broke the news that bodies had been found in his flat,
they were met with complete disbelief. -[ Speaking German ] -No one expected that of him, no one.
Even if you've met him, you'd definitely have said, "Him? Nah, he's too harmless."
Really shocking. -Journalists also went round the bars to get background color for their stories.
-[ Speaking German ] -Part of the story was to look around and find out, "Where did Honka meet his women?"
and that was in the Goldenen Handschuh. It was unimaginable. This was pure poverty.
People, human wrecks, women as well as men, whose fate had taken a sad turn for the worse.
These people had reached the very bottom of society. This doesn't mean that had to be criminals,
but they were very poor creatures. As a consequence, it smelled pretty bad in the Goldenen Handschuh,
as these people weren't able to wash. They had nowhere to go, as many of them were homeless.
-The police had identified one of Honka's victims as Gertraud Brauer, but the other three remained a mystery.
Establishing their identities would not be simple. -Even in the modern era of DNA,
identifying victims can be incredibly challenging. By and large, you have to have something to compare
your victim to, so dental records, evidence of missing people, have they got defining characteristics that's unique to them?
-The police found a pile of women's ID cards in Honka's flat and set about the complicated task
of trying to find the rightful owners among the prostitutes who frequented the bars around the Reeperbahn.
Each time they found a woman alive, they were able to cross her off the list of potential victims.
One of the local officers at the time was Peter Reichard. -[ Speaking German ] -We were able to work our way
through all the names on this list, and we realized that our women all seemed to be alive.
-The Hamburg police also put out a call to colleagues across Germany for details of missing women in their mid-40s to mid-50s.
-[ Speaking German ] -How many missing persons reports do you think they get in Germany?
I had stacks of them on my desk, and I had to look through all of them, and somehow still wasn't making progress.
Well, so we catalogued the clothes we had found in his flat, hung them up, numbered them, and photographed each item.
These clothes were really the only thing we had at that moment. -Detectives would have to go to the bars Honka went to around
the Reeperbahn to see if anyone could help them. -[ Speaking German ] -You try going to St. Pauli when you don't have a name.
You don't have an address. All you have is clothes and nothing else. You have the name of Mr. Honka,
and with that, you go to a bar and ask people, "What kind of girlfriends did he have?"
What do you think the people in these bars tell you? "Yes, he had many women, you know?
One was called Annie, the other Gerda, and the next, Erika, but that's all we know."
Well, what are you going to do with that? So you go round all the bars showing the outfits,
and if you're lucky, you might get a name. "Yeah, such-and-such always wore these kind of clothes."
As soon as you get a first name, you can make progress. At that point, we were established
that we were probably dealing with aging prostitutes. -Using the list of missing persons,
the clothes found in Honka's apartment and the names gathered from the local bars,
detectives were able to draw up a short list of possible victims. Armed with photographs,
they headed out on to the Reeperbahn once more. -[ Speaking German ] -And with these pictures, we went back to show them around
and were finally able to establish, "Yes, he had a thing with her." -It was a major breakthrough for the police.
They had linked a number of women to Honka. -[ Speaking German ] -As soon as we knew who these women were,
we could confront him again and again during the interrogations, and we kept insisting until he'd say,
"Yes, I knew her, and she'd been over at my place." So at least now he had admitted that they'd been with him.
Some stayed longer with him, for days, even weeks. It was nice for the women. Suddenly, they had somewhere to live.
The question was, what happened next? Well, we obviously had to confront him with the fact
that he had killed the woman, and all he said, "I can't remember." We had no choice but to accept that.
However, there was evidence that the women who had been identified and who had also lived with him,
were found dead in his flat, and that exactly was the point. -But the police still needed a confession.
-[ Speaking German ] -Now we just had to hear from him that he killed them and how he killed them
and what he did with the bodies, and that's difficult. That's very difficult. As I remember, he always made it sound like it was a possibility,
but he never admitted it 100%. -It is interesting that he didn't deny the killings.
He wasn't a particularly, "Oh, no, it's got nothing to do with me." Mind you, it would've been very difficult for him
