00:00:04
-On July 17, 1975, firefighters sifting through
the remains of a fire in a Hamburg apartment block
made a gruesome discovery.
00:00:15
-[ Speaking German ] -We found all different kinds
of body parts and had to examine them.
00:00:21
We were asking ourselves
what was going on. At first, nothing made sense. -And as the police began
to search the small attic flat,
00:00:31
the true horror of the discovery
became apparent. -[ Speaking German ] -We found a corpse.
00:00:38
We found two corpses. We found three corpses. We have found four corpses. It was a huge story
because things like this
00:00:46
don't exactly
happen often in Hamburg. -A man named Fritz Honka
had been murdering women
00:00:54
and dismembering
their bodies in his home for the past five years. He claimed that Jack the Ripper
had told him to do it.
00:01:03
-I think it was simply
crimes of opportunity, but with a horrible edge. He showed no compassion
for the victims.
00:01:13
He didn't respect their bodies
or feel remorse, clearly. He just cut them up.
00:01:19
-Fritz Honka had carved
his name in history as one of the world's
most evil killers.
00:01:26
♪♪ ♪♪ -The brutal murders of
39-year-old Fritz Honka left the whole of
West Germany reeling.
00:01:55
When a fire ripped through
his apartment block on the 17th of July, 1975,
out of the ashes,
00:02:02
the butchered remains
of four women were revealed, hidden away in Honka's attic.
00:02:08
Nobody knew they'd been missing
from the streets of Hamburg. It was a shocking crime scene
00:02:14
even for
the hardened murder squad. The lead investigators
on the case were Jurgen Vierle
and Karl Pries.
00:02:23
-[ Speaking German ] -They told us where
the body parts where, so inside the building,
we went up to the attic,
00:02:30
and there were two flats, Mr. Honka's flat
and another one, and then there was
a toilet and a loft,
00:02:37
and in this loft
were the body parts. -[ Speaking German ] -We were standing
outside the door
00:02:50
when a small man
walked up the stairs. The flat he lived in was
completely filled with smoke.
00:02:56
It was right next to the attic
that had caught fire. I just happened to be standing
right by the front door
00:03:03
of his flat, and he goes,
"What's going on here?" "As you can see,
there's been a fire," I said.
00:03:10
"Oh," he said. "That's really bad. Looks like I won't be able
to live here anymore."
00:03:16
I then asked him,
"Who has the key to this attic room,
and who owns it?"
00:03:21
To which he replied,
"This is my attic room, and I am the only one
who's got access to it."
00:03:27
And in that moment, there were
reasonable grounds to suspect him of a crime. Consequently, we took him
to the offices
00:03:34
of the police headquarters
at Berliner Tor. -The story of this elusive
serial killer
00:03:45
begins over 80 years ago. Fritz Honka was born
into a working-class family in Leipzig, East Germany,
on the 31st of July, 1935.
00:03:59
-[ Speaking German ] -He had eight siblings. The relationship with his father
was very difficult.
00:04:08
He mentions an incident
where his father supposedly wanted to kill him, and the connection to his mother
was also rather cold.
00:04:16
When he was 11 years old,
she left the family, so he always had a rather
crushing relationship
00:04:22
with his parents. -[ Speaking German ] -All the children
were given away, which will have had
quite an effect on him.
00:04:35
-After his father died in 1946,
11-year-old Honka was left to grow up in an orphanage.
00:04:43
His childhood
was far from ideal. -I think he had quite
a hard time growing up. These were quite turbulent
times in Germany,
00:04:53
but for a young lad who was
considerably shorter than his peers, he didn't always
fit in very well at school,
00:04:59
and that made him
a target for bullies, so he was always the brunt
of someone else's joke,
00:05:06
so I don't think he had
a very easy time of it at all. -After leaving school,
Honka began work
00:05:13
as a bricklayer's apprentice,
but it didn't last long. In 1951, aged 16, he fled
from Communist East Germany
00:05:22
and headed west. -[ Speaking German ] -He then came over here
to West Germany and worked in
the farming industry
00:05:31
before relocating to Hamburg,
and here in Hamburg, he worked for a security service
company as a night watchman.
