The Guardian
June 2008
When finally they caught him, it was a fluke. He had parked his lorry outside a football stadium in a small town in north-eastern Spain and he was waiting for dark to throw away the body of his latest victim. By sheer chance, a technician was installing a CCTV camera on the wall of a neighbouring factory and, while he was adjusting it to focus on the factory gate, the technician accidentally panned across the stadium car park and picked out the lone lorry, with its owner’s logo splashed across its flank.
The following day, the Spanish police found the body of the murdered woman; collected and checked any local CCTV; found the accidental footage; traced the lorry to Germany and asked German police to pick up the driver, perhaps as a witness, perhaps as a murderer. So it was that while he was working in Cologne, on November 17 2006, Volker Eckert, aged 47, finally came to the end of his serial killing
Even then, it required Eckert himself to place the handcuffs around his wrists. For an hour or so, he shrugged at police and professed his total ignorance of the body in the Spanish car park. Then he did a strangely revealing thing. He told the police he had a headache and that he needed special medicine from the cab of his lorry. An officer went off to fetch it and almost immediately noticed three polaroid photographs, lying between the two front seats. Each showed a dead woman with a noose around her neck. Next to the bed at the back of the cab, he found hand-written notes describing other murders, and two lengths of rope.
Eckert was held and soon confessed to killing six women. As European police then began to reconstruct his life, they found the clues to others – in Spain, Germany, Italy, France and the Czech Republic. Murders and attempted murders. More than 50 of them. Stretching all the way back to his adolescence when, as a 14-year-old schoolboy, he had called on a girl from his class to ask her about homework and strangled her.
Volker Eckert was no kind of master criminal. He was an uneducated and unskilled man of average intelligence who had earned a living first as a house-painter and cleaner, then as a long-distance lorry driver. Yet for years, he had been able to cruise around Europe attacking and killing in a mobile masterclass in the art of getting away with murder.
He succeeded for two simple and more-or-less accidental reasons: he killed in different countries while the police remained trapped inside their national borders failing to consult each other; and he killed disposable people. With the one exception of his 14-year-old classmate, all the women he killed were poor and/or migrants and/or prostitutes. With rare exceptions: they vanished, and nobody asked why; their bodies turned up, and nobody came to claim them; they were buried, and nobody did anything about it.
And now, for more-or-less accidental reasons, even after his capture and confession, even after the police have traced his involvement in dozens of attacks, the story of the casual crimes of Volker Eckert has remained untold and the questions which it raises have remain unasked and unanswered. It is a story about Europe, a continent of wealth and prestige with a dark underworld of hidden lives where the law has little reach.
It begins in innocence. When finally he was caught, Eckert told a psychiatrist from Munich, Dr Norbert Nedopil, how, as a child growing up in small town in East Germany called Plauen, he had sometimes liked to play with a doll which belonged to his younger sister, Sabine. He treated it well. He especially liked the doll’s hair. It was long, and he fondled it. He was only nine or ten but he was early with his puberty and, one day, kneeling on the floor beside his bed, stroking the hair of the doll which lay on the bed, he started rubbing his groin against the side of the mattress and he had an orgasm. He liked it, so he did it more often.
Soon after that, up in the attic of his family home, he found a hair piece which belonged to his mother. He liked that, too, and played with it and soon used that, too, for his private sexual pleasure. Often. The more he used the doll and the hair piece, the more he fastened on hair as the object of his love. By the time he was 12 or 13, however, he began to tire of artificial hair and, as he told Dr Nedopil, he would sit in class and gaze at the hair of the girl in front, tormented. Real hair. Long hair. Wishing he could take it and fondle it for his orgasm. He told the pyschiatrist that this idea became so overwhelming that there were times when he failed even to eat.
Slowly and quietly, the first thought of violence formed logically in his mind: quite simply, if he was ever to be able to act out the inspiring dream of having sex with real hair, he would have to subdue the girl to whom it belonged. Alone in his mind, for months, he worked on the fantasy, now practising strangling the doll before using her hair. Perhaps it is significant that when he was 13, in 1973, his parents split up, and he went wild with anger, stealing his mother’s car and disappearing for several weeks, outrunning the police in a mad chase before they finally caught up with him and took him back to his unhappy home. Soon, it was time for the dream to become real.