to deny the killings. He was living with the body parts of four women. I mean, how they got there,
he was the only person who truly knew. -[ Speaking German ] -We kept pushing him.
"But you chopped up the bodies. You cut the women up with a saw," and so on. He just said, "I can't remember."
-It was further frustration for the police. For example, he would say, "Yeah, I slept with that woman,
and in the morning, she was lying dead next to me. Well, how she died, the way she died, I simply can't say."
-Although Honka continued to deny killing the three women, the detectives were at least able to finally identify them.
They were 54-year-old Anna Beuschel, 52-year-old Ruth Schult and 57-year-old Frieda Roblick,
a regular in the Golden Glove who went by the name of Rita. -[ Speaking German ]
-I had a cleaning lady who always helped out. Her name was Sofie, and Sofie was friends with Rita.
Now and then, Sofie would take Rita home with her so she could have a wash, bathe, or even sleep,
but I don't know. I think she had nowhere to live. She was gone for a while. One day, she came back wearing nice clothes,
really quite fancy, and I said, "Where have you been? I already thought you were dead."
"No, I have a new boyfriend, and he's wonderful." -But that new boyfriend was Fritz Honka,
who strangled her to death in December 1974. -Honka always seems to me to be kind of a accidental serial killer.
He didn't fit what the BAU or the FBI's behavioral unit call organized. He was completely disorganized.
These were crimes of opportunity. He wasn't stalking these women. He wasn't planning their killings.
They happened. They were part of his tragic character and part of his drinking and part of the fact
that he found any kind of sexual relationship with women almost impossible, and this was the only way
he could find to satisfy those desires that he had. -The West German press were fascinated with Honka.
Photographer Lutz Jaffé managed to capture a photograph of the mysterious killer.
-[ Speaking German ] -Back then, you could have pretty good contacts within the police, and I knew that Honka
would be taken either to prison or to appear in front of the Magistrate at a specific time.
Someone from the police had told me about it. Well, and then I lay in wait for him to arrive.
That's how this photo came about, as he turned around when I called, "Mr. Honka!"
That's how I managed to catch him. -The police were trying to determine a motive
for the murders. Interviews with local prostitutes who'd been with Honka and lived to tell the tale
revealed shocking facts about his perverse sexual tastes. -[ Speaking German ] -The women who escaped from his home were very lucky.
The interrogation of these women hinted at his sexual practices, and these were sometimes catastrophic.
I don't want to go into every detail here, but it was pretty terrible. It's possible these sexual practices got out of hand
and became excessive, which, I have to say, might have led to the death of a women.
-One of the surviving victims showed the police a scar she'd received in a brutal sexual encounter with Honka.
-[ Speaking German ] -Because she was so upset about Fritz Honka, that dirty old swine, as she called him,
she pulled up her skirt, took off her underwear and pointed to a scar beside her vagina.
"What is that?" I asked her. She then told us that during a sexual encounter with Fritz Honka, he had penetrated her
with a broom handle. That's where the injury had come from, and she ended up in hospital.
She was furious, angry beyond belief, you could say. -And she wasn't the only one who needed medical treatment
after spending the night with Honka. -[ Speaking German ] -For example, one of the women he took back to his place,
he sat her with a bare bum on top of a hot plate. As a result, the woman ran semi-naked out of the flat.
This is an example, a sort of thing where he became violent. This may have resulted in these deaths,
but, of course, it's also possible that the women weren't complying with his demands
and he became violent towards them. -The investigation was drawing to an end, but some questions remained unanswered.
-He had, unbelievable though it may seem, escaped under the radar for five years, killing four women
and basically keeping them around the flat as trophies. Now, there's no suggestion that Honka had sex
with them postmortem. There's no suggestion that he was some kind of necrophiliac.
I think he was just a dreadfully lazy drunk who didn't know what else to do and just convinced himself
it would be perfectly all right. -In November, 1976, the trial of Fritz Honka began in Hamburg.
He had retracted his initial confession and was now denying all the charges against him.
-Well, his defense strategy when he was arrested and charged with the crimes was an incredibly bizarre one.
He decided to blame Jack the Ripper, who was sending him messages to kill these women.
Now, this appears to be something that is, you know, completely bizarre and very odd,
