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A native of Berlin, Hein was the oldest of eight children born to an alcoholic tailor and his mentally retarded wife. Departing from his troubled home as soon as he was legally of age, Hein carried with him years of pent-up rage, a stunted sexuality that later found its outlet through sadistic violence. Hein married Edith Dzillak in Berlin; she bore two children, but Hein's second bid at family life proved no more stable than the first. On March 3, 1967, a domestic argument turned savage and his wife was strangled in their home. Convicted of manslaughter in November, Hein was sentenced to eight years in prison; he served only five, and was freed on parole November 24, 1972. A waiter's job and lodgings, in the Neukoelln district of Berlin, were waiting for him, courtesy of German rehabilitation officers. On April 4, 1973, six-year-old Sonja Kleber disappeared while walking home from school in the Neukoelln district. Strollers in a wooded park discovered her that night, unconscious, naked, hemorrhaging from her vagina. She survived to offer the police a clear description of her rapist, leading officers to the address where she had been attacked. They picked up tenant Juergen Hein for questioning, and he confessed to the assault. Returned to prison on a violation of parole, with ten years added for the rape, he was released again in mid-July of 1985. Berlin was too restrictive for him now, with the authorities alert to his propensity for violent sex. Around October 30, he moved to Baden-Baden, in West Germany, a few miles east of Strasbourg, France. The morning of October 31, he stopped 50-year-old Elvira Kaszuba on the street outside her home, inviting her to dine with him that evening. She accepted, smitten with the young man's charm, and they grew intimate within the next few days. Elvira let him have a key to her apartment, and he came to visit her each night. The evening of November 6, he cooked their supper there, then disemboweled Kaszuba with a hunting knife and stuffed her body in a closet. Five days later, police in Baden-Baden filed a missing person report in the name of Theresia Hoog, age 55. Hoog's son had found her missing from the home they shared that morning, and he got no answer when he called her closest friend, Elvira Kaszuba. Alarmed, the young man noted that his mother's car was also missing. She had gone for rheumatism treatments at a local clinic on the evening of November 10; it now appeared the widow never made it home. Detectives visited the Black Forest Clinic, where a nurse remembered seeing Mrs. Hoog the night before. She had arrived on schedule for her treatment, but was called away beforehand, by a man whom clinic workers readily described. Theresia's missing car was not outside the clinic, and its license number was relayed to street patrolmen, with composite sketches of a suspect sought for questioning. That afternoon, a traffic officer discovered the elusive car, parked out in front of an apartment house. He was retreating toward a call box, to report, when he observed a man resembling the suspect sketch emerging from the house. The suspect, Juergen Hein, was taken into custody without resistance as he slipped a key into the door latch on the driver's side. Aware of Juergen's record, officers began to search the building. In a second-floor apartment, they discovered Mrs. Hoog, stripped naked and spread-eagle on the bed, her wrists and ankles tethered to the bed posts, tape wound tight around her head and face. Her breasts and genitals were bloody, marked with superficial cuts that indicated that she had been tortured with a hunting knife that lay beside her on the bloodstained sheets. Theresia Hoog survived her painful injuries, describing how her captor lured her from the clinic with a story that her friend, Elvira Kaszuba, had been gravely injured in "an accident." At knifepoint, he had lashed her to the bed, assaulted her repeatedly and tortured her with superficial cuts, apparently intending to return and finish her at leisure when he came back from the errand that resulted in his apprehension on the street below. Concerned detectives went to see Kaszuba at her flat, and found her mutilated body in the closet. Seeking information from the building's manager, Ruth Tschantscher, 48, police found she had also fallen victim to the killer. Strangled, stripped, and slashed, her body had lain undiscovered in the bathroom for eleven days. In custody, Hein readily confessed his crimes. Ruth Tschantscher's son, had been a former cellmate in Berlin; he had performed the introductions, once suggesting Hein might look his mother up in Baden-Baden, if he ever needed lodgings, and the rest was history. On June 27, 1986, Hein was convicted of double murder, consigned to prison on two consecutive life sentences. In theory, he would never walk the streets in search of human prey again. |