On May 7 1974, two months before his 15th birthday, the boy went up into the attic above his flat. This was part of a communal space which stretched the length of the building. He walked to the far end and took the staircase down into the corridor in front of Silvia Unterdorfel’s flat. She was in his class at school. She had long, beautiful hair. She answered the door and let him in and, having seen that she was alone, Volker Eckert finally lived the fantasy which he had so often rehearsed, clawing both his hands around her neck, using his thumbs on her windpipe, holding his grip until she collapsed unconscious and he could wash his hands in her hair. He told the psychiatrist that he felt sexually aroused but did not come. At this point, Silvia was still breathing. But the boy worried that she would get him into trouble and so he followed his logic and took a clothes line and killed her, tying the loose end to a doorknob to try to make it look like suicide. He went back to his flat, ate well and masturbated with the memory of his deed.
And he got away with it. Even though Silvia’s step-father was a police officer who was sure that the girl had not killed herself; even though a stove pipe had been wrenched off the wall at some point in Eckert’s attack; even though it was almost impossible to see how the girl could possibly have hanged herself from a door knob: the file was closed. This was in the old East Germany and, looking back years later, the police who finally investigated Eckert’s crimes concluded that perhaps the authorities had preferred not to admit that the step-daughter of an officer in the Volkspolizei could possibly have become the victim of such a scandalous crime.
This was the beginning of a pattern of official failure, as all of the resources of the mighty modern states of Europe, West and East, failed to stop Volker Eckert now spending more than three decades living his dream; failed often even to notice as across the continent he left a trail of women, some merely unconscious, some dead.
We know most about the final six or seven years of his activity. This began with a simple change of job when, in 1999, at the age of 40, Eckert qualified as a long-distance lorry driver – a job which, as he admitted, he chose specifically for the opportunities which it would give him to indulge his fantasy. He would set out on trips, planning his attacks with deep excitement, as Dr Nedopil recorded, ‘like a child looking forward to Christmas’. By now, he was addicted not only to women’s hair but to the act of strangulation itself.
We know, because he confessed it, that on June 21 2001, travelling back from a job in Spain, he stopped his lorry in the streets near the railway station in Bordeaux, south west France and picked up a Nigerian prostitute named Sandra Osifo. She was 21. He chose her for her long hair; it turned out to be a wig. Within an hour, she was dead. Four days later, her body was found in a ditch by the road some 90 kilometers north, her Spice Girls pendant still lying loose around her throat. Police in Poitiers identified her and then made no more progress at all in finding her killer.
Two months later, in August 2001, back in Spain, he picked up Isabel Beatriz Díaz in Llorret de Mar, a popular tourist town on the north east coast. He later confessed to police that when he started to strangle her in the cab of the lorry, she fought back with such strength that he became highly aroused and had sex with her as he killed her. He threw her away near the autopista junction at Maçanet de la Selva. Her body was not found for two months. Nobody had even reported her missing. Police in north east Spain made no progress in finding her killer.
Police in France similarly made no progress with the murder of Benedicta Edwards, aged 23 from Sierra Leone, working as a prostitute in Troyes, who was strangled and dumped naked on a footpath in August 2002. (Eckeret never confessed this, but he was driving in the area at the time and withdrew money with his credit card in Troyes just before she was picked up.) And police in the Czech republic failed even to identify the body of a woman found strangled and dumped naked by the autobahn near Pilsen in June 2003. (Again Eckert did not confess this, but again he was found to have been in the area at the time, and police now strongly suspect he was responsible.)
By now, clearly, he was not merely strangling his victims into unconsciousness but routinely killing them. He was also using a polaroid camera to take pictures of their bodies, and cutting off their hair and stealing ‘trophies’ such as clothing or handbags or make-up, all of which he would take home with him, where he attached them to a life-sized rubber doll with which he obsessively repeated his fantasy.
And because nobody stepped in to stop him, he turned that fantasy into reality again in September 2004 at the expense of Ahhiobe Gali, aged 25 from Ghana, who was selling herself in Rezzato, north east Italy and was found in an irrigation ditch; and in February 2005 Mariy Veselova, aged 27 from Russia, who was picked up in Figueras near Gerona and dumped dead in a ravine by a major road at Sant Sadurní d’Osomort; and in October 2006, Agneska Bos, aged 28 from Poland, who had been working as a prostitute for two years by the side of Route 1044 near Reims, and was found a month later next to Route 44 at Suippes; and in November 2006, Miglena Petrova Rahim, aged 20 from Bulgaria, who worked the A7 road at Sant Julia de Ramis, near Girona. She was the final victim, whose disposal was caught on CCTV in north east Spain.