00:05:42
So this means he always had
a steady income, which, of course,
gave him, socially,
00:05:46
an advantage with the crowds
he hung out with. -Age 22, he meets his wife,
and they get married,
00:05:56
and things are quite normal
and quite regular, but both of them have a bit
of an issue with alcohol.
00:06:03
Both of them tend to drink
to excess, and their relationship
becomes quite volatile
00:06:08
and quite chaotic. They attract the attention
of neighbors and the authorities
when they're arguing
00:06:14
and they're overheard
having domestic disputes, so it's not a particularly
nice household for very long.
00:06:22
-After separating from his wife
in 1967, 32-year-old Honka was alone and working
the graveyard shift
00:06:30
as a night watchman. -So he rented a small,
one-bedroom apartment, which was very close to the
red-light district in Hamburg,
00:06:38
and in this apartment, he created his own
little world, basically. He wasn't subject to any kind
of informal surveillance
00:06:45
of other people
who would question, you know, "What are you doing?" So it was his own little zone,
essentially,
00:06:53
and this is the place
where he would live in something of a little bubble,
to be honest,
00:06:58
so I think this is a recipe for
disaster for someone like him. -Honka spent his free time
drinking in 24-hour bars
00:07:06
around the Reeperbahn in the city's notorious
red-light district. -There will be lots of reasons
why people turn to alcohol,
00:07:15
but I think in this case,
here is an individual who didn't have a lot of control
over his life as a child.
00:07:20
There was a lot
going on around him that he had very little power
over whatsoever,
00:07:25
and what can happen with people
who experience circumstances like these
is that in adulthood,
00:07:30
they develop an intense
need to be in control of what's going on around them,
and for some people,
00:07:35
that will manifest itself
in self-medication. -[ Speaking German ] -One of the bars was the famous
Goldenen Handschuh,
00:07:46
the Golden Glove. It was named like that because
it belonged to a famous boxer, and right across was
the Elbschlosskeller,
00:07:53
a bar where mainly
homeless alcoholics or drifters hung out. Well, they drank
plenty of alcohol.
00:08:00
The preferred drink was
grain schnapps with lemonade. There was dancing, and it
didn't get cleaned very often.
00:08:10
It was open all hours,
around the clock, and looked accordingly. You had to be careful
not to stick to the floor,
00:08:18
and those were
the surroundings and conditions. These people had
reached rock-bottom,
00:08:29
at least the women
who went there, and now and then, the men
would take the women home
00:08:34
with them to play sex games. -The Golden Glove soon became
one of Honka's favorite haunts.
00:08:43
He would regularly visit
after finishing his shift as a night watchmen. The owner of the bar,
Jorn Nurnberg,
00:08:51
became friendly with the man
his regulars knew as Fite. -[ Speaking German ] -When he came in
wearing his uniform,
00:09:01
you could see that he was
very proud of himself, but he was never pushy. People who didn't know him,
who just saw him briefly,
00:09:09
thought he looked a bit odd because Fite wasn't
exactly a pinup. At times, he looked
a bit creepy.
00:09:20
-A traffic accident in his 20s
had left Honka with a crooked nose
and a pronounced squint.
00:09:26
-Well, he's an individual
who has never really had a very positive relationship
when it comes to women.
00:09:32
So he was abandoned
by his mother. The relationship that
he had with his wife was quite chaotic
and quite unstable,
00:09:38
so there isn't a really
positive association with women in his mind
at this point in time.
00:09:45
-Honka is a mentally unstable, intellectually challenged
runt of a man who has profound
sexual problems.
00:09:54
He finds sex with a women
almost impossible and therefore
demands oral sex. He is a drunk, a loner,
who has had almost no paternal,
00:10:04
maternal caring as a child. He was no one's idea
of Mr. Universe, but he was, clearly
or at least able,
00:10:15
could afford
to hire prostitutes. -Honka had taken a liking
to older prostitutes
00:10:22
who could often be found in
the bars around the Reeperbahn. -[ Speaking German ]
00:10:30
-These were homeless women
who had no income. He had money. He could offer alcohol.
