Cold Open:
November, 1923.
You’re a working-class German, carrying a bag full of cash to buy a few meals because hyperinflation has made your money worthless, and you stumble across a man selling boneless pickled pork.
Sounds weird, and maybe kind of disgusting, but you’re happy to have finally found some meat you can actually afford.
When you approach the man’s meat stand, you also notice he’s selling leather goods for a low price. You can’t believe your luck! You quickly buy as much meat as you can afford, and a new pair of leather suspenders to go along with it.
Papa Denke, the butcher, thanks you for your business and tells you to enjoy the meat.
And then, a little over a year later, when his story breaks, you start to vomit.
That wasn’t pork you ate.
And that wasn’t leather you bought.
Karl Denke, lovingly nicknamed Papa by the citizens of Muensterberg, was a cannibal serial killer who murdered for over two decades. A butcher who ate pieces of his victims and sold their meat to strangers. A monster who kept victim’s bones and fashioned their skin and hair into random pieces of apparel.
Denke was a quiet man who kept to himself who began killing as early as 1903, and who killed all the way until 1924. The true number of victims is unknown. The estimates range anywhere from at least 30 to somewhere around 40.
And almost no one had a clue what he was up to for over twenty years. Karl was so far off the police’s radar for over two decades that they didn’t even believe the person who finally reported him until they discovered his sickening butcher’s workshop inside his apartment.
How did he get away with what he did for so long?
As we’ll learn today, Germany’s interwar economic troubles helped him out immensely and sent victims literally to his door.
How is he not more well known? Until the 1980s, Karl’s story was almost completely lost in history.
As crazy as his crimes were, others were committing even crazier crimes at the same times and his dark acts didn’t grab that many headlines.
But we’ll learn all about his forgotten deeds today.
Who was the mysterious Karl Denke? Why did he feel the need to not only kill, but eat his victims as well, and maybe sell their meat to unsuspecting customers at the local market? What other German serial killer stole his spotlight?
All this on a historical, true crime, maybe don’t eat any meat while you listen edition, of Timesuck.
PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO
I. Welcome!
Happy Monday Meatsacks!
It’s Cult of the Curious time.
Holy shit do I have a wild fucking tale for you all today.
I’m Dan Cummins, the Master Sucker, Fred Flinstone impersonator, future Darren, Bad Magic Master Magician, and you are listening to Timesuck.
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It’s gonna wild and weird. And so much fun.
And that’s it.
Tried to be extra quick today. E. Segue to Topic:
Now we are off to explore the twisted deeds of Karl Denke, a German cannibal serial killer lost for many years to history.
Such a disturbing ghoul of a man who murdered and ate, in all likelihood, at least thirty people in his little town from 1903 to almost 1925.
He reminds me of a monster from an old, dark children’s fairytale.
Some real life Baba Yaga-like boogey man. I can hear parents using him to scare their children into behaving.
“Eat your dinner, or Denke will eat YOU! He’ll clean your bones and pickle your flesh!”
“Hurry home from school or Denke will cut you up and throw your meat on the stove!!”
“Children who don’t listen to their parents get sent away to Denke’s bloody home…. and they never come back! He’ll wear your skin, rip out your teeth, and turn what’s left of you into a stew!!”
How did the Cannibal of Ziębice [zhome beet-suh] sneak under the radar for so long??
You’re about to find out!
PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE
II. Intro/Establish Premiss:
Summer, 1999.
What were you doing then?
Working? On summer break? Traveling with the Spice Girls working as a roadie for their “Christmas in Spice world” tour? Not even born yet young meatsack!?!
If you were Lucyna (lut-zena) Biały (bi-a-ly), the Polish custodian of the Silesian [ si-lee-zhuhn] Library of Poland’s Wrocław (Vhrots-wahf) University, you were coming across dark details of the life of one seriously fucked up serial killer.
You were thinking, HOW have I never heard of this monster before?
In 1999, Lucyna (lut-zena) found records of a mysterious figure known as “The Cannibal of Ziębice,” [zhome beet-suh] - Karl Denke. She wondered how neither she nor nearly anyone else she spoke to about Karl recalled ever hearing of him.
Imagine finding records of Ted Bundy’s crimes and know one you knew had heard of him.
She dug through the records she found and began researching news articles from the 1920s. She compiled everything she could on him then sent her research to Poland’s two most important and prestigious literary publications - Mad Magazine and Penthouse.
Only Poland’s FINEST minds and very BEST writers are able to get published in Penthouse and Mad Magazine.
Gosh Dang! JK. Sorry - been awhile since I took an unnecessary and undeserved shot at my wife’s family’s homeland.
No.
Editor Tadeusz (tah-day-oosh) Dudź (dooj) published her research in, bear with me….. “Gazeta Wyborcza” [gah zetta vere boacha] and “Gazeta Wrocławska.” [gah zetta oh vah rotska]
Hoping I got those pronunciations right. I listened to some native speakers say those words on forvo.com and literally said, out loud by myself, “Fucking what???”
All of the Polish words I’ve said so far look absolutely nothing like how they’d be said with the same letters in English. Lot of Polish words in today’s suck. I always forget how tricky that language. I played a game with myself during the research where I would take a guess looking at the word regarding how it sounds and say it aloud to myself to see how close I was to the correct pronunciation. Not even remotely in the ballpark a single time.
Thank god for websites like Forvo and for professors posting lectures on Youtube.
Both of the publications I mentioned are daily Polish newspapers.
Then, in July and August 1999, the Household Equipment Museum in Ziębice [zhome beet-suh] - the southwest now-Polish-once-was- German town of about 9,000 souls where Denke lived and hunted and devoured - put together a small exhibit for Denke featuring photographs and some of his tools.
Worse museum name ever. The Household Equipment Museum. No wonder they put in a serial killer exhibit. Before they did, they probably had a whole ten visitors ever stop by. Who the fuck is going to the Household Equipment Museum? How bored do you have to be for that to sound fun?
Anyway - those who attended the exhibit were…shocked. I bet they were. I am jaded as Hell to true crime details after all the topics we’ve covered and I was still shocked.
Before this exhibit, almost no one outside Poland or Germany knew about Karl Denke, and very few IN Poland and Germany had either heard of Denke or at the very least they hadn’t thought about him in decades.
Had he committed the same crimes in say, the US in recent years - Netflix and/or HBO would’ve probably already aired documentaries about him. For sure.
Karl Karl Denke was a monster.
A serial killer and cannibal who murdered for an estimated 21 years, killing what seems to be a minimum of thirty people. Thirty people whose murders he recorded in his journal. Thirty people he likely also ate. People who’s meat it’s very likely he sold to others. Many, many others. https://killer.cloud/serial-killers/show/20/karl-denke
How could someone like that ever get lost in history?
As we’ll learn, when Denke was active, there was a lot of nasty shit going on in the world, including two other serial killers prowling the streets of Germany - Peter Kürten, "The Vampire of Düsseldorf”, who’ll we be sucking later this year, and Fritz Haarmann, the “Werewolf of Hanover,” who we’ll suck a bit on today - a monster who’s sensational trial happened to wrap up just two days before Karl’s death. An even bigger monster in many ways than Denke.
And Peter and Fritz both talked about their evil deeds in great length before being executed, each by guillotine.
Denke, however, killed himself within hours of being arrested and never discussed his crimes.
He didn’t give journalists a lot to run with. No super fucked up quotes to print.
The press had a lot more to report on with both Kürten and Haarmann than they did with Denke.
Also - real quick before we go on - I love the nicknames these guys had.
“The Cannibal of Ziębice,” [zhome beet-suh], "The Vampire of Düsseldorf” - the “Werewolf of Hanover.”
Sound like a bunch of old-timey wrestlers.
Reminds me of previous serial killer suck subject Albert Fish - also active in the 1920s, just in America not in Germany, who was dubbed both the Brooklyn Vampire and the Werewolf of Wisteria.
“Showbiz! That’s how the do it in Hollywood!”
JOHN CENA BUTTON
(speak quickly)
“Ladies and GENTLEMANNNN! Tonight we have an epic death match featuring four old timey creepy murderers!
Wearing trunks made out of his neighbor’s skin, “The Cannibal of Ziębice,” [zhome beet-suh] takes on the hammer wielding bloodthirsty "Vampire of Düsseldorf” and they will both face the “Werewolf of Hanover” who just can’t seem to keep his evil penis in his trunks and the Werewolf of Wisteria will undoubtably try and fill the ring with fresh, piping hot peanut butt butter and whip any fat bottoms bloody he CAAAA- ANNNNNNNNN!”
ANNNNND I’m back.
Also, some of the records that existed on Denke just ended up getting lost.
Back before damn near everything was uploaded to the internet and archived, if someone threw away the wrong set of files - or if files were damaged in a flood or a fire, they were sometimes just gone for good.
If they got thrown in a box and mislabeled, they could end up getting tossed out in the trash.
The original records that were found were in German or Polish, and not everything was translated.
Luckily, enough details survived for us to tell a darkly fascinating story today.
Enough dark details for you to maybe not want to eat pork chops while you listen to this one.
Gonna start off by going over what life was like in Germany when Denke was killing. In short - NOT good. An economic collapse certainly contributed to his long killing spree.
When you’re continually worried about losing everything you have and starving, you tend to be less interested in what your neighbors are up to.
Or so it seems in today’s story.
After going over part of Germany’s Interwar Period - we’ll then jump into a timeline of Karl’s life and crimes. The details up front will be a little scarce, but, after he’s arrested, we’ll thoroughly go over the investigation of his bloody apartment if you’re up for it.
More details there then some of you may want to hear or be able to stomach. Very reminiscent of what investigators found in former Suck Subject Ed Gein’s home when he was arrested.
Then, after the timeline we’ll examine some of the crimes of Fritz Haarmann - the Vampire of Hanover - since it was his sensational details coming from his trial that overshadowed Denke’s butchery.
Holy shit was that dude a savage.
They were both savages. And they were living in savage times.
Let’s head to Interwar Germany.
III. Non-Timeline Content:
“Just as certain plants thrive only under particular circumstances of soil and climate, so certain crimes spring up and flourish only under certain special mixtures of conditions.” - a quote from a story about Denke written in New York City’s The Daily News, on Sunday, June 17th, 1945
What special mixture of conditions allowed Denke to flourish?
The story of Karl Denke involves, to some degree - how much exactly we’ll never know - principles of scarcity and demand.
At the time Denke killed, there was a high demand for meat, and meat was scarce.
Any meat that people could find and could afford to eat, they were willing to pay as much as they could afford to get some sweet meat to feed themselves and their families.
After World War I, in Germany, many, many people were “hungry and disorganized,” according to that same Daily News article.
They couldn’t afford many basic necessities like food and clothing.
Any kind of food was hard to get ahold of - and meat was the hardest. It was a luxury.
Dire economic conditions led to families unraveling - to widespread homeless - to young boys and men drifting around Germany, away from their family and alone, often not telling anyone where they were heading in the days before cell phones.
Men like these made perfect targets for Karl Denke.
Almost no one would ever knew that his victims had ever met him. Mae it real hard for him to become a suspect. And since he disposed of the bodies - butchered them and hid the remains he didn’t eat or sell - no one even knew for sure his victims had died in many cases.
Many didn’t know that his victims had ever even travelled to the Polish town of Ziębice [zhome beet-suh], known in those days as the German town of Münsterberg [munster berg].
The desperate-for-men work that comprised the majority of Denke’s victims just disappeared, and their disappearances weren’t even investigated. No one knew where to look. And also - back then - in Germany’s Interwar Period, people disappeared all the time. They made it to a new country, they died of various ailments, the just stopped writing letters home, didn’t know where to send the letters because they’re relatives were also moving around looking for work, etc. https://www.newspapers.com/image/443899354/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
Why were times so tough in Germany?
For starters - a lot of Germans died or were injured in the war.
Over 1.9 million German soldiers had died fighting. Over 4.2 million additional soldiers had been wounded. Over 1.1 million had been taken by other nations as prisoners of war.
Germany had over 7.3 million casualties - well over 50% percent of the 13,000,000 soldiers Germany mobilized for the war. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/war_losses_germany
Also, roughly half-a-million German civilians died in WW1. An untold number of others were wounded. http://www.centre-robert-schuman.org/userfiles/files/ REPERES%20%E2%80%93%20module%201-1-1%20- %20explanatory%20notes%20%E2%80%93%20World%20War%20I %20casualties%20%E2%80%93%20EN.pdf
After World War I ended, Germany, like any nation following that much death and destruction - needed to heal. Germany had spend tens of billions of dollars on its military during the war and suffered tens of billions of dollars in property damage during the war. Germany had a lot of wounded, disabled, out-of-work veterans to take care of. https://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/The-First- World-War-in-Numbers.pdf
But it wouldn’t be able to because Germany - thanks to being the war’s primary aggressor that LOST the war - it was left with the bill.
