Joachim Georg Kroll (17 April 1933 - 1 July 1991) was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale), Ruhr Hunter (Ruhrjäger) and the Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger Menschenfresser). He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a total of 13.

Early life

Born the son of a miner in Hindenburg (Zabrze), Province of Upper Silesia, Kroll was the last among eight children. He was a weak child and used to wet the bed. His education was poor, only reaching Grade 3. (Later psychiatrists found he had an IQ of 76.)

After the end of World War II, Kroll's family moved to North Rhine-Westphalia.

Crimes

He began killing in 1955, after his mother died. Around 1960, Kroll went to Duisburg and found work as a toilet attendant for Mannesmann. Afterwards he worked for Thyssen Industries and went to 24 Friesen street, Laar, a district of Duisburg. At that time he resumed killing people.

List of victims

• 8 February 1955 - Irmgard Strehl, 19, raped and stabbed to death. Her disemboweled body was found in a barn in Lüdinghausen.

• 16 June 1959 - Klara Frieda Tesmer, 24, murdered in the meadows of the Rhine, near Rheinhausen. A mechanic, Heinrich Ott, was arrested for the crime. He hanged himself in jail.

• 26 July 1959 - Manuela Knodt, 16, raped and strangled in the City Park of Essen. Slices of flesh were carved from her buttocks and thighs.

• 1962 - Barbara Bruder, 12, abducted in Burscheid. Her body was never found.

• 23 April 1962 - Petra Giese, 13, raped and strangled in Dinslaken-Bruckhausen. Vinzenz Kuehn is arrested and convicted.

• 4 June 1962 - Monika Tafel, 12, killed in Walsum, slices of flesh carved from her buttocks. Walter Quicker is arrested for the crime. He is released but is driven by neighbors to suicide in October.

• 22 August 1965 - Hermann Schmitz and his girlfriend Marion Veen were attacked as they sat in a car in a lover's lane in Duisburg-Großenbaum. Hermann - Kroll's only male victim - was killed, but Marion escaped.

• 13 September 1966 - Ursula Rohling, strangled in Foersterbusch Park near Marl. Her boyfriend Adolf Schickel committed suicide after being falsely accused of the crime.

• 22 December 1966 - Ilona Harke, aged 5, raped and drowned in a ditch in Wuppertal.

• 12 July 1969 - Maria Hettgen, 61, raped and strangled at Hückeswagen.

• 21 May 1970 - Jutta Rahn, 13, strangled walking home from a train station. Peter Schay was arrested and eventually released. He confessed to the crime in 1976 after being hounded by his neighbors.

• 1976 - Karin Toepfer, 10, raped and strangled in Voerde.

• 3 July 1976 - Marion Ketter, 4. Parts of her body were in the process of being simmered when Kroll was arrested.

Method

Kroll was very particular about where he killed, only killing in the same place on a few occasions years apart. This, and the fact that there were a number of other killers operating in the area at the time, helped him to evade capture. Kroll would surprise his victims and strangle them quickly. Afterward he would strip the body and have intercourse with it, often masturbating over it again. He would then mutilate and cut off pieces to be eaten later. Upon returning home, he would have intercourse again with a rubber sex doll he had for the purpose.

Capture

On 3 July 1976, Kroll was arrested for kidnapping and killing a four-year-old girl named Marion Kettner. As police went from home to home, a neighbor approached a policeman and told him that the waste-pipe in his apartment building had blocked up, and when he had asked his neighbor, Kroll, whether he knew what had been blocking the pipe, Kroll had simply replied; "Guts". Upon this report, the police went up to Kroll's apartment and found the body of the Kettner girl cut up: some parts were in the fridge, a small hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water and the entrails were found stuck in the waste-pipe.

Kroll was immediately arrested.

Trial and death

He admitted killing Marion Kettner and gave details of 14 other murders and one attempted murder over the last two decades.

Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery bills. In custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted murder. In April 1982, after a 151-day trial, he was convicted on all counts and was given nine life sentences.

He died of a heart attack in 1991 in the prison of Rheinbach, near Bonn.

Wikipedia.org

Joachim Georg Kroll

He started to rape and kill in 1955 when he was 22, and continued for two decades in the Duisberg area of Germany. At one point on a whim, he tasted the flesh from a murdered woman and found that he liked it.  Thereafter, he stalked women or girls that he thought would yield tender meat and left their bodies to be discovered, sans pieces of flesh cut mostly from the buttocks.  Many of them were young, and one was only four years old.  When police finally nabbed him, they found a kettle on his stove boiling carrots and potatoes along with a tiny female hand.