00:10:36
He could offer a place to stay, and that made it
quite easy for him. I wouldn't say
to make friends,
00:10:40
but certainly to make
the acquaintance of people, whether that would be
female or male,
00:10:46
and as a result,
he was well-known in these circles he moved in. The lowest class of society,
that was his world.
00:10:58
-And it was a world
that was about to implode. On the 17th of July, 1975, a fire in Honka's apartment
block would lead
00:11:08
to a startling revelation -- the dismembered bodies
of four women. -[ Speaking German ]
00:11:19
-The fire service responded
to the fire incident, and when they found
the bodies in the attic,
00:11:24
they called us,
the homicide squad, so myself and the rest of the on-duty team
made our way to the crime scene.
00:11:32
-The police waited for Honka
to arrive home from his shift as a night watchman. He was immediately arrested
00:11:39
and taken to the police station
for questioning. -[ Speaking German ] -We set out to do our work
and walk through the crime scene
00:11:51
and during the crime-scene
investigation, a mummified corpse was found, and underneath
this mummified corpse
00:11:59
lay a partly decomposed torso. We broke down walls, broke
through the floor and searched.
00:12:16
Throughout the whole flat, we noticed
this very strong smell. I'd say the typical smell
of decay
00:12:22
mixed with that of burning. Very unpleasant. And so this led us
to search more, and we found a hatch
facing the side of the roof
00:12:32
that had been covered
with wallpaper, and then we broke
into the side of the roof
00:12:36
and found a large object wrapped in bed linen
with a corpse inside. We took it out and announced
00:12:48
that we had discovered
another body. -The press soon got wind
of this shocking discovery
00:12:57
and headed for the crime scene. Lutz Jaffé was a newspaper
photographer at the time.
00:13:03
-[ Speaking German ] -We always listened
to the police radio. Back then, it was possible
to do that,
00:13:11
and you could hear
where things were happening. That's how we found out
about the fire in Zeissstrasse.
00:13:18
We heard a residential building
was burning, and, of course,
I headed right out.
00:13:29
The fire brigade
was already there. You obviously wait a little
because you never know
00:13:34
what's going on
inside the house. Is anyone hurt?
Did someone die? Well, firefighters
have a good nose,
00:13:43
and they can, of course, pick up
the smell of decaying bodies. And then I think
they found Honka's bags.
00:13:57
We were downstairs getting
information from the police. "We have found a corpse.
We have found two corpses.
00:14:04
We have found three corpses.
We have found four corpses." Well, of course, for us,
it was a huge story
00:14:12
because things like this don't
happen very often in Hamburg. Up and down the street,
00:14:22
the news that this wasn't
just a fire spread quickly, and a lot of people turned up.
00:14:28
You can see in the photo that
they looked into the police car, this cluster of people
left and right.
00:14:34
It was just sensational. Also, for the people
who lived there, it was simply unbelievable.
00:14:40
They probably knew him. They knew Honka. The following day,
it was on the front page
00:14:46
of all of Hamburg's newspapers. -As forensic experts work
tirelessly at the crime scene,
00:14:55
detectives at the police station
were beginning to question Honka about
the gruesome discovery.
00:15:01
-[ Speaking German ] -During the interrogation,
you have to try to get a confession
or at least try to get clues
00:15:11
that explain the evidence
found at the crime scene. Only this evidence
from the crime scene
00:15:16
can help to confront him
with allegations that eventually
lead to charging him. So I explained the situation.
00:15:30
We had found four bodies
in his living room and the adjoining rooms
of his flat,
00:15:35
and I confronted him with that. He had nothing to say about it. Then he said, "I don't know.
00:15:44
I've got nothing
to say about this, and I don't know
what you want from me."
00:15:47
Of course, in that moment,
you accuse him, and you say, "How is it possible
that we found a wrapped-up body
00:15:53
behind the disguised wall
in your living room? And what about
the two body parts we found
00:16:02
in the covered hole
behind your toilet, the mummified corpse
and the torso? You see?
