Word: kuerten
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Confessing to eleven murders, to seven attempted murders, to a grand total of nearly 100 crimes, Peter Kuerten, a workman aged 47, sat in a neat blue serge suit, in the dock at Düsseldorf last week. A year and a half ago all Germany shuddered at the gruesome exploits of the "Düssel-dorf Murderer." Until he was jailed Düsseldorf children went to school in busses guarded by policemen with pistols (TIME, Jan. 13, June...
...talked, Peter Kuerten's eyes often winked rapidly, his hands often fluttered. "These symptoms," Teuton psychiatrists at the trial told Teuton reporters, "betray a lust to kill...
...prisoner's mild but fluttery behavior, several women whom he had stabbed and left for dead but who turned up as witnesses at the trial had hysterics, screamed, fainted in the court. But no less calm than the prisoner was one stolid, buxom peasant wench. She told how Kuerten had got her down, pierced her 30 times with a dagger "until the blade broke...
Opponents of the famed criminological thesis which says "It is insane to commit murder, therefore every murderer is insane, therefore no murderer should be punished," observed last week that in Germany this syllogism seems to have badly broken down. Triumphantly they pointed out that Coachman Kuerten, Harrman and Angerstein all lived orderly lives apart from their crimes, showed no other symptoms of insanity, seemed to be actuated as killers by what one detective last week called "sane malice...
That Coachman Kuerten was caught resulted from his softheartedness in not actually killing some nine women whom he attacked, merely pricking and slashing them lightly with his penknife and letting them go. One such victim recognized and later denounced him to the completely baffled police. His wife sobbed last week: "I don't understand. I can't believe it! Peter was always so kind and gentle...