A really big fucking bill.
They were given a bill most economists of the day said would be literally impossible for them to pay back. They now owed tens of billions in reparations, the majority of which was to go to France and Great Britain.
Germany owed 132 billion gold marks, over 400 billion dollars in today’s money.
And they would actually pay that bill off - in 2010. Took them almost an entire CENTURY. But they did it. I find that very impressive.
The Treaty of Versailles that ended the war - signed by the combatants on June 28th, 1919 - was what gave them that bill.
It was written entirely by the winning team of the Allies - and it demanded “compensation by Germany for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies and their property by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea and from the air.”
A lot of valuable German land - around 10% of the empire - was also given to other nations following the war - further weakening Germany.
Germany - known primarily prior to the war as the German Empire, Imperial Germany, and the Second Reich - additionally lost all of its vast overseas colonial and HIGHLY profitably holdings in China, the Pacific, and Africa.
It was given a bill and then had its ability to pay it anytime soon destroyed. It was like demanding that a frozen yogurt place you’d invested in to pay back a huge loan and then after making that demand, destroying its yogurt machines and freezers.
Germany’s territories were taken over by Britain, France, Japan, and other Allied nations.
The Allied Powers punished Germany severely with the Treaty of Versailles. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/09/14/140419140/the- economic-catastrophe-that-germany-cant-forget https://www.britannica.com/event/Treaty-of-Versailles-1919 https://www.history.com/news/germany-world-war-i-debt-treaty- versailles https://www.history.com/news/treaty-of-versailles-provisions https://www.history.com/news/treaty-of-versailles-provisions
And then, making things even worse, following the war, no countries were willing to loan money to Germany to pay back the reparations with. Those other nations were either also broke or nations that Germany had just recently attacked.
So Germany’s Central Bank threw a Hail Mary. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and their desperate measure was to start printing more money to pay their debts off
They began printing lots of money - and loaning it to the German government.
And this Monopoly money move was a HUGE mistake.
It turns out you can’t just suddenly print billions and billions of additional dollars or marks or whatever, and not suffer any economic consequences.
Hyperinflation set in.
Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic, as Germany was known from 1918 to 1933, completely ruined the already almost completely destroyed economy.
So why does printing money cause inflation?
Economists don’t totally agree on this actually. And printing most money doesn’t ALWAYS lead to inflation.
But if often does.
The most basic reasoning for it causing inflation is - too much money chasing too few goods.
Flushed out a bit more - in order to have an economy, there has to be SOME kind of relationship between an economy’s money value and the cost of goods in that same economy. Otherwise, you don’t have an economy, you have anarchy.
Think about it this way - if sandwiches are five dollars each in economy with a billion total dollars floating around in it, and then that same country prints another four billion dollars, the relationship between the sandwich and the dollar has changed, right?
Taking other complicating economic factors, it makes sense that the sandwich would now be worth five times as much, because you have five times as much money to spend on everything, including sandwiches.
When there was ONE billion total dollars, there were five dollar sandwiches. When there is FIVE billion total dollars, there are now twenty-five dollar sandwiches in order for the relationship between currency and goods to remain constant.
Make sense? There are many other factors and exceptions, etc - this is some masters level economics lesson - but that’s the simple explanation from a guy with a pretty simple understanding of economics.
In my above example - the overall relationship between sandwich and total money hasn’t changed. In both examples, if you spent ALL of an economy’s money on sandwiches, you could buy 200 million sandwiches because a billion divided by five is 200 million AND five billion divided by twenty-five is ALSO 200 million.
BUT - and this helps explain what happened in Germany - what if an economy printed a fuck-ton of extra money but NONE of that money went to its people?
What if was given to foreign nations?
What if all of the sudden, you’re still making the same amount of money you were making before the extra money was printed - you still have the same amount of money in the bank you had before extra money was printed - but now - everything you need to buy is five times as expensive?
THAT showcases the danger of inflation - of hyper inflation.
If you don’t make enough money to keep up with the rapidly rising cost of goods due to the printing of far too much money - you are FUCKED.
And this happened BIG time in the Weimar Republic. And a lot of people were massively FUCKED. https://medium.com/alpha-beta-blog/where-is-all-the- inflation-264ffed52450
Check this out to see how the value of the German mark fell through printing way too much money way too quickly, as illustrated by comparing its value to the US dollar over a four year time period.
In 1919, one dollar was worth 4.2 marks.
Two years later, in 1921, a dollar was worth 75 marks.
In 1922, one dollar was worth 400 marks.
By January 1923, a dollar was worth 7,000 marks.
A few months later in July, 160,000 marks.
The next month, 1,000,000 marks!
By the end of 1923, one dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks. Insane.
How did hyper inflation get THAT bad? Unless you have already studied economics extensively, you’ll have to study economics for a lot longer than this entire episode will last to understand it.
Best of luck.
No need to do that here since it’s not the focus of the episode.
The only important thing to know is that it happened. And that it led to really, REALLY rough times for the Weimar Republic. https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/ primary-sources/weimar-economics https://www.history.com/news/germany-world-war-i-debt-treaty- versailles
Hyper-inflation got so bad, people had to carry loads of cash just to buy basic necessities. Photos from the time show people carrying wheelbarrows of money around just to buy a loaf of bread.
At one point, it cost a million marks to send a letter. A MILLION.
For a time, money became so worthless, Germans used it as wallpaper in their homes. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/09/14/140419140/the- economic-catastrophe-that-germany-cant-forget
The overall German population went from being relatively prosperous before World War One to a nation full of homeless people, widows, and injured veterans unable to work and provide for their families.
People lined up all the way down the block waiting to buy whatever meat anyone was selling - no matter how tasty or not-tasty it was. No matter what KIND of meat it was.
The homeless men and women’s shelters were full every single night.
There are pictures of children posed next to stacks of money they used to build forts and towers.
German babies grew up playing with money, because their parents couldn’t buy them any toys.
What an insane and terrifying situation.
To fix it, Germany had to issue a new form of currency and phase out the old, worthless one.
Now - If you owned a lot of land and/or goods in this situation, you were actually okay.
Your money kept dropping in value, but you could also charge more and more for goods and/or rent.
Some workers also did okay - they just kept renegotiating their wages - on a daily basis at the height of hyperinflation. Some businessmen and landowners were now able to pay back their loans easily thanks to hyperinflation. Farmers also managed fairly well because they could raise their prices to match demand. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z8vt9qt/revision/4
Some other people weathered the storm by turning to a barter economy. They traded for goods and services. Some benefited and got land and other valuable assets for food.
But a lot of people just got fucked.
If you didn’t own much and were unemployed when this hit - even if you had a lot of cash in the bank - this hyperinflation absolutely financially destroyed you.
Can you imagine if that happened now? Imagine how disheartening it would be to find the money you work so hard for suddenly lose all it’s value?
It’s, at least for me, hard to fathom.
People who had carefully put money aside in banks for years suddenly had nothing.
Veterans had pensions from the war that were suddenly worthless.
German artist George Grosz [grosh] - popular in the 1920s, was quoted as saying, “Shopping had to be done immediately. Even an additional minute meant an increase in price. One had to buy quickly because a rabbit, for example, might cost two million marks more by the time it took to walk into a store. A few million marks meant nothing really. It was just that it meant more lugging. The packages of money needed to buy the smallest item had long since become too heavy for trouser pockets. They weighed many pounds… people had to start carting their money around in wagons and knapsacks.” One woman claimed, “To understand the conditions in Germany, one only has to look and listen in a fourth-class car; tired, worn, angry faces. And what rags, what talk! How one has to slave to earn nothing at all. All those millions buy nothing. Bread is 600 billion.” https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/ primary-sources/weimar-economics
What an insane experience to live through.
The anxiety. The fear. The constant state of panic. Never knowing if you’ll have enough money to buy bread the next day. Never knowing how much worse it could get. Chaos.
And during this inflation crisis - Denke was at the height of his butchery - leading some to think that his his cannibalism was probably influenced and maybe even primarily motivated by this economic crisis.
I’m not so sure.
Partially motivated - maybe.
But, I wonder if economic conditions just gave him a kind-of- maybe-but-not-really-good excuse to do something he wanted to do for other, more disturbing reasons.
Now with the backdrop for his murders established, let’s meet this monster in today’s Timesuck Timeline…
A.MIDROLL BREAK:
PAUSE
… right after today’s sponsor break.
PAUSE
Thank you for listening! NOW - let’s head back to 1870 and learn what we can about the crazy life of Karl Denke.
PAUSE
PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE INTRO
IV. Timesuck Timeline
1. August 12, 1870:
August 12th, 1870.
Karl Denke was born in a small village in Germany called Oberkunzendorf (oba-kunsendorf), part of lower Silesia [ si-lee- zhuh], just three miles from the town of Münsterberg, now known as Ziębice [zhome beet-suh].
So many dual names in this area because it bounced back and forth between falling under the jurisdiction of Poland and Germany for centuries.
Now, it’s part of Poland. And in 1870, it was also part of Poland.
But from 1871 to 1945, the entirety of Denke’s life minus the first few months, it would fall under German control. First the German Empire, then after WW1, the Weimar [ vahy-mahr] Republic. https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Silesia
Also - if you’re familiar with this dirtbag, or you look into him, you’ll see that some sources, like Wikipedia, list him as being born in 1860. Others list 1866. And some go with 1870.
From what can tell, the most reliable seeming sources - some of the original German sources and various American newspaper entries from the early 20th century, list his birthdate as 1870, so we’ll stick with that today.
There isn’t much information about Karl’s early life.
Very, very little actually.
He was the son of a wealthy farmer, who was described as “pedantic.” And pedantic can mean anything from really particular - sometimes a positive connotation, to really fussy - obviously negative.
Generally, I think it’s negative. Everything had to be just so with pedantic Denke. Exactly how he wanted it or he threw a fit kind of deal.
And we’ll find out later, he was VERY particular. Highly organized in a very macabre way. Definitely had his own specific way of doing things.
Karl seems to have had just two siblings - both older brothers, but their names and the names of their parents are not known. We can’t find them anyway. A lot of records about him and his family seem to have been lost. Or at least they haven’t been translated and published anywhere. They might exist in that little Polish museum that has or at least HAD a display on him.
What we do know is that he had a poor relationship with them. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
His family owned a successful farm in their village and are described in sources anywhere from middle class to somewhat wealthy.
Remember - when times got really economically bad in Germany between WW1 and WW2, landowners and farmers did a lot better than most.
Some sources say his parents ran a nursery. Others say they owned a restaurant. It’s possible they owned multiple businesses but most sources just cite a family farm, so I’ll go with that. https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/
His parents don’t seem to have been abusive - at least there are no reports of abuse. It seems likely that Karl didn’t experience any extremely traumatic childhood events.
According to a 1938 Knoxville Journal article, “He came from a reputable family untainted by insanity.” https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
As a child, in addition to being “pedantic” - Karl was described as “dull.”
He didn’t begin speaking until age six or seven, and had difficulty learning in school. If he learned any material at all, it was at a very slow rate. He was far behind his peers academically. His teachers called him an idiot, and said he would never accomplish anything, so that’s pretty cool.
Ah the good ol’ days when teachers would just tell kids they were idiots!
Kidding… kind of.
Not gonna advocate we totally return to that system, buuuuuuut some kids could probably benefit from being called out for acting like fucking idiots.
Karl often received punishments for refusing to do his work. His teachers noted, “he’s very obstinate and lacks respect for teachers.” When he did start speaking, his voice was soft and quiet, and he would only say a few words at a time. For the rest of his life, he would never be much of a talker. When he would speak, the words were slowed, slurred, and he stretched out the syllables.
I wonder - based on some of these details and what we’ll learn about him later, if he was on the autism spectrum.
And I’m not the only one to think this.
A few historians have theorized he might have had Autism Spectrum Disorder. He was super weird socially, very odd in many ways, but in some ways pretty smart to pull off what he pulled off for so long. Very unemotional and methodical about it. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/ https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/ https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/ https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Karl also moved very slowly, and as little as possible. If someone tried to shake his hand, he’d barely lift his arms to meet them.
