“Then, in 1923, even as Gormann was being rejected as a suspect, the murders stopped completely. At least, those murders that bore Gormann’s trademarks. Any detective will tell you that the most terrible thing about investigating a series of lust murders is that the murderer stops killing before he is caught. It’s the most appalling feeling on earth to find yourself wishing another murder will be committed in the hope that it might yield up the one vital clue that will crack the case. It’s moral paradoxes like this that make the job so difficult sometimes and which cause homicide detectives many sleepless nights. In circumstances like these I’ve even known detectives to blame themselves for a victim’s death. As paradoxes go, to desire a death in the hope that you might save a life is about as acute a dilemma as you’ll find outside of wartime. It’s no good telling a cop how the philosopher Kant argues that to act in the morally right way people must act from duty. Or — again, according to Kant — that it is not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong but the motives of the person who carries out the action. Most cops I’ve ever met couldn’t even spell ‘categorical imperative.’ And I know I myself fall short of his morally absolute standard every day I go to work.
“But back to Fritz Gormann. When the Kuhlo killings case came my way in 1928, I took the files home with me and spent several nights reading them through in their entirety. And then I read them again. You see, it’s almost invariably the case that when eventually you make an arrest, the evidence was staring you in the face all along; and with this in mind, sometimes the best thing you can do is to arrange a review of all the available evidence in the hope that you may see something that wasn’t seen the first time. You see, a cold case is nothing but all of the false and misleading evidence that, over a period of years, has come to be accepted as true. In other words, you start by patiently challenging almost everything you think you know; even the identity of the victims.
“You might reasonably think that it would be impossible to mistake the identity of a murdered girl. You would be wrong. It turned out that one of the nine murdered girls was someone else: the girl we thought she was had, after a year living in Hannover, turned up safe and well. Meanwhile I was struck by how much work had gone into the investigation and how many people the detectives in the Murder Commission had managed to interview. But by the time I finished I knew the case as well as any detective who’d been in on the case since the beginning.
“Now, before joining the Murder Commission I had been a sergeant working in Vice. Consequently many of my informants were to be found in some less than salubrious places, including a place called the Hundegustav Bar. Previously known as the Borsig Cellar, this was a real dive. At the Hundegustav they had some private rooms where they used to show what were called Minette movies — movies that explicitly featured naked girls on film. Not only were such pornographic films tolerated under the Weimar Republic, incredibly they were actively encouraged as a way of asserting the complete freedom that characterized a modern society — one that had left behind outmoded concepts like morals and accepted standards of behavior. This is one of the reasons why Germany demanded a Nazi revolution in the first place.
“Anyway, I was in there on police business — well, I would say that, wouldn’t I? — and I happened to see one of these films and something about the girl in the film struck me as familiar. I’d seen her before somewhere. But it was several days before I thought to check the Kuhlo case files, and when I did, it turned out that the girl in the film was none other than Amalie Ziethen, the very first girl that Gormann had strangled.
“I went back to the club with my commissar to interview a thief called Gustave the Dog, who owned the Hundegustav Bar. We checked the film and were astonished to find the girl’s name scratched on the film’s leader and also the actual date of her death. Gustave told us he’d paid cash for the film; the man who’d sold it to him hadn’t left a name, of course, but he described him well enough. A respectable man with a bow tie, stiff collar, a limp, perhaps an injured arm, a bowler hat, and an Iron Cross on his lapel. I had an artist friend draw a likeness of the man to Gustave’s exact instructions. Then I went around to some of the other clubs looking for a man like this who might have sold them a Minette movie. But I always drew a blank.
“Doubtless many of you are familiar with the phrase Media vita in morte sumus. I think all homicide detectives have this written on the inside of their hats. And you can hear that sentiment in a poem by the great German poet Rilke, of whom I am fond, which goes, ‘Death stands great before us, We all are his, Even our most carefree laughter to him belongs, and in the midst of the joy that life is, Mortal tears are most immortal songs.’”[1]
I glanced up as Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller took out a notebook and started to make notes with a silver pen. Was he — I wondered — a fan like me of Rilke? Or was there another, more sinister reason why he was making a note? Was he reminding himself to have some of his thugs come to my flat on Fasanenstrasse in the early hours and arrest me? That was the thing about Müller; as a policeman he was a real wire brush: it was hard to think of him having anything but sinister reasons for doing anything at all.
“Since detectives on the Murder Commission live with death as much as anyone, it’s perhaps natural that they should often believe that murderers stop only because they get caught or because they are dead. Nearly all of the detectives in the Murder Commission who were on the original investigation believed what they wanted to believe: that the killer had been stricken with remorse and committed suicide. But given the fact that the murderer might have been the man in the bowler hat who’d sold Gustave the Minette film, it was now equally possible that this earlier explanation as to why the killer had simply stopped after the last Kuhlo killing — that of Lieschen Ulbrich — was wrong. So I asked myself what other reason might have accounted for the strangler giving up an activity he seemed to very much enjoy? Had something else happened to the Kuhlo killer? Something that had made him stop killing? If he wasn’t dead, had he perhaps left Berlin? Returning to a lengthy list of witnesses who’d been interviewed, I started to investigate what dramatic life events had occurred to any of these men five years ago that might have put a stick in the spokes of a lust murderer’s career. And finally I came up with a list of possible suspects, at the head of which was the name of Fritz Gormann.
“Gormann had been awarded a second-class Iron Cross in 1917, having served as a train transport commander with a field artillery regiment. He had a limp, which was the result of an injury sustained in 1916. As I mentioned, Gormann had been a suspect until detectives rejected him on the grounds that the bank clerk — now a bank manager — was perceived to be much too mild-mannered ever to kill someone. This was nonsense as his military record clearly demonstrated that Gormann’s medal had been awarded for courage under fire.
“Further research revealed that on the day before his wife’s fortieth birthday in the summer of 1923, Fritz Gormann visited Braun’s jewelry shop at 74 Alte Jakobstrasse. The shop had been robbed twice before — in January 1912 and again in August 1919. Unknown to Gormann when he visited the shop to buy his wife a brooch, the shop was in the process of being robbed a third time. Gormann entered the store to find Herr Braun, the proprietor, lying dead on the floor and a man advancing upon him from a back room with a gun in his hand, demanding the cash that Gormann had brought with him to buy the brooch. Gormann refused and was shot, but not before he managed to hit the murderer with the lead-filled cosh that Braun had kept for self-defense. The robber was subsequently captured and executed while Gormann himself spent six months recovering from his wound in the Charité Hospital.