00:00:07
-In October 1989, the body
of a woman was found in a forest on the outskirts of the village
of Deetz in East Germany.
00:00:17
She'd been hit by a hammer, strangled,
and sexually assaulted. Scattered around her body
00:00:24
was her underwear,
stolen from a washing line. Police had no idea at the time, but this was the work
of a perverted serial killer.
00:00:34
-He did know what he was doing. He did know that it was wrong,
and he chose to do it anyway,
00:00:38
regardless of whatever drives
or desires he had. -The murderer was a 23-year-old
man named Wolfgang Schmidt.
00:00:46
He'd been roaming the local
woods in search of prey to satisfy his depraved
sexual fantasies.
00:00:53
He became known as
the Beast of Beelitz. -I was on call day and night,
and when my phone would ring,
00:01:00
I would sit up
straight in my bed because I thought
he had struck again. -Over the next two years,
00:01:06
he would kill a further
four women and a baby, all to fulfill his own
grotesque form of sexual urges.
00:01:15
-You have a man who is
completely possessed by the desire that he's now feeding
the frenzy of his own addiction.
00:01:25
-Wolfgang Schmidt,
the Beast of Beelitz, had become one of
the world's most evil killers.
00:01:32
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Wolfgang Schmidt had
brutally killed five women and an infant during his near
two-year-long killing spree.
00:02:02
He committed his crimes
in and around the forest near the town of Beelitz
in East Germany,
00:02:08
but when he was finally
captured in 1991, it was after the fall
of the Berlin Wall,
00:02:14
and so he faced the courts
of the new unified Germany. The trial began on
the 20th of October, 1992,
00:02:22
just two weeks after
Schmidt's 26th birthday. -[ Speaking German ] -The public gallery
was jam-packed.
00:02:29
Not one more person
could fit in. Everyone wanted to see
Wolfgang Schmidt. This, of course, has to do
with the sensationalism.
00:02:38
It's also clear
the more difficult, the more terrible the crime, the more people are fascinated.
00:02:46
-Schmidt had murdered
five people and attacked three other women
in an attempt to get sexual gratification
from his unique perversion --
00:02:56
stealing and soiling
their underwear. The only way he could do this
was if they were dead.
00:03:03
-There are some elements of the most extraordinary
humiliation in Schmidt's acts towards women,
00:03:15
and there can be
no forgiveness for that. He was literally out of control. He was quite literally
fulfilling his own fantasies
00:03:27
at the expense of whomever
might get in his way. -[ Speaking German ] -It moved the whole country --
all of Germany,
00:03:33
not only the vicinity
of Berlin and Brandenburg. It was on the national news. Germany was moved.
00:03:40
-Despite the extreme violence
and sexual elements to his crimes, when he was found guilty and
sentenced to 15 years in prison,
00:03:48
Wolfgang Schmidt showed
little remorse for his actions. -I think he was embarrassed,
00:03:54
but he was not ashamed
about anything, least of all the murders. -During the trial,
it became clear
00:04:02
Schmidt's motive for killing was to indulge his fantasies
for wearing women's underwear
00:04:08
and defecating in them
to reach sexual satisfaction. He was diagnosed with a fetish
called coprophilia.
00:04:16
-Coprophilia is a very rare
paraphilia, and it's basically
a sexual arousal around human waste,
around excrement --
00:04:25
people becoming sexually excited
around this substance. So it's very, very rare
to see this,
00:04:31
even amongst serial killers. -Any kind of major fetish almost always
becomes uncontrollable.
00:04:40
The same is true of someone who
gets an intense satisfaction, as in this case,
from wearing women's clothes.
00:04:48
That satisfaction
along with coprophilia is a very dynamic mixture. -In time, Schmidt's bizarre
and murderous acts
00:05:01
would earn him two monikers. He was called
the Beast of Beelitz and was also labeled by some
as the Pink Giant.
00:05:10
-He became known as
the Pink Giant because he grew to be
a 6-foot-1-, 6-foot-2-tall man,
00:05:16
and he loved pink underwear --
ladies' pink underwear -- which was part of his fetish.
00:05:24
-This killer's story begins
just over 50 years ago. Wolfgang Schmidt was born
on the 5th of October, 1966,
00:05:33
in the small town of Lehnin,
near Potsdam, in the former
German Democratic Republic.
