Fritz Erbe and his 30-year-old mistress, Dorothee Buntrock, were a cunning murderous duo who robbed young women not only of their jewelry and clothing, but also of their lives. She was born in Holzminden in 1856 and worked as a teacher of laundry tailoring...
The last woman to be convicted under a British witchcraft law from 1735, the so-called “Witchcraft Act,” was 46-year-old Scot Helen Duncan, better known as “Hellish Nell.” The Witchcraft Act did not criminalize witchcraft itself, but rather the exploitation of belief in witches for...
A sex murder that remained unsolved for 20 years became one of the greatest mysteries in German criminal history. In the early morning of July 13, 1983, a firefighter discovered the body of 25-year-old Karen Oehme, the daughter of Wolfgang Oehme, CEO of Esso...
In 2008, a serial killer from Lithuania kept the Guarda Civil in Tenerife on their toes. The serial killer was 44-year-old Maris Meiers from Madona, Lithuania. He was a Navy diver and passionate photographer who couldn’t cope with the fact that his great love,...
A diabolical crime took place in June 2000 in the Italian village of Chiavenna, a town of 8,000 people in the Lombard Alpine province of Sondrio, where the 60-year-old nun Maria Laura Mainetti was brutally murdered. For three weeks, the Carabinieri puzzled over who...
In 1772, the child murderer Susanna Margaretha Brandt was the talk of the town in Frankfurt am Main, the birthplace of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the man with whom I share a birthday. At the time, he was working as a lawyer in Frankfurt...
