THE DUSSELDORF MANIAC

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 86, 6 January 1930, Page 7

THE DUSSELDORF MANIAC

♦ PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS GRIM SCENES IN DANCING ' HALL i HYSTERICAL DESIRE FOR THE LIMELIGHT Developments in the course of the search for the maniacal criminal of Dusseldorf are of the deepest interest, not only to students of criminology, from police inspectors to newspaper readers, but to psychologists the world over. The man Is held responsible for nineteen murderous attacks on women and children and for nine deaths (writes the Berlin correspondent of the London "Observer”). The young woman, a typist, “energetic, good-looking, and clever,” who wrote to the police offering herself as a decoy, provided she were given a suit of mall to wear beneath her frock, and suggesting as headgear a steel helmet masked with roses, of the ordinary pull-on shape, is surely unique. Typical, however, of the case is its mass effect on the local children and versifiers. The children are playing at digging for bodies Instead of their ordinary spade games in the sands with which German playgrounds are provided, and a deluge of poems, in ballad form, has descended on the local papers and the police. Children played at digging trenches and transporting the wounded when war. was the topic of conversation in Germany and more than one Song of Hate was . composed, but never before in connec- ' tion with a crime has there been such an epidemic of letters to relatives of the victims. It began after the communication of the murderer to the local Communist paper was published, describing the spot where a body would be discovered. The overwhelming amount of work these poems and letters have caused the police has been an added complication to their labours. “Signs of Religious Feeling.” The communications from the murderer have brought the pseudo-science of graphology prominently to the fore again. It was already honoured in Germany, and there are many big business houses which do not engage anybody without first submitting his or her applications to a handwriting expert. The “Vossische Zeitung” asked the Zurich graphologist, Dr. Pulver, for an opinion of the person who wrote the directions which led to the discovery of the body of the twenty-year-old Marie Hahn, who had been missing for three months. Dr. Pulver, explaining that too much was lost by reproduction for him to give a detailed analysis, was able nevertheless to pronounce the opinion that the writer, who used block or Latin letters, was in the habit of writing German of Gothic script only, as he made a mistake In one “d”; that another “ds,” badly formed, showed great dissimulation; that the repetition of the words “wood” and “meadow,” each written three times, are typical of madness. Besides great clearness of thought he found that certain signs of religious feeling were shown. But various thick down strokes and underlinings showed violence in the extreme, and he finally concluded that the whole was a typical example of hysterical desire for the limelight. In Dusseldorf, other experts, including the Berlin criminologist, Dr. Schyveikart, are testing the various letters and poems as they come in, to see if they come from the same writer, though no analysis of character accompanies these scientific reports. But graphologists of lesser reputation are profiting by the boom. No writer of detective stories has ever imagined a more dreadful scene than that which takes place in the less elegant Dusseldorf bars and dancing halls, one.after anotb-r, night after night. The music suddenly ceases. Three men bearing a wooden box arrive. and after it is unpacked with a flourish of music a wooden puppet is displayed, dressed in the clothes worn by the murdered girl,,lda Reuter, who was found terribly battered in a field Xon flip last September Sunday she ever went dancing. So far nobody present has recalled seeing any man with a girl thus attired. "Dancing Sunday.” The 'whole cheerful ' system of the Sunday afternoon and evening of the masses in Germany has been shown up in pitiful light in the course of these proceedings. Ida Reuter, it is stated in the police records, was a girl of gay and cheerful nature and good reputation. She apparently tried one place of amusement after another on her Sundays out and frequented no particular one. It is what all German girls do. watching during the week for those beer houses and cafes which advertise Sunday dancing from four o’clock in the afternoon. They are 'quite prepared to pay for their own drinks, and generally provide themselves with a thick packet of bread and sausage. They have no intention of returning home until after midnight,. whether dance partners are plentiful or not. It is from among these hard-working and deserving young women and from children playing in the streets that the murderer’s victims are drawn. It is not too much to say that this unenviable publicity has proved a sad hardship to Dusseldorf, that city in the west to which the wealthy selfmade man of the Ruhr and Rhine, despairing of his own town, retires to spend his days amid luxurious surroundings, where the atmosphere, less Catholic than Cologne, attracts all the artistic temperaments of the province. But like all towns in the rich west of Germany, there Is a chain of industrial villages—some larger than any medium-sized town elsewhere—on the outskirts, whose inhabitants in many cases form the sole support of the less elegant places of amusement. The villages expand and draw nearer till they become suburbs. It is here, and not in the privileged haunts of an extremely wealthy population, that the crimes have occurred.