00:16:12
And what about the fact that we
found loads of women's dresses, and that initial examinations
of the wrapped-up body show
00:16:18
that it is a woman? So is the mummified body,
just as the chopped-up body we found under the coals
also belongs to a woman?"
00:16:26
When we confronted him
and asked him, "What have you got
to say to that,"
00:16:30
he just shrugged his shoulders
and said, "No idea." And there you are, the officer
leading the interrogation,
00:16:42
and you need to prove to him that he does have something
to do with it. -With Honka not giving them
any information,
00:16:54
the police began
the arduous task of trying to identify the remains
of all four women,
00:17:00
and they got
a big break early on. Missing parts of one
of the bodies had been discovered
four years previously.
00:17:08
-[ Speaking German ] -In November 1971,
a worker at a factory yard in the Gausssirasse
came across some junk,
00:17:17
and when he rummaged through it,
he found body parts. He saw a hand sticking out
of a pile of rubbish.
00:17:28
He immediately informed
the police, and the local officers on duty who were the first to arrive
at the scene informed us
00:17:34
that the findings were,
indeed, body parts. We went to investigate
further and spotted
00:17:40
several chopped-up body parts. Only the torso and the right leg
were missing. Everything else was there,
but cut into pieces.
00:17:52
Besides the body parts, we found
breasts that had been cut off, suggesting that this was,
in all probability,
00:17:59
related to a sex offense. -Although the head
was badly decomposed, in 1971, experts were able to
reconstruct it well enough
00:18:11
to enable the police to provide
a photo to the press. The victim was identified as 42-year-old prostitute
Gertraud Brauer.
00:18:20
Before the fire
at Honka's apartment, the case had remained unsolved. -[ Speaking German ]
00:18:29
-We had come full circle, from the body parts found in
the Gausssirasse to the torso found
on the premises
00:18:35
of Honka's living quarters, and subsequently, we could
charge him with this crime.
00:18:43
-Honka had murdered Gertraud
in December, 1970, after picking her up
in the Golden Glove.
00:18:49
It was the first time
he'd killed someone. Investigators believe
he strangled
00:18:54
the 42-year-old to death because she refused
to have sex with him. He dismembered her body
using a saw.
00:19:02
-To simply cut off a limb is a fairly straightforward
procedure. You need a knife
to get through the flesh
00:19:09
and a saw to get
through the bone. It doesn't have to be
a complex thing to do.
00:19:16
It's not like you're a surgeon
doing an operation. -Golden Glove barman
Jorn Nurnberg
00:19:22
had unknowingly assisted
Honka in meeting his victims. -[ Speaking German ] -He always said in a sneaky way,
00:19:30
"Hey, Jorn, give that
one a little drink, but don't tell her
it's from me."
00:19:34
"Okay, Fite, no problem,"
gave the drink. "Who's that from?"
"From someone."
00:19:39
"Oh, okay. Good." They didn't ask much, as long
as they had something to drink.
00:19:46
-Gertraud Brauer, a hairdresser
and part-time prostitute, was a regular in the bar.
00:19:53
-Time after time,
prostitutes are killed because no one
reports them missing. They live on the edge
of the law.
00:20:00
They're long past in connection
with their families. They are living in
a twilight world,
00:20:09
and, well, you miss
a prostitute? Well, she could've given up, or she could've gone
to another city,
00:20:16
or she could've gone
back to her mother, or whatever it may have been, and so they're
very seldom tracked.
00:20:22
-Even though Honka refused
to cooperate with the police, they had now identified
one of his victims.
00:20:29
Each time they interrogated him,
detectives tried to find out more about the other
three women.
00:20:35
-[ Speaking German ] -"You frequently go
to St. Pauli. You're still going to
the Elbschlosskeller
00:20:43
and other bars in St. Pauli. You drink vast
amounts of alcohol. We found a lot of alcohol
in your flat.
00:20:53
And we've seen the walls
in your place. They're full
of pornographic posters."
00:20:58
Well, we also found
a plastic doll he probably used
to satisfy himself when no woman was around.