00:05:39
He, along with
his younger brother, grew up in a rural area
just outside the town.
00:05:45
-Well, the family is
the first institution in which we start to learn about
men and women's roles in society
00:05:51
and about their relationships
with one another, so what we see in our family
in our early years
00:05:57
we take to be
our benchmark for normal. -According to
a psychologist's report,
00:06:03
Schmidt's unusual desires
began early. -[ Speaking German ] -Wolfgang Schmidt discovered
his fetish by coincidence
00:06:12
when he went through
his mother's closet as a 6- or 7-year-old boy
and discovered lingerie.
00:06:20
And then he put
that lingerie on. He had the need for a loving,
symbiotic relationship
00:06:27
with his mother... -[ Speaking German ] -...which he was able
to establish by wearing her lingerie.
00:06:40
-At first, Schmidt says
he felt a childlike pleasure from wearing
his mother's underwear,
00:06:45
and it became a substitute for
a close maternal relationship. -Well, many children
are going to experiment.
00:06:52
They're gonna play
when they're youngsters. They're gonna try on the clothes
00:06:56
of their parents,
their siblings. This isn't something that is
completely out of the ordinary,
00:07:02
but the real key for me here is, it's the reaction
of other people when a child engages
in this behavior.
00:07:09
Is this something
that the parent is gonna make them feel bad about? Is it something that
the parent's going to
00:07:14
make them feel ashamed of? Or is it something that's
just going to be brushed off
00:07:19
and, "Okay, it's fine. They're just playing.
They're just experimenting"?
00:07:23
-According to Schmidt,
his mother reacted with horror, and she started to
lock her underwear away,
00:07:33
but Schmidt had already
developed a fondness for wearing
his mother's undergarments.
00:07:38
When he discovered that
defecating and urinating in them increased the overall
pleasurable sensation,
00:07:46
he could not stop. -The thing about him starting
to soil the underwear -- it could have been maybe
he was wearing the underwear
00:07:54
when everybody
was outside the house, and then he heard a noise. He's a kid.
He gets scared.
00:07:58
You can't really control it,
and it just happened. Right there,
he didn't intend to,
00:08:04
and as he did,
something else came over him that he don't know what it is. But it was something
that made him go,
00:08:12
"Wow. I like this." Not a sexual thing. He just simply felt
a different excitement,
00:08:19
and when a kid likes something,
they will go back to it. -By the time
Schmidt reached puberty,
00:08:26
defecating in
his mother's underwear added a whole different level
of enjoyment.
00:08:31
-To get pleasure out of
destroying something that belongs to her, something that is intimate
for her --
00:08:38
that's really meaningful for me looking at this
from the outside. And to see him getting pleasure
in doing this,
00:08:44
in soiling this underwear -- that's something
that signifies to me he's enjoying getting
a little bit of power back.
00:08:52
-[ Speaking German ] -He ritualized that behavior
over the years so that it didn't only become
the central element
00:08:59
of his sexuality,
but of his entire life. That means that he really
only lives to experience
00:09:07
that kind of sexuality. -With all the underwear
locked away, Schmidt started to look
elsewhere to satisfy his urges.
00:09:19
This was the beginning
of his double life. Ulrich Bauschulte was
Schmidt's defense lawyer.
00:09:26
-[ Speaking German ] -Often, with his father, he cleared things from the house
to be put in trash heaps,
00:09:35
or as they were called then in
the German Democratic Republic, <i> mullhaufen.</i>
00:09:42
Then he noticed that women's
underwear was also thrown away, and so he began to collect
these undergarments.
00:09:48
-[ Speaking German ] -Schmidt regularly went
into the forest near the village of Deetz
that was near to his home
00:09:58
in search of underwear
on makeshift landfills. He would then defecate
with the underwear on,
00:10:04
satisfy his sexual urges,
and clean up after as if nothing had happened. As he grew to be an adult,
however,
00:10:13
this routine
would not be enough for him. He needed an actual woman
to fulfill his fantasy.
