World's Most Evil Killers - Season 2, Episode 17 - Wolfgang Schmidt - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-In October 1989, the body of a woman was found in a forest on the outskirts of the village of Deetz in East Germany.
She'd been hit by a hammer, strangled, and sexually assaulted. Scattered around her body
was her underwear, stolen from a washing line. Police had no idea at the time, but this was the work of a perverted serial killer.
-He did know what he was doing. He did know that it was wrong, and he chose to do it anyway,
regardless of whatever drives or desires he had. -The murderer was a 23-year-old man named Wolfgang Schmidt.
He'd been roaming the local woods in search of prey to satisfy his depraved sexual fantasies.
He became known as the Beast of Beelitz. -I was on call day and night, and when my phone would ring,
I would sit up straight in my bed because I thought he had struck again. -Over the next two years,
he would kill a further four women and a baby, all to fulfill his own grotesque form of sexual urges.
-You have a man who is completely possessed by the desire that he's now feeding the frenzy of his own addiction.
-Wolfgang Schmidt, the Beast of Beelitz, had become one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Wolfgang Schmidt had brutally killed five women and an infant during his near two-year-long killing spree.
He committed his crimes in and around the forest near the town of Beelitz in East Germany,
but when he was finally captured in 1991, it was after the fall of the Berlin Wall,
and so he faced the courts of the new unified Germany. The trial began on the 20th of October, 1992,
just two weeks after Schmidt's 26th birthday. -[ Speaking German ] -The public gallery was jam-packed.
Not one more person could fit in. Everyone wanted to see Wolfgang Schmidt. This, of course, has to do with the sensationalism.
It's also clear the more difficult, the more terrible the crime, the more people are fascinated.
-Schmidt had murdered five people and attacked three other women in an attempt to get sexual gratification from his unique perversion --
stealing and soiling their underwear. The only way he could do this was if they were dead.
-There are some elements of the most extraordinary humiliation in Schmidt's acts towards women,
and there can be no forgiveness for that. He was literally out of control. He was quite literally fulfilling his own fantasies
at the expense of whomever might get in his way. -[ Speaking German ] -It moved the whole country -- all of Germany,
not only the vicinity of Berlin and Brandenburg. It was on the national news. Germany was moved.
-Despite the extreme violence and sexual elements to his crimes, when he was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison,
Wolfgang Schmidt showed little remorse for his actions. -I think he was embarrassed,
but he was not ashamed about anything, least of all the murders. -During the trial, it became clear
Schmidt's motive for killing was to indulge his fantasies for wearing women's underwear
and defecating in them to reach sexual satisfaction. He was diagnosed with a fetish called coprophilia.
-Coprophilia is a very rare paraphilia, and it's basically a sexual arousal around human waste, around excrement --
people becoming sexually excited around this substance. So it's very, very rare to see this,
even amongst serial killers. -Any kind of major fetish almost always becomes uncontrollable.
The same is true of someone who gets an intense satisfaction, as in this case, from wearing women's clothes.
That satisfaction along with coprophilia is a very dynamic mixture. -In time, Schmidt's bizarre and murderous acts
would earn him two monikers. He was called the Beast of Beelitz and was also labeled by some as the Pink Giant.
-He became known as the Pink Giant because he grew to be a 6-foot-1-, 6-foot-2-tall man,
and he loved pink underwear -- ladies' pink underwear -- which was part of his fetish.
-This killer's story begins just over 50 years ago. Wolfgang Schmidt was born on the 5th of October, 1966,
in the small town of Lehnin, near Potsdam, in the former German Democratic Republic.
He, along with his younger brother, grew up in a rural area just outside the town.
-Well, the family is the first institution in which we start to learn about men and women's roles in society
and about their relationships with one another, so what we see in our family in our early years
we take to be our benchmark for normal. -According to a psychologist's report, Schmidt's unusual desires began early.
-[ Speaking German ] -Wolfgang Schmidt discovered his fetish by coincidence when he went through his mother's closet
as a 6- or 7-year-old boy and discovered lingerie. And then he put that lingerie on.