00:21:05
The aim was to unsettle him. The uncertainty produced
insecurity. His replies to specific
questions were different
00:21:12
to those
he had given the previous day. -After taking the life
of another human for the first time
in December, 1970,
00:21:25
Honka wouldn't kill again
for almost four years. -What happened to start him off
again in August, 1974?
00:21:34
I would argue that Honka's
alcoholism had probably got so intense by that time that he
was desperately out of control,
00:21:45
and perhaps he just had
genuinely some kind of psychotic break, some kind of
brainstorm that led him to kill.
00:21:55
-The police had a wealth
of evidence against Honka, but they were desperate for him
to make a full confession.
00:22:02
If he continued
with his silence, they may never identify
the other three murdered women.
00:22:13
-[ Speaking German ] -It smelled really odd
in the house. There were also foreigners
living there,
00:22:21
and Honka always said, "The foreigners cook
in a funny way. They use strange spices in their
food, and that's why it stinks."
00:22:28
None of the neighbors suspected
that it wasn't the foreigners, that the smell came from
the body parts in Honka's flat,
00:22:35
and they had started to reek. -Once somebody dies,
decomposition will begin. There will be an increase,
to start with,
00:22:49
in particularly the smell
that comes from the body. As the body functions render
down, things start to decompose.
00:22:58
-[ Speaking German ] -Everywhere in the flat
were scented stones, all around the skirting boards.
00:23:06
The toilet was full of them. They were everywhere. -The longer the bodies
had remained in Honka's attic,
00:23:15
the harder it was
to get rid of them. -A dead body is difficult
to move, and once rigor mortis
starts to set in
00:23:22
and the body becomes stiff,
it's not even flexible to move. It can be very hard to do.
00:23:28
-This is really illustrative
of the type of serial killer he was. He wasn't massively organized in
terms of covering up his crimes.
00:23:36
You know, he would have
the corpses of his victims right there in his flat. He didn't actually
dispose of them,
00:23:42
so this was something
that he was doing just kind of short-term,
reactionary, just kind of coping
with each day as it arose.
00:23:50
-When the police went to
Honka's favorite bars and broke the news that bodies
had been found in his flat,
00:23:57
they were met with
complete disbelief. -[ Speaking German ] -No one expected
that of him, no one.
00:24:06
Even if you've met him,
you'd definitely have said, "Him?
Nah, he's too harmless."
00:24:10
Really shocking. -Journalists also went
round the bars to get background color
for their stories.
00:24:20
-[ Speaking German ] -Part of the story was to
look around and find out, "Where did Honka
meet his women?"
00:24:30
and that was in
the Goldenen Handschuh. It was unimaginable. This was pure poverty.
00:24:36
People, human wrecks,
women as well as men, whose fate had taken
a sad turn for the worse.
00:24:49
These people had reached
the very bottom of society. This doesn't mean
that had to be criminals,
00:24:55
but they were
very poor creatures. As a consequence,
it smelled pretty bad in the Goldenen Handschuh,
00:25:07
as these people
weren't able to wash. They had nowhere to go,
as many of them were homeless.
00:25:18
-The police had identified
one of Honka's victims as Gertraud Brauer, but the other three
remained a mystery.
00:25:26
Establishing their identities
would not be simple. -Even in the modern era of DNA,
00:25:34
identifying victims
can be incredibly challenging. By and large, you have to have
something to compare
00:25:42
your victim to,
so dental records, evidence of missing people,
have they got defining characteristics
that's unique to them?
00:25:57
-The police found a pile of
women's ID cards in Honka's flat and set about
the complicated task
00:26:04
of trying to find the rightful
owners among the prostitutes who frequented the bars
around the Reeperbahn.
00:26:11
Each time they found
a woman alive, they were able to cross her off
the list of potential victims.
00:26:17
One of the local officers
at the time was Peter Reichard. -[ Speaking German ] -We were able to work our way
00:26:25
through all the names
on this list, and we realized that our women
all seemed to be alive.