According to one source, he was an odd child.
But not a violent child as far as we can tell.
Numerous sources - basically all the sources - consistently paint him as a weird loner.
For pretty much his entire life, he was withdrawn and isolated from others.
Not sure exactly why he was a loner as a child, but I do get why he was isolated for the last couple of decades of his adult life. Hard to have a lot of friends when you’re killing people all the time and your home is full of their blood and body parts.
I want to talk more about that insanity now but I’ll save it for when we dig into what investigators would find in his apartment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ https://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-True-Story-Karl-Denke- ebook/dp/B071W94WNL/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
After he began speaking around the age of seven, Karl did start to improve in school - makes sense, a little easier to get your lessons done if you can speak.
His social skills did not improve so much.
He never seemed to make any friends, didn’t seem to pal around with the other kids in school.
He really didn’t like school.
Sometimes, his two older brothers literally carried him to class because he refused to go.
Karl was also a chronic bed-wetter.
Poor young Karl had a lot of shit going on.
Fear of being teased for that may have helped lead him to his life as a loner.
After he was done with elementary school, he was done with school entirely and his formal education was over.
Never having made any friends, his social life was now reduced only to his family, and from what we can determine, they didn’t seem to really care for him.
He didn’t go to local dances, or any popular social outings - extreme loner.
He apparently liked walking through the woods alone.
Wonder what he was thinking about on his walks? Killing people? Eating people? We’ll never know.
Guessing he was thinking about girls, and not in a loving way. In a couple old articles, it was said that Karl was known for frequently making misogynistic comments. He strongly disliked women, but never seemed to give a reason as to why.
Maybe too many girls in school had been mean to him. Maybe Mama was mean to him - we don’t know much about his parents.
For whatever reason, he never seemed to express any romantic interest in girls growing up. Or ever.
There are no credible rumors that he was gay and romantically interested in boys either. Or interested in them platonically.
He wasn’t interested in anyone. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
Another one of the other few details we know about Karl’s childhood is that he ran away a lot. So he didn’t like others - and didn’t like his family.
Dude was troubled.
Most of the time, the police brought him back. But not every time. https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/
Once he ran away - no age was assigned to this but he had to have been younger than twelve based on upcoming timeline details - and he was gone for nine months.
When he returned he told his family he worked in a quarry, then construction.
And then apparently he never told his family why he left or why he came back, just continued on as if nothing happened.
What the Hell was going on his family?
I wonder if his parents were glad he was gone when he ran away?
“Mother, Father, Karl’s run away!”
“YESSS!!! Whooooo! Finally - our prayers have been answered at long last. Our quiet, creepy, loner son is gone! We can only hope now that wolves eat him or that he gets lost in the forest and never returns.”
Then I picture his parents and two older brothers embracing in a big group hug and crying tears of joy. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/ 2. 1882: In 1882, at age 12, Karl ran away from home again to work as a gardener’s apprentice. Kind of a funny title. I picture a gardener’s apprentice doing nothing but pulling weeds. The gardener does everything else. The apprentice does literally nothing but remove and get rid of weeds.
Sounds like a job Karl could have handled.
After running away this time, he’d never move back in with his parents.
And his family didn’t seem to be to upset about this.
Maybe they really, TRULY didn’t want him.
Maybe this man who would become a brutal and disturbing serial killer was also a really fucked up kid. We just don’t have those details because the interviews that would have given us those details either got lost or never took place to begin with.
And if he was a monster, and if his family was happy to see him leave at twelve… I don’t think that necessarily means he has bad parents.
I mean - I would be devastated if my kids ran away, but, I think I have pretty good kids.
But what if I really did have a bad seed? Like - a REALLY bad seed.
What if you had a monster at home?
You’re other kids are great, but this one - just consistently an asshole.
You’ve raised them for twelve years and literally NEVER enjoyed their company. Their siblings don’t like them. Their teachers and classmates don’t like them. No one likes them.
And what if, in addition to just being really unlikable - they’re violent as well?
What if they assault their siblings? Break your stuff. Hurt or kill the pets. Start fires.
How many bad and/or dangerous things would a consistently shitty and unlikable kid have to do before you were finally like, “Dear God - PLEASE run away you little fucking monster. PLEASE. I PROMISE we will never come looking for you.”
I bet some people are still gonna think a parent who does something like that is a monster.
Not me.
In VERY rare cases… I get it.
I’ve studied too much about nature versus nurture to believe that the right amount of nurture can ALWAYS overcome an absolutely terrible nature.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the overwhelming majority of parents who abandon their child are monsters.
But every once in awhile, I also think someone is just dealt a Denke.
And then - what the fuck are you supposed to do?
Some of us are born blind. Some of us are born deaf. Some of us are born without lower torsos. Or the ability to walk, or with brain damage, or with a chronic illness that drastically reduces our life expectancy.
And some of us are born bad. Really, really bad. Born without the cognitive ability to empathize. To NOT be drawn towards hurt and mayhem.
Maybe Denke was one of these people?
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Denke would work for this unnamed gardener for about a decade, and seemingly fit in fine enough with all the other apprentices in the area.
He didn’t do anything too weird or stick out from the others.
Didn’t necessarily make any friends, but it doesn’t seem anyone came forward after he died to say something like, “Oh yah. I remember Karl. He was SUPER fucked up. Lot of people he hung around went missing. Always seemed to have blood stains on his clothes.”
Nothing like that. He was just quiet. Just kept to himself.
https://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-True-Story-Karl-Denke- ebook/dp/B071W94WNL/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
When he rented rooms in his teenage and young adult years in the area, he often never spoke to other tenants.
He also preferred to stay in the back of houses, or the basements.
Based on what we learn about later, I’m guessing he didn’t want to live on an upper floor because he didn’t want people to hear bodies hitting the floor and him stomping around all night doing some butchering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
3. 1895: In 1895, when Karl was 25, his father died. Annnnnnd he didn’t seem to care. Apparently, he wouldn’t be outwardly shaken up by the death of either parent.
It’s said he felt indifferent towards their deaths. And that he showed no emotion at their funerals.
When his father died, his two older brothers took over the family farm while Karl inherited some money to buy some land.
Good thing he inherited that money long before hyperinflation hit.
Also nice that his parents, who he clearly didn’t have a great relationship with, still left him in their will.
Initially after his father’s death, his brothers gave him a job working for them.
And this didn’t work out well.
They’d later report he was lazy, didn’t do a good job, and wouldn’t show up for days at a time. They’d find him wandering alone through the woods instead of working.
Autism or asshole or both - he sounds like a real pain in the ass.
I find it interesting that while you can’t find a lot of details about his younger years, all the details you CAN find are negative.
Literally can’t find a single example of someone from his early years thinking Karl was a really good kid or guy. Or fun to be around. Or a hard worker. Nothing like that.
He did apparently manage to work as a gardener’s apprentice from the age of twelve to around the age of twenty-two, and not get fired.
That’s the only decent thing he’s seemed to pull off up until 1895.
To not lose his gardener’s apprenticeship.
When his folks died, Karl used his inheritance to buy some land for himself.
Now he’s done at least one smart thing.
Maybe.
Karl Denke then became - and I love how this written in the source “an unsuccessful farmer” - and eventually he sells his land and purchases a house in the town of Münsterberg - which is again, now the Polish town of Ziębice [zhome beet-suh].
NOW maybe he’s done at least one smart thing.
The house he bought still stands on Stawowa Street.
When Karl lived there, it had three units. And he rented out two of them to tenants.
Noice!
That inheritance allowed him to set things up for himself so he wouldn’t have to work on farm, or, really… anywhere. He could now make some of that landlord money and not have to rely on what seems to be a nearly nonexistent work ethic to pay the bills.
Karl’s own personal room was 13x13, and then there was a shed in the yard he used for some of his living quarters.
Living that shed life! I get it. I spent two years of high school living in basically what was a carpeted shed with some windows.
Karl also built a pond next to the shed. A nice little calm body of water he could sit next to a stare at - reflect on his most recent murder or something.
Maybe enjoy some tasty, pickled man-meat as he started into the cool water.
That wasn’t a random reference. As you’ll learn, dude love to pickle people.
Maybe he stared at the pond water and reflected on how he could have bought three houses for the money he paid for this one house.
Remember when I said that buying this house was the smart thing he did?
Not exactly.
Yes - he paid three times what he should’ve when he bought the house. He got scammed.
His two brothers were worried enough about him getting scammed again, and him losing what he still had from his inheritance, that they pushed for legal guardianship of Karl.
Not sure if this decision really came from concern for Karl, or from worry that if he lost everything, he’d try and move in with one of them and create problems.
His brothers only didn’t get guardianship because a doctor they spoke with regarding Karl’s ability to take care of himself - Karl’s doctor - told them that Karl could easily become violent if he was no longer in control of his life.
No idea how the doctor came to this conclusion. At this point, as far as we know from all of the source documents we could find, Karl had never been aggressive towards anyone in his life. Never had any outbursts.
The doctor would be right about Karl. He soon began to exhibit real, real violent tendencies that once discovered, would shock the people of Münsterberg. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
At the time, about 9,000 people lived there. Same as today.
It was said to be a close-knit town as well, where everybody knew each other’s business, or at least they thought they did. But no one knew what Karl did there for over twenty-years https://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-True-Story-Karl-Denke- ebook/dp/B071W94WNL/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
When he first moved to Münsterberg, he sold wicker baskets and other crafty products.
So random.
His next business venture was even more random.
Using the land around his home as a garden, he tried his hand at rhubarb farming. And he did really, really well.
Before he later began working as a butcher, Karl became known as “The Rhubarb King of Münsterberg,”
And I wonder what exactly our source for that particular info, an article in the April 3rd, 1938 edition of the Knoxville Journal, meant by “The Rhubarb King?”
Like - did one resident of Münsterberg they interviewed say that and only they and two other people knew Denke as The Rhubarb King? https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
Did he give himself that nickname? Did he introduce himself as “The Rhubarb King?” Or did he truly have a gift when it came to growing rhubarb and he really did grow a city-wide rhubarb reputation?
(exasperated) “So what do think? Do you like it or not?”
(ambivalent) “I do like it, it’s - it’s fine strawberry rhubarb jam, Johan… but….”
(exasperated) “But what??”
“Well, it’s just that…. I just had some of Karl Denke’s strawberry rhubarb jam yesterday, and while this is good, no one beats the Rhubarb King. I mean, the rhubarb he uses - it’s so perfectly ripe. It’s so sweet - I think I’d eat it without the strawberries. And don’t get me started on this pear rhubarb almond crisp thing he whipped up the other day and served hot with a cold scoop of vanilla bean ice cream on top. And the week before he made the craziest apricot rhubarb walnut bread, it was like….”
“I get it! He’s the Rhubarb King!”
Sorry. That was probably just funny to me. I’ve just never heard of anyone referred to as The Rhubarb King before because, no one in the States - no one that I know of, anyway - really seems to give much of a shit about rhubarb.
I also got lost in rhubarb for a moment because it reminded me of great-grandma Stell who really did make an awesome strawberry-rhubarb jam that no one seemed to care about as much as me.
Karl probably would’ve killed me. The Rhubarb King would have lured me to my death with that tart, semi-sweet fruit pink celery looking edible stalk vegetable thing that’s served as a fruit. He would’ve offered me some tasty jam and a few years later, he’d be grilling my ass cheeks on his stove.
Making rhubarb might have been the one really good choice Karl made - or, maybe it was to become a butcher.
The Rhubarb King clearly didn’t make THAT much money growing rhubarb because he soon left the vegetable game for the meat game.
Becoming a butcher - that would serve Karl well in a variety of ways.
After the economic crisis began, butchers were some of the few people that still had jobs - no matter what the hyperinflation was - people still needed food. And meat was the scarcest food.
And if you had a good supply of it, you were gonna be okay.
And once he got to butchering, Karl did seem to always have a fresh supply of meat. It just wasn’t always - it seems - the pork he was advertising.
In addition to his butchery, Karl’s brothers sent him a small amount of money each month.
Despite their poor relationship, they believed he was “feeble minded” and wanted to help him out.
And maybe he WAS feeble minded.
Again - I think of serial killer Ed Gein.
If you’re not familiar with that old Suck Subject or just forgot - Ed “the Butcher of Plainfield” Gein was a ghoul and a grave robber who killed two women and dug up at least nine other women’s bodies from nearby cemeteries to make all sorts of shit out of their skin. Nipple belts, face masks - and not Covid Masks - like a someone-else’s-face-as-your-face kind of halloween mask - a shoebox full of vulvas.