He had the need for a loving, symbiotic relationship with his mother... -[ Speaking German ]
-...which he was able to establish by wearing her lingerie. -At first, Schmidt says he felt a childlike pleasure
from wearing his mother's underwear, and it became a substitute for a close maternal relationship.
-Well, many children are going to experiment. They're gonna play when they're youngsters.
They're gonna try on the clothes of their parents, their siblings. This isn't something that is completely out of the ordinary,
but the real key for me here is, it's the reaction of other people when a child engages in this behavior.
Is this something that the parent is gonna make them feel bad about? Is it something that the parent's going to
make them feel ashamed of? Or is it something that's just going to be brushed off
and, "Okay, it's fine. They're just playing. They're just experimenting"? -According to Schmidt, his mother reacted with horror,
and she started to lock her underwear away, but Schmidt had already developed a fondness
for wearing his mother's undergarments. When he discovered that defecating and urinating in them
increased the overall pleasurable sensation, he could not stop. -The thing about him starting to soil the underwear --
it could have been maybe he was wearing the underwear when everybody was outside the house,
and then he heard a noise. He's a kid. He gets scared. You can't really control it, and it just happened.
Right there, he didn't intend to, and as he did, something else came over him that he don't know what it is.
But it was something that made him go, "Wow. I like this." Not a sexual thing. He just simply felt a different excitement,
and when a kid likes something, they will go back to it. -By the time Schmidt reached puberty,
defecating in his mother's underwear added a whole different level of enjoyment.
-To get pleasure out of destroying something that belongs to her, something that is intimate for her --
that's really meaningful for me looking at this from the outside. And to see him getting pleasure in doing this,
in soiling this underwear -- that's something that signifies to me he's enjoying getting a little bit of power back.
-[ Speaking German ] -He ritualized that behavior over the years so that it didn't only become the central element
of his sexuality, but of his entire life. That means that he really only lives to experience
that kind of sexuality. -With all the underwear locked away, Schmidt started to look elsewhere to satisfy his urges.
This was the beginning of his double life. Ulrich Bauschulte was Schmidt's defense lawyer.
-[ Speaking German ] -Often, with his father, he cleared things from the house to be put in trash heaps,
or as they were called then in the German Democratic Republic, <i> mullhaufen.</i>
Then he noticed that women's underwear was also thrown away, and so he began to collect these undergarments.
-[ Speaking German ] -Schmidt regularly went into the forest near the village of Deetz that was near to his home
in search of underwear on makeshift landfills. He would then defecate with the underwear on,
satisfy his sexual urges, and clean up after as if nothing had happened. As he grew to be an adult, however,
this routine would not be enough for him. He needed an actual woman to fulfill his fantasy.
-[ Speaking German ] -That means the woman has to be draped with lingerie. There has to be mutual defecation,
and then there will be intercourse. And it became clear to him at some point that in order to live out this fantasy,
he needed a woman to be entirely at his disposal. -And the only way Schmidt was going to satisfy his needs
was to murder. But living in such a remote and sparsely populated area, the opportunities for Schmidt
to fulfill his unusual fantasies were limited. -He lived in a very rural community --
lots of forests, lots of lakes, woods, so there weren't countless washing lines with ladies' underwear hanging on them out to dry.
It was quite a complicated search, but search he did, and he searched rubbish dumps.
He searched as much as he could. He got pleasure from putting the underwear on, taking it off, urinating in it, defecating in it.
It was all mixed into this bodily-function, sexual-arousal dynamic. -In 1985, Schmidt's life changed.
He signed up to 10 years of service with the riotant, anti-insurgency police force.
Around that time, he also met a young woman from a nearby village. -He develops a double life.
He has this young woman who he's devoted to and eventually becomes his fiancée. -At this time, Schmidt appeared to be leading a regular life.
-And he has this very ordered life in the police. Perhaps he thinks something about the uniform
or the discipline will -- well, how can I put it? -- "Help me control my urges. Perhaps there's something about that disciplined environment
which will calm me down." It's a very male, macho environment. -But when, in April 1989, he got drunk
and publicly celebrated Adolf Hitler's 100th birthday, he was dismissed from the force.