00:10:20
-[ Speaking German ] -That means the woman has to be
draped with lingerie. There has to be
mutual defecation,
00:10:29
and then there
will be intercourse. And it became clear to him
at some point that in order to
live out this fantasy,
00:10:39
he needed a woman
to be entirely at his disposal. -And the only way Schmidt
was going to satisfy his needs
00:10:48
was to murder. But living in such a remote
and sparsely populated area, the opportunities for Schmidt
00:10:56
to fulfill his unusual fantasies
were limited. -He lived in
a very rural community --
00:11:06
lots of forests,
lots of lakes, woods, so there weren't
countless washing lines
00:11:11
with ladies' underwear
hanging on them out to dry. It was quite
a complicated search,
00:11:19
but search he did,
and he searched rubbish dumps. He searched as much as he could.
00:11:24
He got pleasure from
putting the underwear on, taking it off, urinating in it,
defecating in it.
00:11:30
It was all mixed into this bodily-function,
sexual-arousal dynamic. -In 1985,
Schmidt's life changed.
00:11:44
He signed up to
10 years of service with the riotant,
anti-insurgency police force.
00:11:50
Around that time, he also met a young woman
from a nearby village. -He develops a double life.
00:11:58
He has this young woman
who he's devoted to and eventually
becomes his fiancée.
00:12:04
-At this time, Schmidt appeared
to be leading a regular life. -And he has this
very ordered life in the police.
00:12:12
Perhaps he thinks
something about the uniform or the discipline will --
well, how can I put it? --
00:12:18
"Help me control my urges. Perhaps there's something about
that disciplined environment
00:12:23
which will calm me down." It's a very male,
macho environment. -But when, in April 1989,
he got drunk
00:12:33
and publicly celebrated
Adolf Hitler's 100th birthday, he was dismissed from the force.
00:12:40
It led to
catastrophic consequences. -Well, when we look at
the offending behavior
00:12:46
of serial killers, often we identify
particular stressors, particular things that would
have made the difference
00:12:53
between offending
and not offending at that particular
point in time, and I think for Schmidt,
00:12:58
losing his job
as a police officer was very, very significant
for him 'cause this was quite central
to his sense of identity.
00:13:08
-Schmidt, now 23, got a new job
at a local steelworks, but without the discipline
of the police force,
00:13:15
his strange urges grew stronger. -I'm not in any doubt that Schmidt was
increasingly unraveling
00:13:24
from the moment
he lost his job with the police until the first killing, which was not
all that much later.
00:13:31
It was that ticking time bomb
within him that led inevitably,
unfortunately, to the first killing.
00:13:39
By the autumn that year,
he is about to explode. -Schmidt was on his way to work
when he was sidetracked
00:13:47
by his desire to indulge
in his deviant fantasies. He ended up on the outskirts
of the small village of Deetz,
00:13:55
where he hid
at the edge of the forest to watch a row of houses. He was hoping to find
women's underwear.
00:14:03
-He goes to the house
on the end of the little road and discovers
that there's a tool shed,
00:14:08
and he presumably started by
looking for the washing line, but he goes into the tool shed,
and he discovers a hammer.
00:14:14
He then spies the owner
of the property, and I think at that point, the detonation went off
in his head.
00:14:26
-When Schmidt saw
Edeltraut Nixdorf tending to her garden, he was overcome
by an intense urge
00:14:33
to violently assault
the 51-year-old woman. -And probably
in the first instance,
00:14:40
without very much premeditation,
he simply hit her on the head with the hammer
he'd found in the tool shed.
00:14:48
-The woman screamed and tried to
defend herself with a rake, but Schmidt dragged her
into the house,
00:14:55
hit her again with the hammer,
and strangled her. He then proceeded
to have intercourse with her.
00:15:02
However, not getting
the satisfaction he craved, Schmidt wrapped her body
in a blanket
00:15:08
and started to carry her
towards the forest. Wolfgang Schmidt had killed
his first victim,
00:15:14
but it had not gone to plan. -In terms of his first killing, that reality didn't quite
live up to the fantasy
00:15:23
that he had in his head, so of course he was
going to continue to try and create that fantasy
and make it a reality.
00:15:32
-Schmidt had been spotted when he carried his victim
into the forest, and the police
were called to the scene.