Beyond these nine murders – six confessed and three discovered – the police who finally investigated his crimes found evidence of three others. The notes which the German officer found in Eckert’s lorry indicated that he had killed an unknown woman in France in February 2005 as well as two other unidentified victims in the mid 1990s in the Czech republic where he had driven across the border from his new base in Hof, near Nuremberg, before he had begun his international career.
Searching his small flat in Hof, police found more photos. Some were pictures of women cut from magazines. Others were real victims, with nooses around their necks and notes about what he had done to them. Some of these women have never been identified. Beneath the bed, they found his life-sized rubber doll decorated with hair and other trophies which he had collected from them. There were polaroids, too, of the doll, hanging from a noose in the sleeping compartment of his cab.
Looking back into his past, police then found a bridge of violence leading from the murder of his schoolmate in 1974 to the international self-indulgence of his lorry-driving phase. And whereas the Western European authorities had failed even to notice that there was a pattern of killings which needed to be investigated, the old East German authorities had, at least, managed to arrest him three times, although they had then failed entirely to recognise let alone attempt to attempt to deal with his dangerousness.
They arrested him first back in 1974, for the incident when he reacted to his parents’ separation by stealing his mother’s car. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. He came out in 1975 with his dream intact and later told the psychiatrist that the memory of his attack on Silvia had helped him with his masturbation, but the memory had begun to fade and so, now out of school and working with his father as a painter, he had started to spend nights wandering the streets of Plauen, looking for suitable women.
We still don’t know how many women he attacked at this time, but in 1978, the East German police arrested him for a second time, when he was caught one night strangling a victim in the street – an attack which, as he later told Dr Nedopil, gave him great happiness. He was jailed for sexual assault, but for only two years and eight months. With parole, he was out the following year, his violent fantasy entirely unaddressed.
He told Dr Nedopil that for a while, knowing that the police had his DNA, he tried hard to suppress the dream. Both his parents now died within days of each other, and he tried to distract himself by caring for his younger sister and brother – ‘the only worthwhile thing I have ever done,’ as he told the psychiatrist. But soon his siblings were taken to live with his aunt, his restraint began to collapse and, although he drank to flatten his feelings, to the best of his recollection, over the next eight years, he attacked some 30 different women in the dark streets of Plauen, strangling them until they went limp, using their hair, stealing trophies for later and leaving them unconscious behind him. He also attempted to make himself feel normal by having girlfriends, but he capitulated and strangled half-a-dozen of them, too. As far as we know, during this prolonged orgy of assaults, he was not questioned even once.
It seems very likely that, during this time, he got away with at least one murder, making 13 known killings in total. In April 1987, Heike Wunderlich, aged 18, was on her way to college after work when she was strangled and left naked in woods outside Plauen. Twenty years later, police concluded that this must have been the work of Volker Eckert, who was in the area at the time, had no alibi and was to fall into the habit of dumping women’s bodies in this way. However, the local police force, which failed to question Eckert at the time, continues to insist that it was nothing to do with him. (By curious chance, a second man was also strangling women in Plauen in the mid 1980s but he had been caught before Heike Wunderlich was murdered. In other words, if this was not Eckert, there must have been three men strangling women in this one small town.)
Later that year, in an incident which should have stopped Eckert in his tracks, he was arrested for the third time, after attacking two young Plauen women who were able to identify him. This time, he was given a serious jail sentence, of 12 years, for attempted murder. The sentence was cut on appeal; he received only a few hours therapy from a psychologist who heard about his sexual fantasies but concluded that he could safely be released; and so, in 1994, after only six years in jail, he walked back into the world. By now, the Berlin wall had fallen. Eckert moved to Hof in what had been West Germany. In the bureaucratic chaos of post-communist East Germany, paperwork which should have been passed to the Hof police was simply lost – and Volker Eckert was free to travel, at first across the border to the Czech republic with its motorway lined with prostitutes, then, armed with his lorry, to the dark corners of Western Europe.
Even after Eckert’s confession to six murders in November 2006, police attempts to find the truth were obstructed by the same pattern of official inadequacy. First, there was a bureaucratic tug of war between the Spanish and the Germans about who should take charge of his inquiry. This was finally resolved in favour of the Germans, and the job was passed to detectives in Hof. But they were already overstretched investigating three murders in the town, and so the job had to be passed to the organised crime department, the OKD, even though Eckert had no connection with any kind of organised crime group.