It led to catastrophic consequences. -Well, when we look at the offending behavior
of serial killers, often we identify particular stressors, particular things that would have made the difference
between offending and not offending at that particular point in time, and I think for Schmidt,
losing his job as a police officer was very, very significant for him 'cause this was quite central to his sense of identity.
-Schmidt, now 23, got a new job at a local steelworks, but without the discipline of the police force,
his strange urges grew stronger. -I'm not in any doubt that Schmidt was increasingly unraveling
from the moment he lost his job with the police until the first killing, which was not all that much later.
It was that ticking time bomb within him that led inevitably, unfortunately, to the first killing.
By the autumn that year, he is about to explode. -Schmidt was on his way to work when he was sidetracked
by his desire to indulge in his deviant fantasies. He ended up on the outskirts of the small village of Deetz,
where he hid at the edge of the forest to watch a row of houses. He was hoping to find women's underwear.
-He goes to the house on the end of the little road and discovers that there's a tool shed,
and he presumably started by looking for the washing line, but he goes into the tool shed, and he discovers a hammer.
He then spies the owner of the property, and I think at that point, the detonation went off in his head.
-When Schmidt saw Edeltraut Nixdorf tending to her garden, he was overcome by an intense urge
to violently assault the 51-year-old woman. -And probably in the first instance,
without very much premeditation, he simply hit her on the head with the hammer he'd found in the tool shed.
-The woman screamed and tried to defend herself with a rake, but Schmidt dragged her into the house,
hit her again with the hammer, and strangled her. He then proceeded to have intercourse with her.
However, not getting the satisfaction he craved, Schmidt wrapped her body in a blanket
and started to carry her towards the forest. Wolfgang Schmidt had killed his first victim,
but it had not gone to plan. -In terms of his first killing, that reality didn't quite live up to the fantasy
that he had in his head, so of course he was going to continue to try and create that fantasy and make it a reality.
-Schmidt had been spotted when he carried his victim into the forest, and the police were called to the scene.
The witness gave a description of a very tall, strong, and athletic man. When detectives searched the crime scene in Deetz,
they found underwear scattered around the victim's body. One of the investigating officers was Volker Kelm.
-[ Speaking German ] -These clothes were lying in the area very close by to the victim.
From this, we concluded that it was a break-in and that the perpetrator had been disturbed by the victim,
and so he killed her. -Police also found a vital clue in the house -- a large footprint.
The boot was military-issue and similar to ones worn by some police units, but in 1989,
the German Democratic Republic was on the brink of collapse. Attempts to identify the owner of the boot
from an official list of police recruits proved futile. For Schmidt, however, this was just the beginning.
-This is a man who is now literally searching for prey. He wants nothing more than victims,
and he doesn't really mind which shape and form they come in. They could be older.
They could be younger. What's important is they are submissive. -On the 24th of May,
Schmidt was riding his bicycle to meet friends in Ferch, about eight miles from the town of Beelitz,
when he saw a sign pointing to a landfill. -Although there weren't copious washing lines for him to search,
there were increasing numbers of illegal landfills in which were deposited underwear of all sorts of shapes and sizes,
be it slips, bras, knickers, all kinds, and that became Schmidt's happy hunting ground.
-While Schmidt searched the landfill for women's underwear, he was disturbed by a noise.
He spotted a 55-year-old woman, Christa Naujoks, who lived in a caravan next to the landfill.
-[ Speaking German ] -He did not care about the age of his victims at all. In the fantasies of a perpetrator like that,
the victims appear faceless and ageless a lot of the time. So it's not about who I do it with,
but rather about what I do, and with him, the central element of experience was his fetish.
-As Schmidt approached his victim, she screamed. He put his arm around her neck and started to tighten his grip,
but Christa managed to get away. Schmidt then picked up an electric cable and caught up with her.
He strangled Christa to death, dragged her into the forest, and sexually abused her.