00:26:32
-The Hamburg police
also put out a call to colleagues across Germany for details of missing women
in their mid-40s to mid-50s.
00:26:42
-[ Speaking German ] -How many
missing persons reports do you think they get
in Germany?
00:26:49
I had stacks of them on my desk, and I had to look through
all of them, and somehow still wasn't
making progress.
00:26:58
Well, so we catalogued
the clothes we had found in his flat, hung them up, numbered them,
and photographed each item.
00:27:07
These clothes were
really the only thing we had at that moment. -Detectives would have to go to
the bars Honka went to around
00:27:19
the Reeperbahn to see
if anyone could help them. -[ Speaking German ] -You try going to St. Pauli
when you don't have a name.
00:27:29
You don't have an address. All you have is clothes
and nothing else. You have the name of Mr. Honka,
00:27:35
and with that,
you go to a bar and ask people, "What kind of girlfriends
did he have?"
00:27:45
What do you think the people
in these bars tell you? "Yes, he had many women,
you know?
00:27:49
One was called Annie,
the other Gerda, and the next, Erika,
but that's all we know."
00:27:55
Well, what are you
going to do with that? So you go round all the bars
showing the outfits,
00:28:04
and if you're lucky,
you might get a name. "Yeah, such-and-such always wore
these kind of clothes."
00:28:14
As soon as you get a first name,
you can make progress. At that point,
we were established
00:28:18
that we were probably dealing
with aging prostitutes. -Using the list
of missing persons,
00:28:30
the clothes found
in Honka's apartment and the names gathered
from the local bars,
00:28:35
detectives were able to
draw up a short list of possible victims. Armed with photographs,
00:28:41
they headed out on to
the Reeperbahn once more. -[ Speaking German ] -And with these pictures,
we went back to show them around
00:28:48
and were finally able
to establish, "Yes, he had a thing with her." -It was a major breakthrough
for the police.
00:28:58
They had linked a number
of women to Honka. -[ Speaking German ] -As soon as we knew
who these women were,
00:29:07
we could confront him
again and again during the interrogations, and we kept insisting
until he'd say,
00:29:13
"Yes, I knew her, and she'd
been over at my place." So at least now he had admitted
that they'd been with him.
00:29:23
Some stayed longer with him,
for days, even weeks. It was nice for the women. Suddenly, they had
somewhere to live.
00:29:30
The question was,
what happened next? Well, we obviously had to
confront him with the fact
00:29:35
that he had killed the woman, and all he said,
"I can't remember."
00:29:44
We had no choice
but to accept that. However, there was evidence
that the women who had been identified
and who had also lived with him,
00:29:53
were found dead in his flat,
and that exactly was the point. -But the police still
needed a confession.
00:30:04
-[ Speaking German ] -Now we just had to hear
from him that he killed them and how he killed them
00:30:13
and what he did with the bodies,
and that's difficult. That's very difficult.
00:30:18
As I remember, he always made it
sound like it was a possibility, but he never admitted it 100%.
00:30:27
-It is interesting that
he didn't deny the killings. He wasn't a particularly,
00:30:35
"Oh, no, it's got nothing
to do with me." Mind you, it would've been
very difficult for him
00:30:38
to deny the killings. He was living with
the body parts of four women. I mean, how they got there,
00:30:43
he was the only person
who truly knew. -[ Speaking German ] -We kept pushing him.
00:30:49
"But you chopped up the bodies. You cut the women up
with a saw," and so on.
00:30:54
He just said,
"I can't remember." -It was further frustration
for the police.
00:31:05
For example, he would say,
"Yeah, I slept with that woman, and in the morning,
she was lying dead next to me.
00:31:13
Well, how she died, the way
she died, I simply can't say." -Although Honka continued
to deny killing the three women,
00:31:23
the detectives were at least
able to finally identify them. They were 54-year-old
Anna Beuschel,
00:31:30
52-year-old Ruth Schult
and 57-year-old Frieda Roblick, a regular in the Golden Glove
who went by the name of Rita.
00:31:40
-[ Speaking German ] -I had a cleaning lady
who always helped out. Her name was Sofie,
and Sofie was friends with Rita.