00:15:39
The witness gave a description of a very tall, strong,
and athletic man. When detectives searched
the crime scene in Deetz,
00:15:49
they found underwear scattered
around the victim's body. One of the investigating
officers was Volker Kelm.
00:15:58
-[ Speaking German ] -These clothes were lying
in the area very close by to the victim.
00:16:08
From this, we concluded
that it was a break-in and that the perpetrator had
been disturbed by the victim,
00:16:13
and so he killed her. -Police also found a vital clue
in the house -- a large footprint.
00:16:23
The boot was military-issue
and similar to ones worn by some police units,
but in 1989,
00:16:31
the German Democratic Republic
was on the brink of collapse. Attempts to identify
the owner of the boot
00:16:38
from an official list of
police recruits proved futile. For Schmidt, however,
this was just the beginning.
00:16:47
-This is a man who is now
literally searching for prey. He wants nothing more
than victims,
00:16:55
and he doesn't really mind which
shape and form they come in. They could be older.
00:16:59
They could be younger. What's important
is they are submissive. -On the 24th of May,
00:17:06
Schmidt was riding his bicycle
to meet friends in Ferch, about eight miles from
the town of Beelitz,
00:17:13
when he saw a sign
pointing to a landfill. -Although there weren't copious
washing lines for him to search,
00:17:20
there were increasing numbers
of illegal landfills in which were deposited underwear of all sorts of
shapes and sizes,
00:17:29
be it slips, bras, knickers,
all kinds, and that became
Schmidt's happy hunting ground.
00:17:38
-While Schmidt searched the
landfill for women's underwear, he was disturbed by a noise.
00:17:45
He spotted a 55-year-old woman,
Christa Naujoks, who lived in a caravan
next to the landfill.
00:17:53
-[ Speaking German ] -He did not care about the age
of his victims at all. In the fantasies of
a perpetrator like that,
00:18:01
the victims appear faceless
and ageless a lot of the time. So it's not about
who I do it with,
00:18:07
but rather about what I do, and with him, the central
element of experience was his fetish.
00:18:15
-As Schmidt approached
his victim, she screamed. He put his arm around her neck
and started to tighten his grip,
00:18:25
but Christa managed to get away. Schmidt then picked up
an electric cable and caught up with her.
00:18:32
He strangled Christa to death, dragged her into the forest,
and sexually abused her.
00:18:41
-The first two murders
were really spontaneous. Wolfgang Schmidt didn't intend
to kill anyone.
00:18:47
That's not why he was out there. But he learned by committing
the first two murders
00:18:54
firstly that he was capable
of doing it... ...and, secondly, that when
he had sex with corpses,
00:19:03
it was especially arousing
to him. -By the time police arrived
at the crime scene,
00:19:10
Schmidt had already left. Having now found a way to get
his deadly needs met, it wasn't long until Schmidt
tried to overcome another woman.
00:19:21
-By now, you have the classic
behavioral trait of escalation. First murder --
the autumn in October 1989.
00:19:31
Second murder in May 1990. Not much longer,
again in the summer of 1990. -In July,
Schmidt was at a landfill
00:19:42
just outside the city
of Brandenburg. He had already found underwear
and pornography
00:19:48
when he realized
he was not alone. He spotted his next victim,
a 58-year-old woman.
00:19:56
This time,
Schmidt was carrying a knife. He approached and stabbed her
but did not kill her.
00:20:04
He then dragged the woman
to a more secluded place. -He renders her unconscious,
00:20:11
and he's about to rape her,
but he gets interrupted, so he's nearly got to the point
00:20:17
where he's fulfilled
his fantasy, where he's made
his fantasy reality, but he's been stopped
in doing so.
00:20:24
-Schmidt fled the scene. The woman was found in time
to call an ambulance. She survived but was unable
to give a description
00:20:33
of her attacker
to the local police. With no formal identification
made, the police could take the case
no further.
00:20:42
At this point, they did not
make a connection with the previous killings. Schmidt laid low
for eight months,
00:20:49
but he could not control
his urges, and it would not be long
before he struck again.
00:20:55
-When he gets to
the fourth victim, he goes prepared, essentially. He's got a knife.
00:21:00
He's absolutely determined
'cause he's nearly reached the point
that he wanted to reach.