Ed Gein made himself a suit out of women’s skin - he told investigators he made the suit so that "he could become his mother—to literally crawl into her skin.”
He would literally go out on his family’s giant farm once he was the only one living there after his folks’s died, and dance under the moonlight wearing a skin suit he’d made from the bodies of middle-aged women after his mother died.
Ed Gein is the inspiration for Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s film, Psycho, Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Buffalo Bill from the Silence of the Lambs -
Remember that psycho dancing in the mirror? “Would you fuck me? I'd fuck me. I'd fuck me hard. I'd fuck me so hard.”
And Ed Gein - although he wasn’t quite thought to be “feeble-minded” exactly - as they would have said back then, he also just wasn’t a real bright guy.
He also was socially awkward as fuck and didn’t have any friends. Another weird loner.
Such a weird dude. He actually didn’t seem to want to hurt anyone - he just REALLY, REALLY wanted a skin suit to try and look like mama as carazy as that sounds.
And it sounds crazy because Ed was insane.
After being caught, he spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital.
And Karl - he MIGHT have been like Ed in some ways.
He also might have been much more calculating and sadistic, but he MIGHT have just really wanted people’s meat. And to get it, well, they had to die.
Still makes him a monster, just a different kind of monster than say, The Kansas City Butcher Bob Berdella who really wanted to rape and torture them and hurt them as much as possible before they died.
Now that we’re talking about serial killers, let’s move on to this serial killer’s first victim.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
4. February 21, 1903: It’s likely that February 21st, 1903 was when Karl Denke killed for the first time . He was thirty-three.
And his possible first victim was Ida Launer - and we know almost nothing about her. Just - based on a ledger entry we’ll go over later - that he very likely did kill her, and did so on this date.
We don’t even know how he killed her.
Based on what we’ll learn later about other crimes, I’m guessing he either swung an axe at her head when she wasn’t looking, or strangled her.
OR - maybe he got real, REAL aggressive with a stalk of rhubarb??
Since we have no idea what this creep was doing for the next six years - gonna skip ahead six years now to his next known murder in 1909.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
5. December 21, 1909: On December 21st, 1909, now thirty-nine- year-old Karl murders a twenty-five year old woman named Emma Sander. And then, a very unlucky local man named Eduard Trautmann is arrested for her murder. Her body isn’t found but she’s disappeared and assumed dead.
And Eduard and Emma had went out on a date recently, and he was the last man known to have seen her.
And in 1911, this poor bastard was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in Glatz Prison for Denke’s murder.
No one thought to blame Karl Denke at the time. He wasn’t even a person of interest.
No one would know that Karl was the real killer until right before Christmas in 1924 - fifteen years after her murder and over thirteen years after Trautmann would go to prison.
After Karl’s death, after he’d spent damn near his full fifteen-year- sentence in prison for a murder he had nothing to do with, Trautmann was pardoned and released.
I’m sure he wasn’t mad or bitter at all about the whole mixup.
(Police officer) “Hey Eduard - got some great news! You don’t have to wait until next week to get out of prison. No sir! You get to go home now, NICE AND EARLY!…. Why? Why you say? (mumbles) because we now know you didn’t do it and caught the real guy… (not mumbling) what? Speak up you say? Ummmm… we caught the real guy. So sorry about the almost 15 years in prison. More good news though- for the whole mixup, since it was our bad, we’re giving you FIFTY BILLION Marks! You can grab your bags of money at the front desk. We even have a wheelbarrow for you to haul it home with.”
And then I picture Eduard leaving the prison actually pretty excited, thinking he’s now wealthy. That he’s going to buy the whole town with that kind of money, until he realizes that thanks to early 1920’s hyperinflation, all that money will get him is a loaf of bread and some of Denke’s pickled people meat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/
6. 1918: Back to 1918 now.
This year, the building German economic crisis forces Karl to sell the house he’d paid way too much fucking money for.
He continues to live there, now renting the a small apartment on the first floor from the people he sold it to, and he gets to still use his shed in the backyard.
He apparently made a terrible sale just like he’d made a terrible purchase, and soon, he’d lost his entire inheritance and can barely pay rent.
Despite his economic fall, the Weimar Republic as it’s now called following WW1 is such a shit show - he’s still considered lower middle class.
At least he has a job - he’s working as a butcher - and at least he has a place to stay.
That’s how bad things were.
If you had enough money to rent a studio apartment with an accompanying shed in a small town - you still weren’t thought of as poor.
You were middle class.
I picture some middle class kid being teased at school.
“Must be nice, Joachim! Must be nice to be able to play in a BIG FANCY SHED! I wish my parents were that RICH! We live in a chicken coop. And we’re better off than the rest of our family. Most of my cousins live in dog houses!”
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Karl's home was now owned by the Voigt and Gabriel families who would later provide a few details about his life to investigators after he was arrested.
https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/
7. 1918-1924: From 1918 to 1924, the final six years of Karl’s life, he worked at a homeless shelter.
Seems nice at first, but, I think he was scouting out future victims there. Figuring out who could go missing and have no one look for them.
His tenants and locals around the town started calling him Papa Denke because they liked him so much.
Also during the period from 1918 to 1924 his killing frequency seemed to ramp up considerably.
And authorities still had no idea he was serial killer- not until shortly after he died following his arrest at the end of the 1924.
Although he was well-liked, he WAS treated with suspicion by some. Not because of his lonely life, but because of his sexual indifference. He was described as, “neither man nor woman,” and was judged by many for never taking a wife.
He was known for being polite, humble, donating to charity, and letting the homeless stay for free at his apartment - in order to kill them but no one knew that at the time - and he wasn’t well liked because he had no wife.
Funny what can set off people’s radar.
(investigator) “Did the fact that you heard screams coming from his apartment both you?”
(neighbor) “No not really.”
(investigator) “Did the blood you saw on his clothes on numerous occasions bother you?”
(neighbor) “Nah. Not at all.”
(investigator) “Did the fact that you saw numerous men enter his apartment and never leaver bother you?”
(neighbor) “No. Never thought anything of it.”
(investigator) “So what bothered you?”
(neighbor) “He was SINGLE!
He never asked ANYONE out!
Look - we all get blood on us from time to time, we all have people disappear in our homes, we all have the occasional death cry blast out of our humble abode - but what kind of SICK MONSTER STAYS SINGLE?” https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-True-Story-Karl-Denke- ebook/dp/B071W94WNL/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
Also around 1918, when Karl would have been 48, he cut off almost all contact with his brothers.
I love what led to this.
Apparently, during all his time in Münsterberg - he’d been living in town since 1895 - for 23 years - is brothers lived just outside of town on the family farm, and he hadn’t accepted a single dinner invite to either one of their homes.
Then he finally does, and it doesn’t go well. His brother gets furious with him for eating two pounds of meat in one sitting - and calls him a glutton.
And after this INFAMOUS MEAT SQUABBLE, Karl never comes back to his house … EVER!
(Curious neighbor) “Why don’t you talk to your brother, Karl anymore?”
(Angry Brother) “TOO MUCH MEAT! He ate TOO MUCH DAMN MEAT! I mean, seriously, what kind of grown man eats two pounds of meat as a dinner guest?
First my wife gave him a 1/2 pound of meat - carefully weighed out in the kitchen on the meat scale we use for guests. We don’t want to seem stingy - don’t want to seem cold - so we make damn sure EVERY guest gets a 1/2 pound of meat. EVERY GUEST!
And that’s a generous amount!
The Schoenheits - ask anyone - they only give their guests a 1/4 pound of meat. The Rickenbachers? A half-slice of baloney. OLD grey baloney!
But - our farm is doing well, we know times are tough for many, so we go with the 1/2 pound of meat.
AND - if someone asks for second, we will give them a SECOND half pound of meat. We don’t love it, but we don’t make a fuss.
That is four times as much as the Schoenheits - and they are not stingy!
No one gives a guest as much meat as the Denkes!
But Karl - he has ALWAYS been such a PROBLEM - he asks for thirds, and then for fourths!
And THEN - he doesn’t say thank you for SO MUCH meat! Many families pray to have that much meat whole month - and he gets in one meal.
We shake our heads. We call him glutton. Already ve don’t care for him so much - he was always odd - and that was the last straw. The last STEAK IF YOU WILL!”
While his family may not have cared for him, now in the last years of his life, when he was killing the most people, Karl’s social life seems to have finally bloomed.
The last couple of years, in his early fifties, Karl was apparently well-liked and popular in Münsterberg.
He was an organ player at his local church and carried crosses at funerals.
He had city permission to sell meat and clothes door to door which is horrifying because he was almost certainly selling people meat. Almost certainly sold it for years.
He had permission to sell meat at a local market, now called the Wrocław [rot swah] Weekly Market.
He sold leather suspenders, belts, and shoe laces as well… that I think very likely were made out of human skin.
You’ll see why soon.
And, while he was no longer “The Rhubarb King” - he did gain a reputation in last years for selling some really tasty boneless pickled pork that was VERY likely pickled people.
But was it REALLY pork? Or was it pickled people? https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
In addition to selling his probably-people-meat locally, Karl often traveled to Breslau [ brez-lohw] a slightly larger town 62 kilometers/38 miles away, to sell pickled people and/or pork and human skin and/or leather goods at their meat market.
https://www.inyourpocket.com/wroclaw/karl-denke-the-cannibal- killer-of-ziebice_72922f
Karl’s fucked up meat market stand was a popular spot for shoppers.
He was known for having fresh, cheap, tender, juicy meat. And it was probably sometimes, or maybe oftentimes, human.
Due to that inflation crisis, people were hungry. They had almost no money for food - and they were happy to get their hands on any cheap meat.
And Karl - because he was murdering his meat and not spending any money raising livestock - he was able to offer really good prices.
Good meat at a cheap price was bound to make any butcher popular in the Weimar Republic in the early 1920s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
8. December 21, 1924: THEN - his human meat slanging days suddenly come to an end - on December 21st, 1924 Karl Denke is arrested after being accused of murder.
And then, just a few hours later, he commits suicide.
The community is shocked. A lot of people found him odd, but almost no one thought he was a criminal of any kind - let alone a murderer.
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Here’s how the night of his arrest went down in all likelihood.
There are a few different accounts out there - most slightly different.
This is the one I feel the best about.
A thirty-five-year old homeless man named Vincenz (Vin-sens) Oliver entered the city of Münsterberg on the 21st looking for work like many Germans.
Vincenz (Vin-sens) was classified in old newspaper accounts as a vagabond, one of many “traveling artisans who wandered from town to town turning their hands to any bit of work that might earn them a meal and a bed. They were an ill-fed, ill-clothed lot, many of them former soldiers partially crippled by the war and regarded by more substantial citizens as little more than tramps. As a rule they congregate at the cheapest inn in the poorest section of town, not being able to afford any better.”
Vincenz [Vin-sens] arrived in Münsterberg and went to a local hangout spot for vagabonds. Vincenz [Vin-sens] has just come from Strehlen [stray len], a town thirty miles away. https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
And he quickly heard stories about “Papa Denke” - a kind local man with a reputation for helping out those down on their luck.
Vincenz [Vin-sens] was desperate and hungry and needed a place to stay.
And after knocking on some other doors following up on other leads on kind strangers, he arrived at Karl Denke’s house. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
He knocked on Karl’s door, and Karl invited him in, asking, “Are you a stranger here?”
“Yes sir,” said Vincenz [Vin-sens], “I have just arrived.”
And then Denke asked him, (accent) “Scale of one to ten, how tasty do you think you are?”
And Vincenz [Vin-sens], thinking he must have misheard him, was like, “What? What did you just ask me?”
And then Denke was like, “Scale of one to ten, with ten being butt steaks that would pass for the finest filet mignon beef at Berlin’s finest steakhouse, and one being if you pickled me with enough right spices, and threw in enough salt, some down on the luck struggling family wouldn’t get to upset choking my meat down, HOW GOOD… DO YOU THINK…. YOU TASTE!?!”
No. He didn’t say any of the one-to-ten scale shit. Of course not.
What he really asked was, “Are you looking for work? I need someone to write a letter for me.”
Eager for any money he could get, Vincenz [Vin-sens] responded, “I’m sure I could do it to your satisfaction sir. I am no great penman, but the letters I write are legible.”