-The first two murders were really spontaneous. Wolfgang Schmidt didn't intend to kill anyone.
That's not why he was out there. But he learned by committing the first two murders
firstly that he was capable of doing it... ...and, secondly, that when he had sex with corpses,
it was especially arousing to him. -By the time police arrived at the crime scene,
Schmidt had already left. Having now found a way to get his deadly needs met, it wasn't long until Schmidt tried to overcome another woman.
-By now, you have the classic behavioral trait of escalation. First murder -- the autumn in October 1989.
Second murder in May 1990. Not much longer, again in the summer of 1990. -In July, Schmidt was at a landfill
just outside the city of Brandenburg. He had already found underwear and pornography
when he realized he was not alone. He spotted his next victim, a 58-year-old woman.
This time, Schmidt was carrying a knife. He approached and stabbed her but did not kill her.
He then dragged the woman to a more secluded place. -He renders her unconscious,
and he's about to rape her, but he gets interrupted, so he's nearly got to the point
where he's fulfilled his fantasy, where he's made his fantasy reality, but he's been stopped in doing so.
-Schmidt fled the scene. The woman was found in time to call an ambulance. She survived but was unable to give a description
of her attacker to the local police. With no formal identification made, the police could take the case no further.
At this point, they did not make a connection with the previous killings. Schmidt laid low for eight months,
but he could not control his urges, and it would not be long before he struck again.
-When he gets to the fourth victim, he goes prepared, essentially. He's got a knife.
He's absolutely determined 'cause he's nearly reached the point that he wanted to reach.
He's nearly managed to have sexual relations with a woman who is submissive, who is unconscious,
and he's absolutely determined that he's gonna make this happen, so there's a real sense of urgency in him now,
and he's a very, very dangerous man. -On the 13th of March, 1991, Schmidt attacked Inge Fischer.
The 34-year-old woman was walking home through the forest near Beelitz. -[ Speaking German ]
-She was stabbed by the killer with a knife from behind. And here, too, based on the way it was done
and in the circumstances, we couldn't establish connections with any previous incidents.
The modus operandi, the way it was done, was different. One was struck with a hammer.
One was strangled. One was stabbed. Two were older women, this time a younger woman,
on a forest path, a cottage, a rubbish dump. Because we didn't have any matching clues until then,
it was hard for us to see any connections. -[ Speaking German ] -After four attacks, three resulting in murders,
it was still impossible for police to make a conclusive connection between the crimes.
That meant Schmidt's killing spree continued unabated. In the spring of 1991, Wolfgang Schmidt was leading a double life.
He was engaged to be married and worked at a local steelworks. At the same time, he was a dangerous sexual predator
who was still on the loose. One thing had become clear -- it was dangerous for women
to venture into the forest on their own. Police handed out leaflets and warned local communities,
but the message had not reached a community of former Russian military families living in the area.
-[ Speaking German ] -They had very little contact with the people in the area and so probably didn't notice what was happening.
One should add that, tragically, that they were just about to go back home. -Just nine days after killing his last victim,
Schmidt was prowling the forest behind a hospital. He spotted a Russian mother, Tamara Petrowskaja,
and her infant son walking home through the woods. -He's been fantasizing about this --
this sexual encounter -- for so many years. It's something that he really wants.
Now the possibility is in front of him, and there's this one barrier in the way,
and that barrier is the baby. So he's very instrumental in removing this obstacle
to getting what he wants. -Schmidt attacked his victim, beat her, and started to pull her into the forest.
To silence the baby, Schmidt picked up the infant and threw him to the ground and then callously kicked him in the chest.
-The most horrific, the most terrifying of Schmidt's crimes, was the killing of a Russian doctor's wife.
The woman was 44. Imagine how much she must have prized the child, particularly at that age.
Unfortunately for her and for her child, Schmidt comes across them and is absolutely determined to attack the woman.
-[ Speaking German ] -At the crime scene where the baby and the woman died, there was women's lingerie lying right there at the scene,
and it was clear that it had something to do with the crime. That's when it occurred to us, "What about the others?