00:21:04
He's nearly managed to have
sexual relations with a woman who is submissive,
who is unconscious,
00:21:10
and he's absolutely determined that he's gonna
make this happen, so there's a real sense
of urgency in him now,
00:21:17
and he's a very,
very dangerous man. -On the 13th of March, 1991, Schmidt attacked Inge Fischer.
00:21:26
The 34-year-old woman was walking home
through the forest near Beelitz. -[ Speaking German ]
00:21:36
-She was stabbed by the killer
with a knife from behind. And here, too,
based on the way it was done
00:21:42
and in the circumstances, we couldn't establish
connections with any previous incidents.
00:21:53
The modus operandi, the way
it was done, was different. One was struck with a hammer.
00:22:00
One was strangled. One was stabbed. Two were older women,
this time a younger woman,
00:22:08
on a forest path,
a cottage, a rubbish dump. Because we didn't have
any matching clues until then,
00:22:16
it was hard for us
to see any connections. -[ Speaking German ] -After four attacks,
three resulting in murders,
00:22:28
it was still impossible
for police to make a conclusive connection
between the crimes.
00:22:35
That meant Schmidt's
killing spree continued unabated. In the spring of 1991,
00:22:46
Wolfgang Schmidt
was leading a double life. He was engaged to be married and
worked at a local steelworks.
00:22:54
At the same time, he was
a dangerous sexual predator who was still on the loose.
00:22:59
One thing had become clear --
it was dangerous for women to venture into the forest
on their own.
00:23:05
Police handed out leaflets
and warned local communities, but the message had not
reached a community
00:23:11
of former Russian military
families living in the area. -[ Speaking German ] -They had very little contact
with the people in the area
00:23:23
and so probably didn't notice
what was happening. One should add that, tragically,
00:23:30
that they were just about
to go back home. -Just nine days after
killing his last victim,
00:23:40
Schmidt was prowling
the forest behind a hospital. He spotted a Russian mother,
Tamara Petrowskaja,
00:23:47
and her infant son
walking home through the woods. -He's been fantasizing
about this --
00:23:54
this sexual encounter --
for so many years. It's something that
he really wants.
00:23:59
Now the possibility
is in front of him, and there's this one barrier
in the way,
00:24:03
and that barrier is the baby. So he's very instrumental
in removing this obstacle
00:24:10
to getting what he wants. -Schmidt attacked his victim,
beat her, and started to
pull her into the forest.
00:24:17
To silence the baby,
Schmidt picked up the infant and threw him to the ground and then callously kicked him
in the chest.
00:24:27
-The most horrific, the most
terrifying of Schmidt's crimes, was the killing
of a Russian doctor's wife.
00:24:37
The woman was 44. Imagine how much she must have
prized the child, particularly at that age.
00:24:47
Unfortunately for her
and for her child, Schmidt comes across them and is absolutely determined
to attack the woman.
00:25:00
-[ Speaking German ] -At the crime scene where
the baby and the woman died, there was women's lingerie lying
right there at the scene,
00:25:13
and it was clear that it had
something to do with the crime. That's when it occurred to us,
"What about the others?
00:25:26
Could this case be linked
with the others?" -Police found women's underwear
at the crime scene.
00:25:35
They had now established
it was crucial evidence in all these murders, and that was
a major breakthrough.
00:25:42
The investigators believe
the perpetrator must be someone
with a dangerous fetish.
00:25:47
They were coming under
increasing pressure to capture the killer who was
now hitting the headlines
00:25:53
as the Beast of Beelitz
and the Pink Giant. Could this be the missing clue
that would finally lead them
00:26:01
to this extremely dangerous
sexual predator? -[ Speaking German ] -After we were able
to establish the relationship
00:26:10
between the underwear
and the perpetrator, naturally, we went to search
this angle in particular.
00:26:19
And at the surrounding area
of the crime scenes, we found lairs where he basically
collected the underwear
00:26:27
and where he satisfied himself
with it. And there were bags of underwear
that we found.
00:26:36
-Marianne Bohm, then a young
prosecutor from West Berlin, was sent to Potsdam
to head up the investigation.
00:26:44
-[ Speaking German ] -The case of Wolfgang Schmidt
was especially distinguished by the variety of cases
to deal with.