Karl offered to pay him 20 pfennig [ fen-ig], equivalent to about $10 dollars. Enough to buy some food at the time.
Vincenz [Vin-sens] agreed to do the work for the offered price and stepped in Karl’s creepy-ass little apartment.
Karl was cooking some mystery meat stew when Vincenz [Vin- sens] showed up, came in and and sat down.
He ate the meat stew with Karl at the table, and was so hungry he even ate the fat and gristle.
Ugh.
Vincenz [Vin-sens] thanked Karl for the food, and Karl asked him to start writing the letter.
Vincenz [Vin-sens] sat down to write, and Karl paced around behind him, beginning to dictate the letter, “Dear Albert, you fat belly-”
I didn’t make up that weird opening to the letter. That’s what the sources say.
And while his guest had his eyes focused down and was distracted, Karl grabbed an axe.
Vincenz [Vin-sens] took a pause and turned around to ask if Karl wanted to begin with a date instead of just opening with a greeting. https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
He turned his head and saw Karl standing over him with a pickaxe.
And then he ducked right as Karl swung the axe down. The axe glanced off his head and got stuck in the table.
Stunned, but not knocked out, Vincenz [Vin-sens] and Karl now fought and struggled.
It’s not totally certain how big Karl Denke was, but descriptions of him and the picture of his body make me think he was a bear of a man. Broad shoulders and a barrel chest.
Karl latched onto Vincenz [Vin-sens] and refused to let go.
Vincenz [Vin-sens] screamed for help, continued to struggle, and then managed to escape Karl’s hold and continue calling for help as he ran out of the apartment. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
As he ran, a massive amount of blood poured out of the open wound on his head.
Incredibly, his wound would later only require stitches and he’d be fine. No skull fracture. No major brain injuries.
Turning his head at the last second saved his life and put an end to the long run of a local serial killer. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
Another account claims that after Vincenz (Vin-sens) ran screaming into the street, some neighbors asked who injured him and he pointed to Karl, who was standing in the doorway of his home, red faced, twitching, shaking, and grinding his teeth.
The neighbors couldn’t believe Papa Denke had tried to just randomly murder someone, and they now tried to apprehend Vincenz (Vin-sens), thinking he must have tried to hurt Papa Denke.
Vincenz (Vin-sens) got away again and continued running, running all the way to the police station. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
Once he made it to the police station, he made a formal complaint.
And at first, the police didn’t believe what he was telling him - that Papa Denke attacked him out of nowhere with an axe.
But then a doctor treated him and confirmed the wounds could have indeed been made with a pickaxe.
The police, led by Sergeant Mielenz, were still reluctant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
Vincenz [Vin-sens] was a vagabond - and Papa Denke was a model citizen. They warned Vincenz [Vin-sens] that Papa Denke could sue him for slander, and actually threatened to put him in jail for two weeks for making false accusations. And then the DID hold him jail. https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
From his cell, Vincenz [Vin-sens] refused to recant his statements.
And so, the officers reluctantly left to go talk to Karl.
Once they made it to his apartment, he didn’t let them in - he came outside to greet them - he admitted to attacking the man, and they brought him down to the station to talk further.
They STILL didn’t think he was at fault.
He told them he’d only attacked Vincenz [Vin-sens] because he’d tried to rob him, and he was trying to defend his property.
The police now decided to take Vincenz [Vin-sens] back to Denke’s place to recreate the attack.
They told Denke they’d have to enter his apartment.
And when they said that, Karl got real, REAL quiet. He stopped responding to their questions.
He knew what they’d find. He knew that his serial killing days were over.
And suddenly, the officers thought, for the first time, that maybe there was something to Vincenz [Vin-sens]’s story.
Just a few hours later, before investigators even left for Denke’s apartment, at 11:30PM, a sergeant peered into his cell and found him dead, hung by his handkerchief.
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-True-Story-Karl-Denke- ebook/dp/B071W94WNL/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Karl had tied his handkerchief to a ring in the wall meant for chains. And then he’d laid on the floor and pressed down with all of his his weight until he’d choked to death.
The handkerchief he used wasn’t the small square of fabric that most of us now normally think of.
Back then, German handkerchiefs were more like scarfs, it was plenty long enough to work as a noose.
The photo of his body, taken right after he committed suicide, is the only confirmed picture of him.
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://www.amazon.com/Cannibal-True-Story-Karl-Denke- ebook/dp/B071W94WNL/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
His final near victim - Vincenz [Vin-sens] Oliver, was still in jail. He’d actually been sentenced to ten days in jail for vagrancy.
https://www.inyourpocket.com/wroclaw/karl-denke-the-cannibal- killer-of-ziebice_72922f
9. December 24th, 1924: On December 24th, 1924 police go to Karl Denke’s home after delivering his corpse to his family.
According to one source - they still don’t think Denke was a murderer at this point. They felt bad for him. They were all very worried about who would pay for Karl’s funeral.
According to this same source, the police went to the apartment to search for money to pay for the funeral, NOT to look for evidence supporting Vincenz’s Vin-sens] story. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
A locksmith let them into his apartment that Christmas Eve.
And the police did NOT find money to help pay for his funeral.
They found something more akin to the set of a Rob Zombie slasher flick.
Once of the first things they found was obviously human flesh in jars of curing salts and various pots.
Noice!
Pickled people!
They found bloody clothes from various victims in Karl’s closet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
They found literal piles of human bones along with a bunch of cured meat. People meat.
They determined, based on the way it was stored, that it was meat Denke had likely prepared to sell at the meat stand he worked at. https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
Then they found his murder journal. They found ledger with details of 30 people he’d murdered and eaten over the years.
It was clear now that their buddy, Papa Denke - was a killer.
The “pedantic”, particular child had to log his murders just so.
He was meticulous.
And his meticulousness ended up biting him in the ass.
His ledger indicated his victims were beggars, journeymen, and tramps, all people who probably didn’t have anyone looking for them.
On the window sill, they found several documents with discharge records of people released from prisons and hospitals right before Denke killed him. http://www.denke.org/stowoe.htm
In the kitchen, police found two large tubs of pickled meat, and various bones and pots of fat. Karl made sure to waste no parts of the bodies.
They determined the amount of human bones and tissue equated to AT LEAST the thirty victims mentioned in his ledger. http://www.denke.org/stowoe.htm
The only kind of good news they uncovered was that it didn’t seem like any of his victims suffered much.
He seems to have killed them before he got to butchering.
It didn’t seem as if they’d been tortured.
So why did he do it?
The initial crime scene report declared that Karl lacked moral judgement, and was not a sadistic killer - he was just often hungry and broke, and the the victims were simply killed for food and money.
Then, when the police interviewed his family, they theorized that part of his motivation for the murders came from his love of meat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ
Seriously.
He’d apparently always loved meat way more than the average meatsack.
Remember that whole two pounds of meat in one meal at his brother’s house dinner debacle?
“Karl’s not the worst guy - he’s not some sexual sadist or anything, he’s just a dude who really, really, REALLY loves MEAT!”
And really loving meat brings me to another sponsor…
10.Kroll’s Café Fake Ad:
PLAY FROM BEGINING https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=7AapRSeRo7s&list=PLxtYnqeBFouSSGXjXgbsdpRAEyJGP MFjP
Today’s Timesuck is brought to you by Kroll’s Cafe and Malt Shop.
[Kroll] “Hello Fellow Din-ah and Sexy Cow Lov-ah! Dis is Joachim [yaw him] Kroll and I vant you to come to my cafe down in Streusel-Sauerkraut.
Ve have da finest chocolate malts. And da sexiest ham- burgers.
But mostly people come for da blue light specials.
Ve have a new special dis veek! The Denke Pickled Mystery Meat Bowl. Two pounds of Pickled Mystery Meat for just $9.99. AND - some Rhubarb King cobber!
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Our Semen brand fry-sauce is quite delicious. Our vich and creamy recipe is house made every morning by myself.
Some come on down to Kroll’s Cafe, ver is It’s Always Mostly Beef, I promise!”
PRESS STOP
Old sponsor there. Haven’t had Kroll’s Kafe buy ads in awhile. Nice to see them back on board.
Lab testing would detect human proteins in a lot of the meat investigators found at his place. http://www.denke.org/stowoe.htm
Doctors also analyzed Denke’s stomach, and detected human protein in some not fully-digested meat in his stomach.
He was for sure a cannibal.
And I think he ate a LOT of human meat.
In the pic of him taken right after he died, he looks REAL well fed.
He looks like a dude who threw down two pounds of meat in a single meal on a regular basis.
After making it to this info for the first time, I started to wonder - many pounds of human meat did this dude eat over the years?
More than anyone else in recent history at least?
Hundreds of pounds worth? Over a thousand pounds worth?
Let’s do some math.
They think he killed AT LEAST thirty people. And that he killed them for the meat.
I did some more Googling that I’m sure sent some more alerts to whatever federal agents are in charge of cyber surveillance on me, and it appears that the average human has about 75 pounds of meat on them.
75 times 30 is 2,250 pounds. Let’s say he sold half, and that he ate the other half. That’s over 1,100 pounds of people meat.
Holy shit that’s a lot of meat!
A 2018 study conducted by the USDA - the U.S. Department of Agriculture - found that Americans ate a record amount of meat in 2018. The average American ate 222 pounds of meat and poultry. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/americans-meat- consumption-set-to-hit-a-record-in-2018/
How much of each? It didn’t say. But I think it’s real safe to assume that the average meat-eating person eats MORE poultry than red meat.
So let’s say that the average American eats around 100 pounds of red meat a year. Four-hundred quarter pound burgers.
Now imagine eating four-hundred quarter pound burgers a year for over eleven years.
And NOW imagine that every single one of those burgers did not come from a cow - but came from a person.
THAT is how much people meat I think it’s safe to assume Denke could’ve eaten. I bet he ate more than that actually. He’s not the average meat eater. Not many are throwing down two pounds in a meal.
And - since Denke presented his people meat not as beef but as pork - check this out.
According to 2020 stats, the average American eats just a tick over 66 pounds of pork a year. So much bacon. So much sausage.
It would take someone almost 17 years eating over 66 pounds of pork a year to eat 1100 pounds of meat. And Denke may have eaten more than that. SO MUCH pickled mystery meat. https://www.saveur.com/cannibalism-calorie-count/ https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://sentientmedia.org/meat-consumption-in-the-us/
And who were all these people he killed and ate?
They ranged in age from at least as young as sixteen to at least as old as 76. They were mostly men. And almost all people wandering through the area looking for work.
https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/
11. December 25, 1924: On December 25th, 1924 local newspapers began writing articles about Karl Denke, bringing his horrifying story to the public.
They discussed his double life of carrying crosses at funerals, helping beggars, and donating to charity. The wondered if he did all of that just to make the community think he was a good guy so that it would be easier to kill over and over again and get away with it?
The, a week later, one local German paper wrote that between Christmas and New year’s, the sale of local pork “drastically declined.”
I bet it did.
Yeah - that story was not good for pork sales. How many people literally threw up when reading about Denke’s secret meat source? Hundreds? Thousands?
Bobby Willy Pickton from a few weeks ago MIGHT have sold some trace amounts of human meat to the good people of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
This motherfucker for SURE sold a LOT of human meat to a lot of people in Münsterberg and the surrounding area.
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
After the news came out, pork sales in both Münsterberg and Breslau [ brez-lohw], his two main markets, declined significantly.
All of Lower Silesia [ si-lee-zhuh] was afraid to eat meat, leading to a small, localized, additional economic crisis.
Several meat canning and processing plants closed down, and the whole region suffered from reported “stomach disorders” after finding out they might have consumed human meat.
So much puke.
https://www.inyourpocket.com/wroclaw/karl-denke-the-cannibal- killer-of-ziebice_72922f https://www.newspapers.com/image/252682463/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
12. 1926: Now let’s jump ahead a year and change and go over the final results of a lot of analysis and investigation that was done on Denke’s property.
If you are eating, you should stop before listening to this portion of the episode.
If you thought what I’ve gone over already is bad - this report REALLY gets into the details of what Denke was up to.
In 1926, Freidrich Pietrusky, the acting head of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Breslau [ brez-lohw], wrote a full report on the Denke crime scene.
The report was published in the German Journal for all of Forensic Medicine. The translation for the report comes from German forensic biologist Mark Benecke.
This some pretty disturbing stuff, and I think it deserves some pretty serious atmospheric music behind it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XRXT8xZ62s Calliope - play from beginning.