Could this case be linked with the others?" -Police found women's underwear at the crime scene.
They had now established it was crucial evidence in all these murders, and that was a major breakthrough.
The investigators believe the perpetrator must be someone with a dangerous fetish.
They were coming under increasing pressure to capture the killer who was now hitting the headlines
as the Beast of Beelitz and the Pink Giant. Could this be the missing clue that would finally lead them
to this extremely dangerous sexual predator? -[ Speaking German ] -After we were able to establish the relationship
between the underwear and the perpetrator, naturally, we went to search this angle in particular.
And at the surrounding area of the crime scenes, we found lairs where he basically collected the underwear
and where he satisfied himself with it. And there were bags of underwear that we found.
-Marianne Bohm, then a young prosecutor from West Berlin, was sent to Potsdam to head up the investigation.
-[ Speaking German ] -The case of Wolfgang Schmidt was especially distinguished by the variety of cases to deal with.
It was because of this anxiety, because we couldn't catch the perpetrator, I was on call day and night,
and when my phone would ring, I would sit up straight in my bed because I thought he had struck again.
-Schmidt would have known that police were closing in on him, but he was still free
and still indulging in his now deadly fantasies. -The main reason why it was tricky for the police
to put all the clues together to go after Schmidt is, there are two types of serial killers,
or two main types of serial killers. One is the victim-based serial killer, and the other one is action-based serial killer
or the violence-based serial killer. The victim-based goes after a specific kind of victim.
The other kind of serial killer is one that the victim makes zero difference to them.
What they are after is something else. Either the violence -- that is what excites them, is killing the person --
or some kind of sexual pleasure. In the case of Schmidt, he didn't care about the victim.
He wanted the sex. -But as yet, the police had no idea who they were dealing with.
-[ Speaking German ] -The whole problem was that Wolfgang Schmidt was not known to the police as a sexual perpetrator.
The investigators back then already had a pretty clear picture of what made this predator tick,
that his way of acting was fetishistic and that he went into a situation with an intent of killing.
-[ Speaking German ] -It was also clear early on that they were dealing with a serial killer.
And since there were no leads to Wolfgang Schmidt that came from the general public either,
it was basically impossible to catch him unless he was caught in the act at some point.
That means they were looking for a needle in a haystack. -Two weeks after his last assault,
Schmidt was on the prowl again. He came across two 12-year-old girls who were looking for a dead deer in the forest.
-The escalation is very, very common. So now he escalated. Maybe he thought, "To have my kind of fetish sex
with two women instead of one." Maybe he had already been fantasized about that for awhile.
I'm certain that the reason why he went after that is because he had done everything prior to that,
and he was always escalating and escalating and escalating until the day he gets caught.
-Schmidt attacked the girls dressed up in women's clothes, wearing an apron. What the girls must have thought almost defies belief.
There's this presumably huge man dressed up in women's clothes with an apron on.
It is truly bizarre. This time, they both survive. This time, they can describe the man who's attacked them.
-Schmidt's disappointment at failing to fulfill his sexual needs with the two girls
was so intense that the following day, on the 5th of April, 1991, he struck again.
He broke into the house of a 66-year-old woman, Talita Bremer, while she slept. Schmidt found her underwear and became highly aroused.
He strangled her to death and then sexually defiled her body. -What we've got to remember is,
here is a man that did have some control over his behavior. Everybody has fantasies.
Everybody has things that they would like to do, but they know that these things are socially unacceptable
or they are deviant or that they are illegal, so most people choose not to act on them,
but he did. He knows what he's doing is wrong, but he's choosing to do it anyway
because he wants that fantasy that he's created in his head to become a reality,
and he's always making the decision that he's gonna try again. He's gonna try again
'cause, "I've not quite achieved it this time. I'm gonna do it again." -The hunt to capture Schmidt was gathering pace.