00:26:53
It was because of this anxiety, because we couldn't catch
the perpetrator, I was on call day and night,
00:27:00
and when my phone would ring, I would sit up straight
in my bed because I thought
he had struck again.
00:27:07
-Schmidt would have known that
police were closing in on him, but he was still free
00:27:12
and still indulging in
his now deadly fantasies. -The main reason why it was
tricky for the police
00:27:18
to put all the clues together
to go after Schmidt is, there are two types
of serial killers,
00:27:24
or two main types
of serial killers. One is the victim-based
serial killer, and the other one
is action-based serial killer
00:27:30
or the violence-based
serial killer. The victim-based goes after
a specific kind of victim.
00:27:35
The other kind of serial killer
is one that the victim makes zero difference to them.
00:27:39
What they are after
is something else. Either the violence -- that is what excites them,
is killing the person --
00:27:47
or some kind of sexual pleasure. In the case of Schmidt,
he didn't care about the victim.
00:27:52
He wanted the sex. -But as yet,
the police had no idea who they were dealing with.
00:28:00
-[ Speaking German ] -The whole problem was that
Wolfgang Schmidt was not known to the police
as a sexual perpetrator.
00:28:12
The investigators back then
already had a pretty clear picture
of what made this predator tick,
00:28:20
that his way of acting
was fetishistic and that he went into
a situation with an intent of killing.
00:28:26
-[ Speaking German ] -It was also clear early on that they were dealing with
a serial killer.
00:28:37
And since there were no leads
to Wolfgang Schmidt that came from
the general public either,
00:28:43
it was basically impossible
to catch him unless he was caught
in the act at some point.
00:28:55
That means they were looking
for a needle in a haystack. -Two weeks after
his last assault,
00:29:02
Schmidt was on the prowl again. He came across
two 12-year-old girls who were looking for
a dead deer in the forest.
00:29:11
-The escalation is
very, very common. So now he escalated. Maybe he thought,
"To have my kind of fetish sex
00:29:20
with two women instead of one." Maybe he had already
been fantasized about that for awhile.
00:29:29
I'm certain that the reason
why he went after that is because he had done
everything prior to that,
00:29:34
and he was always escalating
and escalating and escalating until the day he gets caught.
00:29:40
-Schmidt attacked the girls
dressed up in women's clothes, wearing an apron.
00:29:47
What the girls must have thought
almost defies belief. There's this presumably huge man
00:29:52
dressed up in women's clothes
with an apron on. It is truly bizarre. This time, they both survive.
00:30:01
This time, they can describe
the man who's attacked them. -Schmidt's disappointment
at failing
00:30:08
to fulfill his sexual needs
with the two girls was so intense
that the following day,
00:30:14
on the 5th of April, 1991,
he struck again. He broke into the house
of a 66-year-old woman,
00:30:22
Talita Bremer, while she slept. Schmidt found her underwear
and became highly aroused.
00:30:29
He strangled her to death and
then sexually defiled her body. -What we've got to remember is,
00:30:36
here is a man that did have
some control over his behavior. Everybody has fantasies.
00:30:40
Everybody has things
that they would like to do, but they know that these things
are socially unacceptable
00:30:46
or they are deviant
or that they are illegal, so most people choose
not to act on them,
00:30:52
but he did. He knows what he's doing
is wrong, but he's choosing
to do it anyway
00:30:59
because he wants that fantasy
that he's created in his head to become a reality,
00:31:05
and he's always making
the decision that he's gonna try again. He's gonna try again
00:31:09
'cause, "I've not quite
achieved it this time. I'm gonna do it again."
00:31:13
-The hunt to capture Schmidt
was gathering pace. Thanks to the description given
00:31:18
by the two surviving
12-year-old victims, police were able to issue
an Identi-Kit,
00:31:24
and the prosecution offered
a reward of 20,000 Deutsche Marks
for information. -We received hundreds of bits
of information
00:31:33
after we went public with it. -[ Speaking German ] -There were several things that pointed towards somebody
that lived in the area,
00:31:41
that was out and about,
that had some sort of occupation that made him wander
the forests,
00:31:45
but that was all we knew. All of that really became
more focused when the girls
were able to tell us
00:31:54
who we were
actually looking for. -[ Speaking German ] -By the summer of 1991,
East German Wolfgang Schmidt's
00:32:04
deviant fantasies had spiraled
completely out of control. In his extraordinary search
for sexual fulfillment,
00:32:12
Schmidt had attacked nine people and murdered five women
and a baby. But his lust for a bizarre form
of gratification
00:32:20
showed no signs of stopping. On the 1st of August, 1991, nearly four months
after his previous murder,
00:32:28
Schmidt returned to the woods
surrounding his home to try and satisfy his desires.