but it could be evidence of somebody who is experiencing some kind of mental ill health.
We know that people who experience episodes of psychosis feel very strongly compelled to act in a particular way,
and they're not really fully in control of their actions, but equally, at the same time,
if you are reading the newspapers, if you are listening to the radio, and you know that this is something
that is available to you, that you're able to come out with this and it perhaps be taken seriously,
then you're going to give it a go. -The psychiatrists who examined Honka during the court case concluded
that he'd acted with diminished criminal responsibility. On the 20th of December, 1976, the jury found him guilty
of three counts of manslaughter and one of murder, that of 54-year-old Anna Beuschel,
who he had strangled in his apartment in August 1974. Honka was sentenced to 15 years in a psychiatric hospital.
-He might have been described at the time as a big slow. That affects the amount of culpability
that we assign to his crimes. So was he in control of what he was doing? Did he know what he was doing was wrong?
And if that can't be established, then perhaps he is treated in a mental-health facility
rather than a prison, and, indeed, he served 15 years in a hospital, in a hospital setting.
-The crimes of Fritz Honka left the entire country in shock, especially the city of Hamburg.
-[ Speaking German ] -I believe after the Second World War, such a murder case has never happened again
in the history of crimes in Hamburg. It was a unique case, that someone killed four women,
dismembered them, and left them in his flat. -[ Speaking German ] -After that, we became very, very well-known beyond Hamburg,
famous for the murder, as unpleasant as it was, and as sorry as I felt for the women, especially Rita.
Rita really didn't deserve it. -Honka was released from the psychiatric hospital
in 1993. He spend the final years of his life in a nursing home under the name Peter Jensen.
He died in Hamburg on the 19th of November, 1998. He was 63 years old. Today, Fritz Honka has become something of a cult figure
in Hamburg. The Golden Glove continues to capitalize on its most infamous former customer,
with the words "Honka Saloon" emblazoned above the entrance. -[ Speaking German ]
-These bars were a no-go zone. Not in a million years would a normal Hamburg citizen go there.
Only after the series of murders was made public did it become an interesting place
for people in fur coats to visit after the opera, so they could see for themselves how well-off they were
and how miserable the others. "Well, I'm going to be really generous and pay for a round of beer."
It was just to boost their own ego. -But it should never be forgotten that Honka was
a violent killer who took away the lives of four innocent women. -I think he's somebody who did evil things,
but if we call him evil, we let him off the hook. We just simply explain it away as,
"Well, this kind of subhuman monster that just does these things because they're evil,"
and that removes the possibility that they've chosen to do these things. -It's entirely possible that Honka would have got away
with it a little longer. No one really had complained particularly. He'd had bodies in the flat for almost five years.
He could well have had them for another two years. It is inevitable, however, that eventually justice would've caught up with Honka.
-Fritz Honka callously killed four women between 1970 and 1975. He strangled them before dismembering their bodies.
By attacking prostitutes, he hoped his crimes would never be revealed. Had it not been for a fire in his apartment block,
who knows just how many victims may have been murdered at the hands of Fritz Honka,
one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Fritz Honka killed four prostitutes in Hamburg during the early 70s.

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

Fritz Honka murdered four women in Hamburg, dismembering their bodies, before being caught after a fire revealed his crimes.

Key points

The Gruesome Discovery. Firefighters uncover dismembered bodies in a Hamburg apartment, shocking the community.
Fritz Honka: The Evil Killer. Fritz Honka, a man with a troubled past, becomes one of the world's most notorious killers.
Identifying the Victims. Police work tirelessly to identify the remains of Honka's victims, uncovering a tragic story.
A Shocking Crime Scene. The discovery of four women's bodies in Honka's attic leaves investigators reeling.
The Golden Glove Connection. Honka frequented bars in Hamburg's red-light district, where he met his victims.
The Complicated Task of Identification. Police struggle to identify Honka's victims, with only a pile of ID cards to go on.

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He showed no compassion for the victims.

Description of Fritz Honka's character.

1:09WatchJul 14, 2021

Tension

75/ 100High tension

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