Thanks to the description given by the two surviving 12-year-old victims, police were able to issue an Identi-Kit,
and the prosecution offered a reward of 20,000 Deutsche Marks for information. -We received hundreds of bits of information
after we went public with it. -[ Speaking German ] -There were several things that pointed towards somebody that lived in the area,
that was out and about, that had some sort of occupation that made him wander the forests,
but that was all we knew. All of that really became more focused when the girls were able to tell us
who we were actually looking for. -[ Speaking German ] -By the summer of 1991, East German Wolfgang Schmidt's
deviant fantasies had spiraled completely out of control. In his extraordinary search for sexual fulfillment,
Schmidt had attacked nine people and murdered five women and a baby. But his lust for a bizarre form of gratification
showed no signs of stopping. On the 1st of August, 1991, nearly four months after his previous murder,
Schmidt returned to the woods surrounding his home to try and satisfy his desires.
-With Schmidt, it's not simply about ending his victims' lives and then sexually abusing them and raping them
after they've died. It's also about continuing in this behavior of wearing women's underwear, of soiling this underwear.
He has this routine, he has this ritual, and he has to have every stage of this ritual
in order to gain sexual satisfaction, and it's becoming all the more elaborate and all the more complex with several stages in it --
wearing women's underwear, soiling the underwear, identifying a victim, and assaulting that victim.
And all of those elements need to be there for him to have satisfaction from it.
-Alert to his perverse and murderous activities, the police were now determined to catch the serial killer
known as the Beast of Beelitz. -[ Speaking German ] -We carried out searches in the woods
for these types of clothing sites... ...because we firmly believed that there must be more to find.
And we were able to find several of them in the forests around Beelitz-Heilstatten, at Neuendorf and so on.
We staked out two of these sites. To do this, we used special observation forces
who were trained for this, who lay hidden in the woods, who watched, and then, if they saw him either putting the clothes on
or engaging in any type of sexual act, they could catch him in the act and arrest him.
-While the police lay in wait, Schmidt, wearing a bra under his jacket, was spotted gratifying himself
at another site by two passersby. When the shocked witnesses reported his abhorrent behavior,
Schmidt was promptly arrested and taken into police custody. There he was charged with the murders he'd committed.
-[ Speaking German ] -He was a very shy, reluctant young man back then who, as is often the case with sexual killers or killers in general,
he didn't have it written on his forehead that he was a murderer. He was often described as the nice kid next door.
-His defense lawyer was Ulrich Bauschulte. -[ Speaking German ] -In contrast to his physical size --
he was well over 1-meter-90 -- I found, when I spoke to him, he seemed very small, very shy,
which is astounding when you read and learn how violently the deaths occurred. -When confronted with the details
of the murders he'd committed, Schmidt seemed to show scant remorse for his actions.
-[ Speaking German ] -I think it was embarrassing for him, but he was not ashamed about anything,
not even about the murders. He was probably embarrassed that he was seen in women's lingerie
and with an apron on. -The trial was set to begin on the 20th of October, 1992, just two weeks after Schmidt's 26th birthday.
The interest in the killer the German tabloids have dubbed as the Beast of Beelitz and the Pink Giant,
after his fascination with pink underwear, was immense. -[ Speaking German ] -So there was an unbelievable press hype back then.
We had far too little room in the court for all the press. Everyone was following it on the news.
-Gisela Friedrichsen was the court reporter for a renowned West German magazine.
-[ Speaking German ] -At the beginning, everyone knew that Wolfgang Schmidt killed many women.
And then, gradually, all the details came out into the open through reports in the tabloids.
-[ Speaking German ] -And it became very clear that he must be a very disturbed person.
-The East German press, however, were less understanding of Schmidt's problems. -They would have, ideally, wanted to execute him.
They would have cut off everything that could be cut off from his body and so on.
-Schmidt's mental health was assessed by Professor Wilfried Rasch, who was the leading
German forensic psychiatrist of his time. -[ Speaking German ] -Professor Rasch explained it brilliantly to the court
how Wolfgang Schmidt developed throughout the years. It began during his childhood in the search
to have a closer relationship to his mother, and that naturally evolved into something else as time went by.
