This photograph, taken shortly after
his death is the only known picture of Karl Denke.
The neat picture of a
saw, a pickaxe and some knives are part of a series of mysterious
photographs found dumped at the Medical Academy of Wrocław in the
mid 1980's. A total of 1200 pictures (medium format glass negatives
and positives) were dumped during a renovation at the medical
college of Wrocław. They belonged most probably to the German
Institute of Forensic Medicine in Breslau until 1945, when the city
became Polish Wrocław.
Tadeusz Dobosz, the
man who found them - then scientific employee, now professor of
Molecular
Techniques at the Department of Forensic Medicine of the Medical
Academy of Wrocław -
was able to interpret most of them, but a dozen frames remained quite
a puzzle.
Four of them
depicted human bones.
One showed a table
full of meat, human bones and a pair of suspenders (made of human
skin).
On another
photograph one could see more suspenders with some rags and old
shoes.
Two pictures showed
jars and pots in some interiors.
With these came 3
single pictures: a house from the outside, a wooden shed and a
portrait
of a deadman (this particular glass negative was shattered and could
not be scanned by
prof. Dobosz but it is the same picture as we know as the only
portrait of Karl Denke).
Prof. Dobosz suspected a
cannibal story behind these pictures but couldn't find any trace of
such a story. Only last spring - after meeting Marcin Tosz, a local
journalist familiar with the Denke case - could prof. Dobosz link the
pictures he had to a specific story - that of Karl Denke. The wooden
shed in Denke's garden was destroyed after World War II by the new
Polish owners of the house. They soon unearthed a few skulls and some
human bones. Thus the gory legend of the cannibal from Muensterberg
soon became common knowledge in the village of Ziębice (as
Muensterberg is called today).
As Mark Benecke points out, Karl
Denke's house has never been demolished,
which is unlike most serial
killers' homes. Lower picture by Armin Ruetters.
In Denke's ledger, investigators found listed names and dates, with the
respective
weights of bodies he had pickled dating back to 1921.