Wait! That’s not right. That’s not right at all. Let me find something more suiting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S623yzR6SY Royalty free game show music - Play from beginning.
“The first findings made in Denke’s house during the search were bones and pieces of meat. The latter were in a salt solution found in a wooden drum. There were altogether fifteen pieces of skin. Two parts of the breast, which is strongly hairy. The torso is cut through the middle, three fingers above the navel. Its lateral limit is the front shoulder blade. In the piece of the anterior abdominal wall, the middle of the navel is visible. The remaining pieces belong to the side and back parts. The largest is about forty by twenty centimeters large. Particularly striking was a very clean anus with large parts of both buttocks.”
PRESS STOP
Sorry - I know that did NOT set the right musical tone and was probably a bit distracting.
There’s something wrong with me.
When I first picked out that and read that passage to Lynze while working at home with that music, I cry laughed.
It’s just so preposterously inappropriate.
Imagine if that music played at a funeral you were at?
PLAY AGAIN FROM WHERE IT LEFT OFF
“He was a good man. A great husband. Provider. Father. But he loved gameshows, and in the end, they got him killed when he tried to impress the producers of Wipeout by parachuting into the Grand Canyon.”
PRESS STOP
Okay - let’s re-circle now on the crime details. On that last one.
Quote: “Particularly striking was a very clean anus with large parts of both buttocks.”
Are we SURE he wasn’t motivated by anything other than a powerful love of meat?
Was he JUST eating these people? Or was he also a sexual sadist? Or a necrophiliac?
Why did he have clean butthole laying around?
No wonder he lived alone and never dated. Hard to explain all that.
Five seconds after walking a woman into his apartment, he’s like, “You know what, would it be okay to go to your place instead? I forgot how messy my place really was. Apologies. I should have at least put away that super clean, pickled butthole.”
The crime scene report continues, withOUT the music:
“The meat is brownish red and does not feel as if the body would have lost much blood. On the back some soft-bluish discoloration is visible as well as liver mortis, which leads to the conclusion that the disassembly of the body took place several hours after death.
There is no evidence of vital reaction of the bodies to the cuts made, which means that the latter were not made while the victims were still alive. Nevertheless some skin and muscles from the necks were missing, as well as extremities - arms and legs, head and sexual organs. Lesions could not be determined, nor the nature of death or the tool of crime.
In three medium-sized pots filled with cream sauce, some cooked meat, partially covered with skin and human hair was found. The meat was pink and soft. All pieces seemed cut from the gluteal area - buttocks. One pot had only half a portion. Denke must have eaten the other piece shortly before being arrested.”
Umm…. did everyone just catch that part about this dude having some cooked butt meat still having HAIRY SKIN ATTACHED on the stove.
Dude didn’t even bother to get rid of the BUTT HAIR.
That shit is SAVAGE.
Why do I feel like he and serial killer Albert Fish, in some other - parallel universe - are the best of friends and have a standing dinner date.
(Albert Fish) “Happy to blow off the bearcats and bimbos tonight for some HAIRY BUTT STEAK, Denke m’boy! Mind if I hop up on the table and garnish it with some peanut butt butter!?! SHOWBIZ! That IS HOW THEY DO IT IN HOLLYWOOD!?!”
Listen to the Albert Fish episode of Timesuck if you really need to understand what just happened there.
Also - I feel like Denke’s spice rack was pretty light.
After hearing about the hair, I don’t get the feeling he was much of a cook. Don’t think he was really mastering his culinary skills if, after doing this for two decades, he’s still cooking up some sloppy butt steaks.
The report continues:
“I should like to mention here that there is no evidence that Denke has ever sold the meat of his victims (all evidence has obviously been eaten!). However, it seems certain that his guests, that is the vagabonds, were offered to eat it.”
Interesting that he would write this.
I wonder if he was pressured to write that to make the public feel better.
This dude SOLD MEAT ALL THE TIME. From DOOR TO DOOR at times. He was a butcher. When he died, there was cooked human flesh on the stove and more in his belly.
He had butchered previous victims.
Times were tough, meat sold easily, and he needed money.
There is NO WAY this dude didn’t sell SO MUCH human meat.
Back to the report:
“In the third pot were found numerous pieces of human skin and parts of the aorta in a gelatinous mass. A bowl on the table in his room was filled with amber colored fat, that appeared to be human. Biological test gave a weak-positive result for the presence of human protein.”
“In the shed, in which the meat pieces were found, was also a barrel full of bones that were cleaned of tendons, muscles, etc. that most probably have been priorly cooked. The investigation initially revealed the existence of six forearm bones, which means they belonged to three people at least. Other traces were found behind the shed. A part of a leg remained in the pond that Denke had dug many years before and also skeletal pieces were uncovered in the local forest. Here is the full list of what has been sent to us for examination:
I know this next thing I’m gonna do is terrible, but I can’t help myself. I need to get this out of my head.
Allow me to read this list with the gameshow music underneath as if it’s what the winning contestant is taking home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S623yzR6SY Royalty free game show music - Play from beginning.
LET’S tell them what they’ve WON!!!!!
-Sixteen femurs of which one pair of remarkably strong ones, two pairs of very thin ones, six pairs, and two left femurs.
-Fifteen medium-sized pieces of long bones
-Four pairs of elbow bones
-Seven heads of radii [ rey-dee-ahy ]
-Nine lower parts of radii [ rey-dee-ahy ]
-Eight lower parts of the elbow
-A pair of upper shinbone
-A pair of lower elbows and radii [ rey-dee-ahy ], of which extremities still remain well-connected
-A pair of upper arms and a pair of upper arm heads
-A pair of collar bones
-Two shoulder blades
-Eight heels and ankle bones
-One hundred and twenty toes
-Sixty-five feet and metacarpal bones
ANNDDDDD -Five first ribs and one hundred-fifty pieces of ribs!!!!!”
And that’s a wrap! Thanks for watching (chant each word) WHO… DID…THEY…. EAT!?!?!
“Help control the pet population. Have your pets spayed or neutered.”
PRESS STOP
C’mon.
That’s at least a little funny, right?
You know who I bet would find that very funny? My dad.
Interesting.
Where the fuck was he when Denke was doing what he did? Hard to say.
Back to the report.
“All bones, with the exception of a few, were very light, porous, and fatless.”
“In the municipal forest remained as well parts of a spine and four parts of a clean, dissected male pelvis, which on one side showed traces of saw-cutting. One piece of head-bone was found. This is a piece of the inferior petrosal sinus area, jagged on the front side. It looks broken and bears visible signs of sharp sawing on its top. This piece of bone is cross-marked with ink.”
“Head bone?” This has to be be a translation mistake, right? I’m guessing he wrote “skull.”
Funny if he did write “head bone” though.
I feel like that would really take away from the legitimacy of a forensics report if the investigator giving it kept saying “head bone” instead of “skull.”
And I feel like when you saw “head bone” you probably also don’t use proper terms for other stuff.
(Terrible Forensics Expert - dumb voice)
THIS DESERVES THE CLOWN CALLIOPE MUSIC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XRXT8xZ62s Calliope - play from beginning
“UMM - you can see here that the little gun shooting doohickey thing pierced the HEAD BONE around HERE, right above the eye ball holder space. Before being shot, it also appears that the victim was stabbed with a long, sharp metal pointy thing, you can see a slash mark or sumpting on the head bone here, starting near the nose hole, and moving down towards those hard little food cutter and grinder bone- thingies.”
PRESS STOP
Back to the report…
“Given the size and condition of the bones, we can assume that there was one particularly strong individual, two others were of delicate bone structure, another suffered from coxa vara.”
Coxa vara is a hip deformity that leaves the afflicted with a shortened leg and a limp. How much of a limp varies. https://radiopaedia.org/articles/coxa-vara?lang=us
“The cutting surfaces of the bones are jagged, as if blunt force was applied, such as the blunt end of an axe or a hammer. Some bones were visibly sawed. Few spots show traces of a sharp tool- an axe most probably. Similarly such traces were found on the articulations, which must have been cut with a knife.”
“Based on these findings, we were able to declare that the bones sent to us, belonged to at least eight people.”
At least eight different people.
And they’d also find numerous additional skeletons and partial skeletons buried around the building.
And then there’s the teeth.
His dental collection totaled three hundred and fifty one teeth.
SO MANY teeth. Holy shit that is like something straight out of a horror movie.
The teeth were found in a moneybag, two tin boxes for salt and pepper, and three paper bags meant to hold pepper.
They were sorted based on size.
The molars were in the moneybag, the others were in the tin boxes and paper bags. In one paper bag, there seemed to be a set of teeth belonging to just one person. In the third paper bag they found three lower incisors with a “strongly atrophic structure,” that might have been from an older person.
All but six teeth were well-preserved.
These teeth were estimated to belong to TWENTY to TWENTY- FIVE DIFFERENT people… conservatively.
Holy shit.
Some teeth seemed to have been easily extracted while others were extracted with force. Those teeth show unnatural fractures and claw marks.
He might have cooked people’s jaws in advance to easily remove the teeth.
From analysis of the teeth and the ledger, they know he had almost no young victims. Four fifths of the victims were seniors. One person was sixteen, but the majority of his victims were older than forty. Two were estimated to be between twenty to thirty, and one victim between thirty and forty.
My god!
What was this guy’s deal with all the teeth!?! He was clearly not JUST killing people because he really loved eating meat and meat was expensive.
He was, best case - and this is a really dark BEST case - he was harvesting people and seeing how much he could profit off of their murder in addition to eating some of their meat. He could sell some of their meat - see if anyone else wanted some medium rare hairy ass steak.
Maybe he hoped he could make some money off their teeth somehow? Maybe some kind of fucked up jewelry? I know this sounds insane, and it is, but you’ll find out in a second he was trying to make some other marketable products from their flesh.
WORST case - he was another serial killer who felt compelled to kill.
And those teeth were some of his trophies.
If the teeth weren’t creepy enough, their other findings revealed that he had experimented with human leather, and soap making from human fat, “although his methods remained utterly primitive.”
They found three pairs of suspenders made from human skin.
And again I think of Ed Gein.
Imagine the two of those fuckers together? Maybe comparing homemade outfits with each other.
“What do you think of these back skin boots?”
“So sick, Gein. So SICK! What do YOU think of this beret woven out of pubic hair??”
“Oh my gawd I LOVE IT!!!!”
I bet you Ed Gein knew about Karl. He started committing his crimes thirty years after Karl died.
Also - Gein’s grandpa was from Germany, and he was known to have read anything he could find about both true crime and cannibalism. He was eighteen when Denke died.
I bet Gein was a big fan.
Back to Denke’s human skin suspenders…
He used skin from the chest to the pubic area to make his leather.
Karl was actually wearing human leather suspenders when he died. Some of the suspenders still had nipples and pubic hair on them.
Apparently, some of them actually had pubic lice.
Not kidding.
How creepy.
CLEARLY - he was not doing what he did JUST for the meat. And I don’t think there’s any way he did all this shit JUST for the money.
He was spending so, SO much times with these dead bodies. He had family sending him some money.
He didn’t have to do all this. But he did because was FUCKING CRAZY.
He liked it. I bet he got off it. This guy was an evil maniac.
He was wearing human leather suspenders when he died.
Think about how dark that is.
HE WAS WEARING HUMAN SKIN SUSPENDERS WHEN HE DIED!
That still had PUBIC HAIR on them!
And possibly pubic mice.
This guy makes Robert Pickton from a few weeks ago seem not-so-ghoulish.
(Mama Picket - High pitched Hillbilly voice) “Bobby Willy! Bobby Willy! Hear ‘bout dis here Karl Denke, eh! Butcher Boy dat uh make any mama proud. Listen how he make uh da skin spenders, eh? Go get momma’s goatee brush, Booby Willy!!! Get muh house boots so I can walk across duh pig shit and find me a Denke story to learn yuh some business, eh?” https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
In addition to his skin-spenders. His PUBE-spenders if you will - Denke also made human leather straps that he polished with shoe polish.
Fun.
AND - they found forty one bundles of rags held together with human skin straps. All the rags had been washed and neatly folded. They were rolled up and tied up with strings. These strings were ALSO MADE from human skin. What they thought were wicker baskets were made of human skin.
This fucker even used human hair to make his SHOELACES.
Investigators also found a coin collection - presumably a bunch of coins from people he killed and skinned and ate, etc.
They found ID cards and private papers for several individuals in the room.
They found the loose sheets of paper that were that victim ledger we mentioned.
