One of Germany’s most notorious serial killers was Volker Eckert, better known as the long-distance lorry driver from Hof. He committed his first murder as a teenager on 7 May 1974 in Plauen, killing his 14-year-old classmate Sylvia U. He strangled her and then disguised the murder as a suicide, which the GDR People’s Police accepted without question. It was not until 1987 that Volker Eckert, a 1.80-metre-tall, gaunt man, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for two near-fatal attacks on women. He was released from prison after only seven years. He settled in Hof and worked as a long-distance lorry driver. During his trips through France, Spain and Italy, his lust for murder was rekindled. Between 2001 and 2009, he murdered at least nine women who worked as prostitutes. He always followed the same pattern. First, he strangled the women, then committed necrophilic acts on their corpses by having sex with them. He then photographed his victims with a Polaroid camera, cut off a tuft of their hair and took an item of clothing with him. He displayed these souvenirs as trophies in his driver’s cab and in his flat. On the back of the Polaroid photos, he noted down his perverse details about the murders. Volker Eckert would probably have committed countless more murders, but a surveillance camera caught him. On 3 November 2006, a woman’s body was found next to a national road in Catalonia. The surveillance camera of a neighbouring haulage company had filmed the Volvo lorry that Volker Eckert was driving, with its company logo and registration number, at the location where the body was found. After a Europe-wide manhunt, Volker Eckert was arrested on 17 November 2006 in Wesseling near Cologne. During police questioning, Volker Eckert confessed to six murders, including the murder of his classmate Sylvia. However, before the trial began, Volker Eckert hanged himself in his prison cell in Bayreuth on 2 July 2007. Nevertheless, the ‘Fernfahrer’ special commission of the Upper Franconia Police Headquarters continued its investigation and, based on Eckert’s statements and DNA analyses, was able to prove that he had committed three more murders. It was not until December 2007 that the Volker Eckert case was finally closed.
The long-distance lorry driver
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