Known as 'The Ruhr Hunter', or simply 'Jockel', Joachim Kroll was born in 1933, in Hindenburg, Germany. He was the 6th of nine children, the rest of which were girls. Having an I.Q. of 76, Kroll didn't make it past the 3rd grade. His father served in the German-Russian war, during which he was captured as a prisoner of war. His mother then moved with the nine children to North-Rhine Westfalia.
In 1955, Joachim's mother passed away. It's hard to say what influence this may have had on him, but two weeks later he began to kill:
February 8th, 1955; Irmgard Strehl, 19 years old, was found raped, strangled and disemboweled, not necessarily in that order, inside a barn in the town of Ludinghausen. Jockel continued to kill, unhindered, for 21 years. At some point he would graduate from murder and necrophilia, adding cannibalism to his M.O. after he decided to try it when he killed Manuela Knodt, 16, in the Essen City Park in July, 1959. Kroll cut off pieces of her buttocks and thighs, took them home, cooked and ate them.
Amazingly, during the course of Kroll's reign of terror, 3 different men, on three different occasions, wound up committing suicide after being blamed for the attacks. A fourth man, in 1970, falsely confessed to one Jockel's crimes after his neighbors hounded him to do so!
In 1976, after his neighbors complained of a foul odor, Kroll told them that his drain was "clogged with guts". They then alerted the authorities, who responded to find 4 year old Marion Ketter's body parts simmering on Joachim Kroll's stove. Escaping the death penalty, as it had been recently done away with in Germany, Jockel was sentenced to life in prison, where he died on July 1st, 1981. We can see Kroll's indiscriminate propensity for opportunistic rape and murder in the varying ages and locations of his victims, the textbook disorganized killer. . . .We can partly thank advances in criminal technology for suppressing the voracity of such monsters.
His list of victims are as follows:
February 8th, 1955-
Irmgard Strehl, age 19- raped, strangled and disemboweled in Lundinghausen. He met her on the road and invited her into the woods. When she refused, he promptly stabbed her four times in the neck, strangled and raped her, after which he cut open her open pig-slaughtering style. She was found 5 days later amidst snow-fallen brush near the town of Herrenstein.
June 16th, 1959-
Klara Frieda Tesmer, age 24- murdered in the meadows near Rheinhausen; for this
crime a mechanic
named Heinrich Ott was falsely arrested. He hung himself while in jail.
July 26th, 1959-
Manuela Knodt, age 16- raped and strangled in Essen.
It was during this crime that Jockel experimented with cannibalism, and found
great pleasure therein, when he sliced off pieces of Manuela's thigh and buttock.
1962- Kroll abducts, rapes, and strangles 12 year old Barbara Bruder; Her body was
never found.
June 4th, 1962-
Monika Tafel, age 12, was killed by Kroll in Walsum, where again he sliced off
pieces of the girl's buttocks to be eaten later. And again an innocent man this
time named Walter Quicker is arrested. He is released but subsequently driven
to sucide by his neighbors.
August 22nd,
1965- Marion Veen, As Well as her boyfriend, Herman Schmitz(not pictured) were
attacked, while parked in a ‘lover’s lane’ in the town of Duisburg-GroBenbaum.
Herman was Jockel’s only male victim, while Marion
escaped. . . . .
September 13th,
1966- Kroll strangles Ursula Rohling, age 20, in Foersterbusch
Park. Her boyfriend, Adolf Schickel
committed suicide after being falsely accused of committing the murder. Of this
particular murder Jockel recalls: “I saw this woman in the park. She was young,
with short hair. I spoke to her and then grabbed her around the neck with my
right arm. I dragged her into the bushes and threw her on the ground. I choked her
until she stopped moving. Then I took off her pants and her other things and I
did it to her. I left her lying there and took the train back to Duisburg.
When I got home I was still hot, and I had it with the doll, and did it with my
hand a couple of times”.
December 22nd,
1966- Kroll rapes Ilona Harke, age 5, and drowns her in a ditch in
the town of Wuppertal. He, as he
stated “wanted to see how someone drowned".
July 12th, 1969- Maria Hettgen, age 61, raped and
strangled at Huckeswagen….While taking a stroll along the banks of the Baldeney-lake,
he encounters the 61 year-old Maria, and said he said he got a ‘tickly feeling’.
She rejected his conversation, whereby he hit her in the head and threw her in
some bushes, where he raped and throttled her to death.
May 21st,
1970- Jutta Rahn, age 13, strangled while she was walking home from
a train station. A man by the name of Peter Schay was arrested, but eventually
released…..Amazingly, Schay, six years later, falsely confessed to the crime
after being hounded by his neighbors about it!!!
1976- Karin Toepfer, age 10- raped and strangled in the town
of Voerde. . . . .
Last, but not least: July 3rd, 1976- Parts of
Marion Ketter (not pictured), age 4, were found simmering in a pot of stew when police
responded to neighbor’s complaints of an odor after Joachim Kroll told them
that his drain was “clogged with guts”. Her intestines were found blocking the drain of the house,
her hand was boiling in the pot on the stove with some carrots and
potatoes, while other parts were packed in the freezer for latter
consumption.
the kitchen where Jockel was cooking 4 year-old Marion Ketter
Kroll later stated
that he cut off and ate portions of his victims to save on grocery expenses,
guess I can’t hate him for being thrifty! He actually believed that he was just
going to get an operation to cure him of his bloodlust and thereby be released
from prison….Instead he just barely missed the death penalty, by luck of
timing, and was given a life sentence in April, 1982; he died of a heart attack in 1991 in the prison
of Rheinbach.
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