00:31:53
Now and then, Sofie would
take Rita home with her so she could have a wash,
bathe, or even sleep,
00:31:59
but I don't know. I think she had nowhere to live. She was gone for a while.
00:32:10
One day, she came back
wearing nice clothes, really quite fancy, and I said,
"Where have you been?
00:32:17
I already thought
you were dead." "No, I have a new boyfriend,
and he's wonderful."
00:32:26
-But that new boyfriend
was Fritz Honka, who strangled her to death
in December 1974.
00:32:33
-Honka always seems to me to be kind of a accidental
serial killer. He didn't fit what the BAU
00:32:40
or the FBI's behavioral unit
call organized. He was completely disorganized.
00:32:46
These were crimes
of opportunity. He wasn't stalking these women. He wasn't planning
their killings.
00:32:54
They happened. They were part of
his tragic character and part of his drinking
and part of the fact
00:33:02
that he found any kind
of sexual relationship with women almost impossible,
and this was the only way
00:33:07
he could find to satisfy
those desires that he had. -The West German press
were fascinated with Honka.
00:33:15
Photographer Lutz Jaffé managed
to capture a photograph of the mysterious killer.
00:33:21
-[ Speaking German ] -Back then, you could have
pretty good contacts within the police,
and I knew that Honka
00:33:29
would be taken either to prison
or to appear in front of the Magistrate
at a specific time.
00:33:35
Someone from the police
had told me about it. Well, and then I lay in wait
for him to arrive.
00:33:46
That's how this photo
came about, as he turned around
when I called, "Mr. Honka!"
00:33:51
That's how I managed
to catch him. -The police were trying to
determine a motive
00:33:58
for the murders. Interviews
with local prostitutes who'd been with Honka
and lived to tell the tale
00:34:04
revealed shocking facts about
his perverse sexual tastes. -[ Speaking German ] -The women who escaped
from his home were very lucky.
00:34:19
The interrogation of these women
hinted at his sexual practices, and these were
sometimes catastrophic.
00:34:26
I don't want to go into
every detail here, but it was pretty terrible. It's possible these sexual
practices got out of hand
00:34:39
and became excessive,
which, I have to say, might have led
to the death of a women.
00:34:52
-One of the surviving victims
showed the police a scar she'd received in a brutal
sexual encounter with Honka.
00:34:59
-[ Speaking German ] -Because she was so upset
about Fritz Honka, that dirty old swine,
as she called him,
00:35:08
she pulled up her skirt,
took off her underwear and pointed to a scar
beside her vagina.
00:35:14
"What is that?" I asked her. She then told us that during
a sexual encounter
00:35:19
with Fritz Honka,
he had penetrated her with a broom handle. That's where the injury
had come from,
00:35:25
and she ended up in hospital. She was furious, angry
beyond belief, you could say.
00:35:34
-And she wasn't the only one
who needed medical treatment after spending the night
with Honka.
00:35:41
-[ Speaking German ] -For example, one of the women
he took back to his place, he sat her with a bare bum
on top of a hot plate.
00:35:53
As a result, the woman ran
semi-naked out of the flat. This is an example, a sort of thing
where he became violent.
00:36:06
This may have resulted
in these deaths, but, of course,
it's also possible that the women weren't complying
with his demands
00:36:14
and he became
violent towards them. -The investigation
was drawing to an end, but some questions
remained unanswered.
00:36:26
-He had, unbelievable
though it may seem, escaped under the radar for
five years, killing four women
00:36:36
and basically keeping them
around the flat as trophies. Now, there's no suggestion
that Honka had sex
00:36:42
with them postmortem. There's no suggestion that he
was some kind of necrophiliac.
00:36:46
I think he was just
a dreadfully lazy drunk who didn't know what else to do
and just convinced himself
00:36:53
it would be perfectly all right. -In November, 1976, the trial
of Fritz Honka began in Hamburg.
00:37:01
He had retracted his
initial confession and was now denying
all the charges against him.