In front of each name he put a date.
The entire list was in chronological order, but the list began at number 11 and ended at number 31.
For his female victims, he usually only wrote their first name.
For male victims, he included birthdays, occupation, where they were staying, and their social status.
So weird that he didn’t do that for the women and only the men. As little regard as he had for other guys, he seemed to care even less about women.
On one column he put the victims’ initials and a number, most likely their weight. They found another slip of paper with a name and, “Dead, 122, naked 107, disemboweled 83.”
This was repeated throughout the ledger.
Is he referring to their weight here?
Dead - 122 kilograms. Naked, 107 kilograms. Once disemboweled - 83 kilograms?
107 kilograms naked would be my size - 235 pounds. Not sure how they’d be wearing an extra 33 pounds of clothes? Heavy winter coat, boats, heavy work shirt, heavy pants, etc?
The list went all the way to 31. He had written, “31 ____,” but the line was empty.
That spot was meant for Vincenz [Vin-sens] Oliver, the guy who got away and exposed the monster. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
The tools Denke used to cut his victims found in his apartment and that shed were three axes, a large wood saw, a tree saw, a pickaxe, and three knives. Police took everything but the axes and tree saw, those were sent for human protein testing.
Testing detected human blood on the saw and pickaxe. https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Such a different time.
The dude got away with killing for years even though he was so sloppy.
Just axing people after inviting them in to his little apartment and then just butchering them up a single wall away from some neighbors, cooking them and pickling them, tossing their bones into a pile apparently, throwing their bloody clothes in the corner.
Investigators also determined, as stated in this big comprehensive repot, that none of Denke’s crimes appear to have been sexually motivated.
After taking all this in, the author the big definitive investigative report felt that Denke was a highly organized and meticulous person with no any moral compass, but NOT a sexual sadist.
One investigator, unnamed in the source article, said: “Probably he didn’t mean to harm people, but his need for food was primordial. After a series of failures at school, farming, business, he found a simple and effective means of procuring food - and probably income - by killing vagabonds he met at the train station. He could gain their trust quite easily and take them home virtually unnoticed. The train station was a short walk from his place and both were on the outskirts of town.” https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Psychiatrists at the time believed his economic troubles may have led him to cannibalism. “This appetite, said the experts, was the real foundation of his butcheries. He had become a slave to his stomach, and had to satisfy his craving at any price.” https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
I don’t know.
I feel like it was a BIT more complicated than that.
But who knows I guess? Maybe hunger did drive him kill, and then some OCD tendencies drove him to organize all the body parts like he did?
Maybe.
But I doubt it. I still feel like this was all about WAY more than food and making some extra money.
Also - how in the world did he go unnoticed for so many years?
I know things in Germany were fucked up but COME ON.
Neighbors apparently did notice some pretty odd things, but thought nothing much of it.
Two men managed to escape after Karl attempted to murder them, but they never reported him to police.
They were just happy to get away. They only talked about what happened after he was dead and gone.
Once, one of his own butcher apprentices ran out of the apartment covered in blood, and he was never seen again. Some people theorize that Denke found him and killed him after his escape.
OR - had maybe Denke talked him into helping him butcher someone and then he freaked out and ran away?
Can you imagine being this ghoul’s apprentice?
A vagabond once complained to neighbors that Karl asked him to write a letter - he loved that ol’ stay-distracted-writing-a- letter-so-I-can-kill-you-trick - and while he was writing, Papa Denke tried to strangle him with a chain.
He was able to overpower him and escape, and again he didn’t report the incident to police.
Maybe Germany was such a shit show at the time that they just didn’t think the police would care. Or believe them.
Interesting he went for a chain here and not an axe.
Again I wonder if the crimes were sexual motivated?
Choking is so intimate. Not as quick. So personal. So many rapists and sexually motivated killers choke.
Just ask my dad. He talks about it all the time.
JK!
Investigators said there was no evidence he had sexually assaulted the victims, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t sexual.
Maybe he just jerked off near the bodies? Or on them?
And maybe he DID have sex with them. I don’t trust their old- time forensic examination techniques AND - the bodies were all carved up. How the Hell could they determine who had been sexually assaulted or not?
I feel like modern investigators might have come to some very different conclusions about this dude.
Also - if a modern psychiatrist would’ve been able to interview him, I feel like we’d learn his kills had WAY more to do with just wanting that sweet meat. https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
Also - think about what his neighbors thought after he was caught?
How many times had they smelled him cooking next door?
Neighbors had at times over the years complained about a, “strong, penetrating smell from his apartment.”
When asked, Denke would tell them he had a disease that required animal fat treatment.
Ha! So stupid.
Holy shit that is a weird explanation that would no longer work today. Not unless your neighbors were total fucking idiots.
If I smelled rotting meat coming from a neighbor’s house and asked my neighbor about it, and he was like, “Oh that? That’s just the smell of animal fat I take for my disease.” - I would IMMEDIATELY assume they were a serial killer.
They also found it odd that he always had plenty of meat, even during the worst of the hyper-inflation period.
Three different families that lived in the house with Denke all gossiped a bit about it and thought he was killing cats and dogs for medicine to treat his weird disease.
Again - what an old-timey thing to think. “Yeah - we figured he was killing - just not people. We just assumed - as one is likely to do - that he was killing cats and dogs and eating them and using their fat to treat his random and never properly described disease.” https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
They didn’t really care that he was killing pets because things were so bad in Germany at that time - people were so hungry - that he wasn’t the only one doing shit like that.
They saw him pouring buckets of blood into the courtyard, and they didn’t report him because they thought it was just dog blood.
Bojangles just snarled at me for saying “JUUUST dog blood.”
Sorry Bojangles!
Not my assessment of the value of a dog’s life, just relaying information.
Late at night, neighbors did later say they heard hammering and sawing from the apartment, but never called the police.
Why the Hell not?
They assumed Denke was preparing meat to sell at the morning market, and that he was butchering cats and dogs for their animal fat to treat his vague disease.
My God.
I know times were really tough - but I hope none of his neighbor’s had pets.
How could you have a pet and just think, “Oh Well! No cause for alarm. Sure my neighbor is killing so many fucking cats and dogs that he has to dump out bucket-fulls of their blood, Times are tough!!!!! Good on him for being able to catch that many dogs and cats. As a pet lover, I don’t like it. But as a hunter, I’m impressed.” https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
After they knew he was a serial killer, neighbors did tell investigators and journalists that they noticed he was always wearing different second-hand clothing.
And they noticed him carrying large packages out of the apartment on a regular basis.
But they didn’t question it. https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder- karl-denke/
Even crazier, in the weeks leading up to his death, Karl had a human rib laying on his window sill for all to see, and no one questioned that either.
Ballsy.
Or sloppy. Maybe he just forgot where he’d set that one rib.
They just couldn’t see Papa Denke as someone capable of murder, so they ignored all the signs that something was amiss.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
After this big investigative report came out about Karl Denke, his story made the papers for a few days and then pretty quickly went away.
How? How could this crazy of a story not be big news?
A different serial killer we’ll talk more about soon was hogging all the true crime headlines. Fritz Haarmann. The werewolf of Hannover. The vampire of Hanover. The Wolfman.
His story is even darker.
Gonna tell a brief version of it when we’re done wrapping up this timeline.
13.1940s: Later, In the 1940s, when new Polish owners purchased the house, they discovered more bones from Karl Denke’s victims, but this didn’t make any headlines. Too much else going on with that whole Hitler, WW2 situation.
14.1970s: In the 70s, even more human remains were found in the neighbor’s garden, but this didn’t make international news because now the original story of Denke had largely been forgotten.
https://www.inyourpocket.com/wroclaw/karl-denke-the-cannibal- killer-of-ziebice_72922f
15. 1980s: Then, in the 1980s, Polish forensics Professor Tadeusz (tah-douche) Dobosz (Do-bosh) made a shocking discovery and Denke’s story was reborn a bit.
A total of 1,200 pictures had dumped at the Medical Academy of Wrocław [rot swah] in the mid 80s during a renovation at the Medical College of Wrocław [rot swah].
These pictures allegedly belonged to the German Institute of Forensic Medicine in Breslau [ brez-lohw] until 1945, when the city became Polish Wrocław [rot swah].
At the time, Tadeusz [tah douche] was an employee at the university, but he was promoted to Professor of Molecular Techniques at the Department of Forensic Medicine of the Medical Academy of Wrocław [rot swah].
Some of the pictures he found were of a saw, a pickaxe, and knives. Other pictures revealed sets of bones and various human parts. Another photo was of a table full of meat, human bones, and suspenders made of human skin.
There were other pictures of suspenders, rags, and a pair of old shoes. A messy room filled with pots. An old white house, a wooden shed, and a portrait of a dead man.
This picture of the dead man is the only known photo of Karl Denke we now have.
He was so curious about these photos.
He suspected the photos depicted some form of cannibal activity, but when he did a quick search of Polish criminal records he couldn’t find any story about cannibals.
But then he ran into with Marcin [maar cheen] Tosz [toss], a local journalist who knew about Karl Denke, and he told Professor Dobosz (Do-bosh) all the gory details.
He told him that the old wooden shed in the pictures was now gone. It was destroyed after WWII by the new Polish owners of the house.
He told them these new owners found buried skulls and bones in their yard.
He told them about Denke’s murder ledger. The investigative report.
And then, with salacious crime scene photos and knowledge of the narrative, the legend of the Cannibal of Ziębice [zhome beet- suh] had been re-discovered.
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl-photos.htm
16. 1999: Then in 1999, “The Cannibal from Ziębice [zhome beet- suh]" museum exhibit we mentioned was created by Lucyna (lut- zena) Biały (bi-a-ly).
We met her at the start of this Suck.
Lucyna (lut-zena) was the curator of the archive of old printed materials at the University Library at Piasek [pee-ah seck] in Wrocław [rot swah].
She found Denke’s story accidentally while she was preparing a back catalog of old Silesian [ si-lee-zhuhn] press articles.
She actually found the story of Denke separately from Professor Dobosz (Do-bosh).
If it wasn’t for the work of Professor Dobosz (Do-bosh) and Lucyna (lut-zena) Biały (bi-a-ly), Karl’s story may have died with the few people who knew about him.
She presented her findings at a scientific conference in Ziębice [zhome beet-suh].
She approached the Mayor of Ziębice [zhome beet-suh] about a Denke display at a town museum.
And he was torn.
German history is filled with murderers and cruel acts and he didn’t want to glorify such darkness, BUT he knew that laying claim to a famous cannibal could bring tourism to the town and boost a sagging economy.
In the end, he decided boosting the economy was worth promoting an association with cannibalism. And then he allegedly said, “let us think how we can exploit our cannibal.”
A few month’s later, Ziębice’s [zhome beet-suh] museum of Household Goods put out a display for Denke.
Still think that is such a TERRIBLE museum name, something in translation had to have been lost -
https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm
The museum display featured and may still feature those photos found in the 80s, as well as knives, axes, a meat grinder and tons of the information you heard today.
http://www.denke.org/stowoe.htm
And that brings us to the end of Karl Denke’s timeline.
PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE OUTRO
V. Fritz Haarmann, the Werewolf of Hanover
Now - a bit more darkness.
We’ve already waded in so far with Denke - might as well go further to illustrate why his story isn’t more widely known.
The mean reason Karl’s story was almost lost in history is probably due to the coverage Fritz Haarmann [harman]’s murders - the Werewolf of Hanover.
He was convicted just a few days before Karl killed himself. And he’d be executed just under four months later.
He was also a cannibal. And his murders were… more extreme. https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1
Germany actually produced a statistically abnormal number of cannibals in the first half of the 1900s.
Why?
All that chaos that followed World War I.
The economy completely collapsed.
People wandered the streets begging for food and searching for jobs.
The scapegoating began. Jewish people, socialists, and communists were blamed for the economic crisis and the road to the Holocaust was paved.
There was escalating violence against many people who had been dehumanized.
The German zeitgeist at the time - so much hate and angst in the air - made people more willing to turn a blind eye to horrific crimes they might have reported in other circumstances. It led others to kill for meat.
Think about it - if you’d already witnessed the Jewish couple next door dragged from their homes and beaten for doing nothing other than being Jewish - if you’ve seen people being beaten for not being nationalistic enough - I’m guessing a lot of people are gonna be pretty reluctant to contact the authorities for anything. Lot of people probably wanted to keep a low as profile as possible.