The Biography of the Ruhr Hunter.

17 april 1933 Joachim Georg Kroll is born in Hindenburg, Oberschlesien, near the Polish border.

1 july 1991 Joachim Georg Kroll dies of a heart-attack in the prison of Rheinbach, near Bonn.

Kroll, Joachim

A nomadic German sex killer, Kroll lived in the vicinity of Duisburg, filling his bachelor apartment with electronic gadgets and inflatable sex dolls, frequently strangling the latter with one hand while he masturbated with the other. Too nervous and shy for sex with conscious partners, he turned to rape and murder at age 22, killing so often over the next two decades that he lost count of his victims. 

In the 1960s, Kroll tried cannibalism on a whim, enjoying it so much that he kept up the practice, stalking "tender" victims in an effort to reduce his grocery bills. 

Kroll's first remembered victim was 19-year-old Inngard Strehl, raped and murdered in a barn near the village of Walstedde, during February 1955. 

Twelve-year-old Erika Schuletter was the next to die, raped and strangled at Kirchhellen in 1956. Three years later and miles away, he killed Klara Jesmer in the woods near Rbeinhausen, on June 17, 1959. Sixteen-year-old Manuela Knodt was raped and murdered near Bredeney, south of Essen, with slices cut from her buttocks and thighs in the first slaying attributed to the man police would dub the "Ruhr Hunter." 

On April 23, 1962, 13-year-old Petra Giese was raped and killed at Rees, near Walsum, both buttocks sliced off, along with her left forearm and hand. The Hunter was still stalking Walsum on June 4, when 13-year-old Monica Tafel vanished on her way to school. Searchers found her body in a nearby rye field, steaks carved from her buttocks and the back of her thighs. 

Kroll sometimes changed his pattern, in an effort to confuse police. No meat was taken when he murdered 12-year-old Barbara Bruder, in Burscheid, during 1962. 

In August 1965, at Grossenbaum, he crept up on a pair of young lovers, stabbing a tire on their car, then fatally knifing the driver, Hermann Schmitz, when he stepped out to investigate the noise. In Marl, he raped and murdered Ursula Roling on September 13, 1966, rebounding three months later to kill five-year-old Ilona Harke at Wuppertal, slicing steaks from her buttocks and shoulders. 

Kroll's luck nearly ran out in 1967, when he settled briefly in Grafenhausen, befriending local children who began to call him "Uncle." 

Luring a 10-year-old girl into a nearby field one afternoon, he promised to "show her a rabbit" but produced obscene photos instead, hoping the child might become sexually aroused. Instead, she was horrified, bolting for safety as Kroll made a grab for her throat, and he fled Grafenhausen the same day, before police could begin asking troublesome questions. 

On July 12, 1969, he invaded the home of 61-year-old Maria Hettgen, in Hueckeswagen, strangling her to death and raping her corpse in the front hall. Reverting to children on May 21, 1970, Kroll waylaid 13-year-old Jutta Ranh in Breitscheid, discarding her strangled body after he had satisfied his lust. In 1976, 10-year-old Karin Toepfer was raped and strangled on her way to school, in Dinslaken Voerde. 

Kroll's arrogance defeated him in July 1976, when he claimed the next victim in his own neighborhood of Laar, a Duisburg suburb. 

Four-year-old Marion Ketter was reported missing from a nearby playground, and police were asking questions door-to-door when they heard a curious story from one of Kroll's neighbors. According to their witness, Kroll had warned him that the upstairs toilet in their block of flats was clogged "with guts." A plumber quickly verified the statement, flushing a child's lungs and other organs out of the pipe, and detectives went calling on Kroll. 

In his apartment, they discovered plastic bags of human flesh stored in the freezer; on the stove, a tiny hand was boiling in a pot with carrots and potatoes. Convinced that they had bagged the Hunter, officers were stunned by Kroll's long-running litany of rape and murder. 

He remembered fourteen victims, but he really couldn't say if there were more, a circumstance that left detectives free to speculate upon his final body-count. With capital punishment abolished in Germany after World War II, Kroll received the maximum possible sentence of life imprisonment.

Michael Newton - An Encyclopedia of Modern Serial Killers