00:37:07
-Well, his defense strategy
when he was arrested and charged with the crimes
was an incredibly bizarre one.
00:37:12
He decided to blame
Jack the Ripper, who was sending him messages
to kill these women.
00:37:18
Now, this appears to be
something that is, you know, completely bizarre
and very odd,
00:37:24
but it could be evidence
of somebody who is experiencing
some kind of mental ill health.
00:37:30
We know that people who
experience episodes of psychosis feel very strongly compelled
to act in a particular way,
00:37:37
and they're not really fully
in control of their actions, but equally, at the same time,
00:37:42
if you are reading
the newspapers, if you are listening
to the radio, and you know that
this is something
00:37:48
that is available to you, that you're able to
come out with this and it perhaps
be taken seriously,
00:37:54
then you're going to
give it a go. -The psychiatrists
who examined Honka during the court case concluded
00:38:01
that he'd acted with diminished
criminal responsibility. On the 20th of December, 1976,
the jury found him guilty
00:38:10
of three counts of manslaughter
and one of murder, that of 54-year-old
Anna Beuschel,
00:38:17
who he had strangled
in his apartment in August 1974. Honka was sentenced to 15 years
in a psychiatric hospital.
00:38:27
-He might have been described
at the time as a big slow. That affects the amount
of culpability
00:38:33
that we assign to his crimes. So was he in control
of what he was doing? Did he know what he was doing
was wrong?
00:38:39
And if that can't
be established, then perhaps he is treated
in a mental-health facility
00:38:45
rather than a prison,
and, indeed, he served 15 years in a hospital,
in a hospital setting.
00:38:51
-The crimes of Fritz Honka left
the entire country in shock, especially the city of Hamburg.
00:38:58
-[ Speaking German ] -I believe after
the Second World War, such a murder case
has never happened again
00:39:06
in the history of crimes
in Hamburg. It was a unique case,
that someone killed four women,
00:39:11
dismembered them,
and left them in his flat. -[ Speaking German ] -After that, we became very,
very well-known beyond Hamburg,
00:39:25
famous for the murder,
as unpleasant as it was, and as sorry as I felt
for the women, especially Rita.
00:39:33
Rita really didn't deserve it. -Honka was released from
the psychiatric hospital
00:39:41
in 1993. He spend the final years
of his life in a nursing home
under the name Peter Jensen.
00:39:49
He died in Hamburg
on the 19th of November, 1998. He was 63 years old. Today, Fritz Honka has become
something of a cult figure
00:40:00
in Hamburg. The Golden Glove continues
to capitalize on its most infamous
former customer,
00:40:07
with the words "Honka Saloon"
emblazoned above the entrance. -[ Speaking German ]
00:40:14
-These bars were a no-go zone. Not in a million years would a
normal Hamburg citizen go there.
00:40:21
Only after the series of murders
was made public did it become
an interesting place
00:40:25
for people in fur coats
to visit after the opera, so they could see for themselves
how well-off they were
00:40:31
and how miserable the others. "Well, I'm going to be
really generous and pay for a round of beer."
00:40:38
It was just to boost
their own ego. -But it should never be
forgotten that Honka was
00:40:46
a violent killer who took away the lives of four
innocent women. -I think he's somebody
who did evil things,
00:40:53
but if we call him evil,
we let him off the hook. We just simply
explain it away as,
00:40:58
"Well, this kind of
subhuman monster that just does these things
because they're evil,"
00:41:02
and that removes
the possibility that they've chosen
to do these things. -It's entirely possible
that Honka would have got away
00:41:10
with it a little longer. No one really had
complained particularly. He'd had bodies in the flat
for almost five years.
00:41:18
He could well have had them
for another two years. It is inevitable, however, that eventually justice
would've caught up with Honka.
00:41:28
-Fritz Honka callously
killed four women between 1970 and 1975. He strangled them before
dismembering their bodies.
00:41:38
By attacking prostitutes, he hoped his crimes
would never be revealed. Had it not been for a fire
in his apartment block,
00:41:46
who knows just how many victims
may have been murdered at the hands of Fritz Honka,
00:41:52
one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