00:32:36
-With Schmidt, it's not simply
about ending his victims' lives and then sexually abusing them
and raping them
00:32:43
after they've died. It's also about
continuing in this behavior of wearing women's underwear,
of soiling this underwear.
00:32:51
He has this routine,
he has this ritual, and he has to have every stage
of this ritual
00:32:57
in order to gain
sexual satisfaction, and it's becoming
all the more elaborate
00:33:01
and all the more complex
with several stages in it -- wearing women's underwear,
soiling the underwear,
00:33:08
identifying a victim,
and assaulting that victim. And all of those elements
need to be there
00:33:14
for him to have
satisfaction from it. -Alert to his perverse
and murderous activities,
00:33:21
the police were now determined
to catch the serial killer known as the Beast of Beelitz.
00:33:27
-[ Speaking German ] -We carried out searches
in the woods for these types of
clothing sites...
00:33:39
...because we firmly believed
that there must be more to find. And we were able to find
several of them in the forests
00:33:47
around Beelitz-Heilstatten,
at Neuendorf and so on. We staked out
two of these sites.
00:33:59
To do this, we used
special observation forces who were trained for this, who lay hidden in the woods,
who watched,
00:34:11
and then, if they saw him
either putting the clothes on or engaging
in any type of sexual act,
00:34:18
they could catch him in the act
and arrest him. -While the police lay in wait, Schmidt,
wearing a bra under his jacket,
00:34:27
was spotted gratifying himself at another site
by two passersby. When the shocked witnesses
reported his abhorrent behavior,
00:34:36
Schmidt was promptly arrested
and taken into police custody. There he was charged
with the murders he'd committed.
00:34:45
-[ Speaking German ] -He was a very shy, reluctant
young man back then who, as is often the case with sexual
killers or killers in general,
00:34:55
he didn't have it written on his
forehead that he was a murderer. He was often described
as the nice kid next door.
00:35:05
-His defense lawyer
was Ulrich Bauschulte. -[ Speaking German ] -In contrast to
his physical size --
00:35:13
he was well over 1-meter-90 -- I found, when I spoke to him, he seemed very small, very shy,
00:35:25
which is astounding
when you read and learn how violently
the deaths occurred. -When confronted
with the details
00:35:35
of the murders he'd committed, Schmidt seemed to show
scant remorse for his actions.
00:35:41
-[ Speaking German ] -I think it was
embarrassing for him, but he was not ashamed
about anything,
00:35:46
not even about the murders. He was probably embarrassed that
he was seen in women's lingerie
00:35:51
and with an apron on. -The trial was set to begin
on the 20th of October, 1992, just two weeks
after Schmidt's 26th birthday.
00:36:06
The interest in the killer the German tabloids
have dubbed as the Beast of Beelitz
and the Pink Giant,
00:36:12
after his fascination
with pink underwear, was immense. -[ Speaking German ] -So there was an unbelievable
press hype back then.
00:36:24
We had far too little room
in the court for all the press. Everyone was following it
on the news.
00:36:31
-Gisela Friedrichsen was
the court reporter for a renowned
West German magazine.
00:36:37
-[ Speaking German ] -At the beginning,
everyone knew that Wolfgang Schmidt
killed many women.
00:36:45
And then, gradually,
all the details came out into the open
through reports in the tabloids.
00:36:51
-[ Speaking German ] -And it became very clear that he must be
a very disturbed person.
00:37:02
-The East German press,
however, were less understanding
of Schmidt's problems.