The OKD, using up to 40 officers, at a time, set out to reconstruct his movements using every conceivable form of record – his credit cards, petrol receipts, his employers’ log of his lorry-driving jobs, records from the sleeping policeman in his cab, autobahn toll payments and satellite tracking of traffic movements. They sent Eckert’s DNA details to 32 different countries and invited them to send them details of the unsolved murder of women so that they could be compared with their reconstruction of his movements.
They had some success, uncovering seven more suspected murders to add to the six which he had confessed, as well as some 40 other serious assaults. They finally identified the body of Mariy Veselova who had lain unknown in her grave for 26 months. Their Catalan colleagues uncovered a pimping ring in Gerona, run by Russians and East Europeans, as well as unmasking corrupt Spanish officials taking cash and sexual favours to allow women to enter the country illegally. The OKD visited the families of some of those who had died, travelling, for example, to Russia and to Poland to explain the final chapter of a missing daughter’s life. And yet….
Some of those who worked on the inquiry speak of their deep frustration at the lack of co-operation from many of the European police services to whom they turned for help. Only the Spanish, they say, were enthusiastic supporters, with the Catalan police sending officers to Germany to help in the interrogation of Eckert. There was apparently little or no support from the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, the Czechs – and the British. “We get zero co-operation from the UK,” according to one source, “unless it is a very serious crime. They did not send us their unsolved murders – just one case, and we looked into it and found Eckert was elsewhere at the time.” And there was an outbreak of friction between the OKD and the police in Eckert’s old home town, Plauen, who objected strongly to the OKD’s claim to have solved the 1987 murder of Heike Wunderlich.
This reproduced one of the simple advantages which Eckert secured as a murderer as soon as he drove his lorry across the German border. As one senior official in the inquiry put it: “Our authority stops at the border. He can drive across it but as soon as we try to cross, we need special permission. Everybody claims to be working together, but the justice systems are very different from one country to another, almost impossible. It is a problem now and for the future.” Without adequate working links, the fragmented forces of Europe simply failed to notice the serial killer in their midst.
Eckert’s other advantage was that the victims themselves were effectively invisible. They had travelled from Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe, leaving behind their families and friends who might otherwise have reported them missing. Some had entered illegally, some were legal: all lived on the fringe of crime with pimps and other prostitutes who were loathe to contact the police when they suddenly vanished. And whereas a dead princess may still generate official inquiries more than ten years after her death, a dead prostitute provokes less interest.
Eckert clearly was not alone in taking advantage of these natural weaknesses in the system. Delving into European police records, the OKD came across many dozens of unsolved murders of women, particularly prostitutes. They came to the conclusion that there were up to 30 serial killers working undetected across Europe. On the E45 autobahn alone, running south from Innsbruck into northern Italy, they found the unsolved murders of 45 prostitutes. Even in Eckert’s adopted home town, Hof, their colleagues were investigating the deaths of three, two Thais and a Romanian, which were provably not the work of Eckert. The natural vulnerability of prostitutes is expressed in the evidence gathered by the OKD that Eckert openly told the women he picked up that he would pay them more if they allowed him to tie them up and partially throttle them during sex. Some were desperate enough to accept.
The result of this long history of official failure is not simply that Eckert was allowed to kill for more than 30 years but that even now we still don’t know the full scale of his violence. There are gaps in the narrative, holes in the evidence and clear indications from his polaroid photographs and his obsessively detailed notes that the 13 dead and 40 survivors almost certainly fail to tell the whole tale.
Finally, however, it was Eckert himself who obstructed the road to the truth. Having confessed to six murders, he then clammed up, apparently upset that the German newspapers were portraying him as a monster. His lawyer, Alexander Schmidtgall, says he felt this deeply: “When he described an attack, he would speak about himself in the third person. He had the emotion rising up in him and he had no way to suppress it. He knew he was an outsider. He was suffering from this.” It appears that it was for this reason that he sent the police to fetch medicine from his lorry cab, thus ensuring that he would be forced to stop the attacks.
On July 1 2007, awaiting trial in custody in Hof, he marked his 48th birthday alone, apparently deeply wounded that even his favoured sister, Sabine, considered him a monster and would not visit him. That night, unwatched in his cell, he finally ended his crimes and his fantasies by doing to himself what he had already done to so many others, and the following morning he was found dead, hanging from the bars of his cell. And without a trial, his story was not told, and so the questions were not asked, and the answers have not been given.