That was fetishism and also transvestism. A combination of these, which together with inclinations toward coprophilia,
changed and became established. -Even when we look at cases of serial killers, we only come across a handful of cases
where people have engaged in this type of behavior, and, unfortunately, if something like this
isn't nipped in the bud, isn't recognized early on, it's something that's only going to get worse.
-Schmidt had shared his most intimate secrets with the psychiatrist, including revelations about his habit
of defecating in women's underwear and then wearing it back-to-front while pleasuring himself.
Professor Rasch concluded that Schmidt's sexual fantasies began to grow, and at some point, the balance tipped over,
and he decided to try to do this with a woman. But when Schmidt failed to achieve sexual gratification,
he snapped, and that's when his killing spree began. -When the desire got stronger and stronger,
it ended in those murders. That's where he got his first kick and where he noticed that there was a chance for him to move on
to a level that may give him sexual satisfaction. -Schmidt was cooperative from the beginning,
but when he was confronted with the Identi-Kit that led to his capture, his response was rather startling.
-[ Speaking German ] -When he saw the picture, he said to me, "That looks a lot like me,
but it can't be me because I didn't kill anybody." I didn't really know how to interpret that statement
back then until Professor Rasch conducted the examination in order to see what it was
that was really wrong with Mr. Schmidt. The results stated repeatedly that when he lived out his fantasies,
in his mind, the women had lived. -All throughout the trial, Schmidt continued to claim that in his head,
all his victims were still alive. -So Schmidt's fantasy was all about dominating alive women.
He says, "In my head, they were alive." Well, in his head, they had to be alive 'cause that was the only way in which
he could get pleasure out of the situation. -The prosecution had vast amounts of evidence,
such as clothes, undergarments, and the murder weapons, but they did not play a significant role
during the trial because Schmidt had confessed to everything. -Everybody agreed that Mr. Schmidt
belonged in a psychiatric facility. -Schmidt was sentenced to 15 years in prison
and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Brandenburg, where he remains to this day.
Adding to the price he's paid, Schmidt's fiancée has, since his incarceration, left him.
-[ Speaking German ] -Wolfgang Schmidt is very sexually deviant, and he most certainly has a personality disorder, as well.
As long as he does not confront what he has done and gets the appropriate means to help him,
he will always pose a threat to others. And since, to this day, that has not changed,
there is no chance for him to ever be set free again. -Many people have issues seeing him
as a typical serial killer because of his modus operandi varying from one victim to the other,
but essentially, his drive, his motivation is the same as many other serial killers.
He wants to have power over other people and to dominate other people. He shared with other serial killers
a callous disregard for the rights of other people, for the lives of other people, and for their suffering.
-In a final twist to this story, in 2009, courts allowed Wolfgang Schmidt to change his name to Beate Schmidt
when he revealed his desire to transition into a woman. Schmidt has been undergoing hormone treatment since 2010
but has so far been refused gender-reassignment surgery. Regardless of his current or future gender,
the bizarre and callous killings committed by the Beast of Beelitz, Wolfgang Schmidt,
makes him one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Between 1989 and 1992 in East Germany, Wolfgang Schmidt, known as the Beast of Beelitz, murdered four women and a baby.

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

Wolfgang Schmidt, the Beast of Beelitz, murdered five women and an infant in East Germany, driven by disturbing sexual fantasies.

Key points

The Beast of Beelitz. Wolfgang Schmidt, known as the Beast of Beelitz, committed heinous crimes fueled by his depraved fantasies.
The Trial of Wolfgang Schmidt. Schmidt's trial captivated the nation, revealing the depths of his depravity and lack of remorse.
The Horrific Killing of a Mother and Child. In a chilling act, Schmidt attacked a mother and her infant son, showcasing his monstrous nature.
The Beast of Beelitz. Wolfgang Schmidt, dubbed the Beast of Beelitz, escalates his violent crimes.
The Arrest. Schmidt is caught in the act, leading to his arrest and trial.
Trial and Confession. During the trial, Schmidt confesses to his crimes but shows no remorse.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Germany was moved.

3:37WatchJul 20, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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