00:37:07
-They would have, ideally,
wanted to execute him. They would have cut off
everything that could be cut off
00:37:12
from his body and so on. -Schmidt's mental health
was assessed by Professor Wilfried Rasch,
who was the leading
00:37:21
German forensic psychiatrist
of his time. -[ Speaking German ] -Professor Rasch explained it
brilliantly to the court
00:37:30
how Wolfgang Schmidt developed
throughout the years. It began during his childhood
in the search
00:37:38
to have a closer relationship
to his mother, and that naturally evolved into
something else as time went by.
00:37:47
That was fetishism
and also transvestism. A combination of these, which together with inclinations
toward coprophilia,
00:38:03
changed and became established. -Even when we look at cases
of serial killers, we only come across
a handful of cases
00:38:13
where people have engaged in
this type of behavior, and, unfortunately,
if something like this
00:38:18
isn't nipped in the bud,
isn't recognized early on, it's something that's
only going to get worse.
00:38:27
-Schmidt had shared
his most intimate secrets with the psychiatrist, including revelations
about his habit
00:38:34
of defecating
in women's underwear and then wearing it
back-to-front while pleasuring himself.
00:38:41
Professor Rasch concluded
that Schmidt's sexual fantasies began to grow, and at some point,
the balance tipped over,
00:38:49
and he decided to try
to do this with a woman. But when Schmidt failed
to achieve sexual gratification,
00:38:57
he snapped, and that's when
his killing spree began. -When the desire got stronger
and stronger,
00:39:05
it ended in those murders. That's where he got
his first kick and where he noticed that there
was a chance for him to move on
00:39:11
to a level that may
give him sexual satisfaction. -Schmidt was cooperative
from the beginning,
00:39:20
but when he was confronted
with the Identi-Kit that led to his capture, his response
was rather startling.
00:39:27
-[ Speaking German ] -When he saw the picture,
he said to me, "That looks a lot like me,
00:39:33
but it can't be me
because I didn't kill anybody." I didn't really know how to
interpret that statement
00:39:40
back then until Professor Rasch
conducted the examination in order to see what it was
00:39:46
that was really wrong
with Mr. Schmidt. The results stated repeatedly that when he lived out
his fantasies,
00:39:54
in his mind,
the women had lived. -All throughout the trial, Schmidt continued to claim that
in his head,
00:40:04
all his victims
were still alive. -So Schmidt's fantasy was all
about dominating alive women.
00:40:11
He says, "In my head,
they were alive." Well, in his head,
they had to be alive
00:40:15
'cause that was
the only way in which he could get pleasure
out of the situation.
00:40:20
-The prosecution had
vast amounts of evidence, such as clothes, undergarments,
and the murder weapons,
00:40:27
but they did not play
a significant role during the trial because Schmidt
had confessed to everything.
00:40:34
-Everybody agreed
that Mr. Schmidt belonged in
a psychiatric facility. -Schmidt was sentenced
to 15 years in prison
00:40:43
and was admitted
to a psychiatric clinic in Brandenburg,
where he remains to this day.
00:40:49
Adding to the price he's paid,
Schmidt's fiancée has, since his incarceration,
left him.
00:40:57
-[ Speaking German ] -Wolfgang Schmidt
is very sexually deviant, and he most certainly has
a personality disorder, as well.
00:41:07
As long as he does not
confront what he has done and gets the appropriate means
to help him,
00:41:15
he will always pose a threat
to others. And since, to this day,
that has not changed,
00:41:22
there is no chance for him
to ever be set free again. -Many people have issues
seeing him
00:41:30
as a typical serial killer
because of his modus operandi varying from one victim
to the other,
00:41:38
but essentially,
his drive, his motivation is the same
as many other serial killers.
00:41:43
He wants to have power
over other people and to dominate other people. He shared with
other serial killers
00:41:49
a callous disregard
for the rights of other people, for the lives of other people,
and for their suffering.
00:42:00
-In a final twist
to this story, in 2009,
courts allowed Wolfgang Schmidt to change his name
to Beate Schmidt
00:42:09
when he revealed his desire
to transition into a woman. Schmidt has been undergoing
hormone treatment since 2010
00:42:17
but has so far been refused
gender-reassignment surgery. Regardless of his current
or future gender,
00:42:25
the bizarre and callous killings committed by
the Beast of Beelitz, Wolfgang Schmidt,
00:42:31
makes him one of
the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