Many had stolen, killed, or lied to get food, work - to help their families survive. That may have made them less likely to report certain crimes.
And hunger helped lead other people to commit crimes of cannibalism. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017HMAWSS/ ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Denke had several contemporaries. None of them knew each other or were inspired by each other, but they all operated at the same time.
And Fritz Haarmann was the most infamous.
In 1918, Fritz finished a five year prison sentence for a series of burglaries, and at the age of 39, entered the city of Hanover, known for high crime rates at the time.
Perfect place for a guy planning on committing a lot more crimes.
Fritz had been in and out of jail for years prior to 1918 - mainly for fraud, theft, and also - for sexually assaulting children.
This guy was a real piece fo shit.
Fritz probably had a tougher childhood than Denke’s - characterized by abuse at the hands of his violent father. Fritz’s father actually tried to have him put in an institution when he discovered that his son was a homosexual, sadly a big crime at that time.
Fritz was also molested by one of his school teachers when he was just eight years old.
Years later, after he left prison in 1918, Fritz became a police informant in Hanover.
Local police trusted him and liked him so much, he was given the nickname “Detective.”
They paid him and gave him a badge, which unbeknownst to them just helped him commit more crimes.
Really, really horrible crimes.
Fritz began attacking and molesting young homeless boys - using his badge to gain their trust.
Most of them were real young - they weren’t even teenagers.
His favorite spot to catch homeless boys was the railroad station, where they gathered to beg for money or food. Like Denke, he targeted people who wouldn’t be missed - people with little to no family ties.
He’d lure them to his apartment with the promise of a hot meal and potential jobs.
Once inside, Fritz attacked them, raped them, and then murdered them - often - and this is something I’d never heard of and is beyond horrific - by tearing their throats out with his teeth.
My GOD.
You didn’t hear that wrong.
He would TEAR THEIR THROATS OUT… with his teeth. Never heard of that one before. This was how he got the dueling nicknames of the Vampire of Hannover and the Werewolf of Hannover.
On several occasions Haarmann bit clear through his victims' Adams apple and trachea. Haarmann later referred to the act of biting through his victims' neck as his "love bite.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haarmann#Childhood
He then drank their blood and… “indulged in necrophiliac activities.”
True monster.
He then took their bodies up to his attic, and transferred their flesh into buckets to either cook up or dispose of.
He’d also either sometimes wear their clothes or give their clothing to his lover and former male escort, Hans Grans, who would sometimes help him catch these kids.
Fritz, similar to Denke, pretended to be a meat-market trader and sold buckets of human flesh, along with secondhand clothes.
He told his customers it was horse meat.
He always got a lot of people to eat human flesh.
He sold his products at a lower price than the competition, and desperate people hungry in a horrific economy were willing to buy anything to feed and clothe their families.
His first victim was seventeen year old Friedel Roth, who disappeared in 1918. He was last seen with Fritz Haarmann. The police interviewed Fritz, but didn’t make much effort to really see if he was the killer, because they wanted their informant to keep working for them.
Eventually in court Fritz would brag that when investigators came to his apartment to talk to him, “The head of the boy was lying wrapped in newspaper behind the oven.”
Neighbors were suspicious of Fritz on many occasions, but didn’t report him. They’d occasionally see Hans Grans wearing the suits of a missing boy.
They also noted seeing lots of young men enter the apartment, but never leaving.
Late at night, they heard chopping and sawing, and just told themselves that Fritz was preparing for the morning meat market.
When they saw him carrying buckets of blood - like with Denke - they assumed it was animal blood.
Such strange times.
Fritz even had his neighbors take care of some of the human bones for him. He gave them away so they could make soups, telling them they were various animal bones.
Neighbors were again suspicious but still never went to the police.
Finally, at a meat market, one customer was so concerned about Fritz’s products she took a sample to the police, thinking it was human.
They dismissed her and told her it was pork.
They still didn’t want Fritz to be guilty of anything - he was a good informant.
By 1923, he’s been killing for five years now, Fritz is still working with the police to help form a secret organization to combat French occupation of the Ruhr [roor], an area of West Germany, and he was working with detectives.
At the same time, local newspapers started putting public pressure on the police to investigate a lot of missing boys.
One newspaper estimated that 600 area boys had disappeared in just the past year.
Rumors started to spread that a werewolf was eating the children. It was all dismissed as paranoia until a skull washed up on the banks of a local river.
In May of 1924, public pressure intensified when more skulls washed up. And then some sacks of human remains washed up from the river as well.
Dredgers then dug up the river bed, and found five hundred human bones.
That’s SO fucking dark.
Who was killing all these kids?
Thanks to a few witnessed seeing him toss shit in the river, Fritz Haarmann became suspect number one.
The police he worked with now finally put him under surveillance.
And then in June 1924 they caught him trying to pick up a boy.
The boy told the police Fritz attempted to molest him, so the police arrested Fritz.
And while he was in custody, the police searched his apartment. And they soon realized his days as an informant were OVER.
They found the bloody room with piles of clothes, similar to what police found in Karl Denke’s apartment.
Fritz told them he was a butcher and clothes trader, so what else did they expect to find in his home? However, the mother of one of the missing boys then saw one of his neighbors wearing her son’s coat.
After the neighbor told police Fritz had given him that coat, Fritz confessed.
The gig was up.
In December 1924 his sensational trial began.
It was, up until that time, the most highly publicized trial in the history of Germany.
Front page headlines day after day for weeks.
Fritz captivated and infuriated the public with all the horrible shit he said and admitted to doing.
He made no attempt to show remorse, at one point nonchalantly telling the judge, regarding how many boys he’d killed, “It might have been thirty, it might have been forty. I really can’t remember the exact number.”
Later, denying raping one of his victims, he told one of their parents why, saying “I have my tastes, after all. Such an ugly creature, as, according to his photographs, your son must have been, I would never have taken to… Poor stuff like him… Such a youngster was much beneath my notice.”
That is some evil shit to say to the parents of a child you savagely killed.
Fritz made no attempt to hide his monstrous nature to avoid punishment or deny any of his crimes. He seemed strangely proud of them. He seemed to enjoy the attention he got from his trial.
Fritz begged for the death penalty instead of being put in an insane asylum. He said, “I want to be executed in the market-place. And on my tombstone must be put this inscription: ‘Here lies Mass Murderer Haarmann.’”
He told the court if he were to ever be released, he’d brutalize more children.
On the final day of trial he pleaded to the court, “Do you think I enjoy killing people? I was ill for eight days after the first time. Condemn me to death… I am not mad. It is true I often get into a state when I do not know what I am doing, but that is not madness… I will not petition for mercy, nor will I appeal. I just want to pass one more merry evening in my cell, with coffee, hard cheese and cigars, after which I will curse my father and go to my execution as if it were a wedding.”
Haarmann got his wish. He was sentenced to death and beheaded on April 15th, 1925. He died at the age of 45.
In his final moments, he stoically walked to his guillotine and never got emotional or seemed nervous.
His spoke his last words calmly - “I repent, but I do not fear death.” https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017HMAWSS/ ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
And THAT is why Karl Denke’s case never got much attention. As insane as it was, it wasn’t quite as sensational as the highly publicized evil deeds of Fritz Haarmann.
AND - Karl never had a trial. Never spoke about his crimes. Fritz spoke them at length.
Fritz’s trial ended on December 19th, just two days before Karl’s death.
And that takes to the end of this crazy look into a dark time in Germany’s history often forgotten because it was sandwiched between two even darker times - two world wars.
Let’s recap.
VI. Recap: Karl Denke - “The Cannibal of Ziębice. [zhome beet-suh]”
It’s believed he killed at LEAST thirty people.
Many think, based on the amount of remains found inside his apartment and around his apartment, the number is likely somewhere in the 40s. He might have forgotten to make some entries in that ledger of his.
He was probably too busy grilling up two pound butt steaks and then after he ate, he took a nap and forgot.
He killed from from as early as February 1903 all the way to December of 1924. He targeted both male and female victims, usually journeymen or homeless people, anyone who wouldn’t be missed by their families.
His most common methods of murder were beating with an axe, or strangulation.
And he operated out of his home town of Muensterberg, Silesia [ si-lee- zhuh]. Now Ziębice [zhome beet-suh]”, Poland.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/443899354/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder-karl- denke/
In the early 1900s, Germany produced a several cannibals. There were others in addition to Karl Denke and Fritz Haarmann.
And many of them got away with their crimes for years.
How?
It was a different time. A chaotic time.
It was also harder for police to catch people back then - they didn’t have modern surveillance technology and evidence gathering techniques.
What a strange place and time.
And we’ll be looking at it again laster this year when we suck today’s fifth takeaway, Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf Vampire.
So many vampires and werewolves.
So much cannibalism.
Imagine if one of these fuckers did this in your town? Lynze and I buy meat from a local farmer’s market every summer. I’ve bought meat from a family owned meat stand I’m told is pork or beef. I do that every year.
I don’t know those people. I just trust their telling me the meat is what I say it is.
We eat a German restaurant in town a couple times a month - Bier Haus - it’s our kids Kyler and Monroe’s favorite restaurant. They make their own sausage.
I don’t know what the fuck is actually in it. I think it’s beef and pork but it’s seasoned, and I put so much spicy mustard on it it could be people meat.
What if ten years from now I find out that the guy at the farmer’s market meat stand is a serial killer, cannibal, and he’s been selling human meat. What if they cook at the German restaurant has been doing that?
Would I throw up and have to steer clear of meat for awhile? What if I knew one of the victims, and I realized I’d possibly helped eat them?
Holy shit.
It’s so crazy that, odds are, hundreds if not thousands of Germans ate some of Frtiz’s or Karl’s human meat.
It’s a wild world.
How many other stories like this are out there?
Time now for today’s top five takeaways.
PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO
VII.Top Five Takeaways
1. Number One: Number one! Karl Denke grew up with various speech delays and learning disabilities. He didn’t start speaking until age seven, and he had trouble in school. His teachers called him an idiot, and complained that he defied authority and never listened. He never liked to socialize with the other children, and his brothers had to carry him back inside from recess because he didn’t want to go back to class.
Did any of this push him towards becoming a killer.
Doubtful.
Despite all these troubles in school, he probably had a relatively normal childhood. His parents didn’t seem to have abused him, and he had no extremely traumatic events happen to him in childhood like most serial killers.
Was it nature or nurture that led Karl to becoming a serial killer? Desperate times caused by hyperinflation? Was he born bad? A combination of both of these factors and others?
2. Number Two: Number two! Karl Denke had a license from the city and the Butcher’s Guild to sell secondhand clothing, leather goods, and meat at the local market. AND he went door to door selling clothing and meat to his neighbors.
How many bought either human meat from him or some fucked up piece of clothing - like some human skin suspenders with pubic hair still on them?
3. Number Three: Number three! Karl Denke was truly a butcher. A human butcher. He used every part of his victims’ bodies. He ate their flesh, used their skin to make suspenders, their hair to make string and shoelaces, and fat to make soap. His home butcher’s shop was highly organized, with jars full of various human parts that he prepped for himself to eat or turn into goods to sell.
4. Number Four: Number four! Vincenz [Vin-sens] Oliver, the man who was meant to be Denke’s latest victim, survived and got him arrested. Spot number 31 on Denke’s ledger was meant for Vincenz [Vin-sens], but he managed to escape the attempted murder and reported Karl to the police. The police also arrested Vincenz [Vin-sens] and sentenced him to ten days in jail for homelessness, a crime at the time in Germany.
THIS is the reason why another survivor never reported Denke.
He wanted to avoid jail time.
Crazy.
5. Number Five: Number five! New info! Another killer who was active a few years after Karl, but still from the interwar period, was Peter Kurten, the Dusseldorf Vampire.
We’ll be doing an episode on him later this year.
So many creepy dirtbags in Germany at this time.
Peter killed for 13 years, part of which overlapped with Karl Denke and Fritz Haarmann. Peter grew up in a family of abusers and criminals. His father raped his mother in front of the children, and also raped Peter’s sisters. Peter Kurten eventually raped his sisters as well to follow his father’s example.
His life is full of so, SO much darkness.
He spent his entire childhood and adolescence witnessing sexual abuse, and later participating in sexual abuse. He formed the connection early on between sexual violence and pleasure, and it fucking ruined him.
He developed intense fantasies about sadism, killing children, arson, and harming animals.
Shockingly, Peter was able to hide his extremely dark nature when he wanted to. He was well-liked by his community, even small children. He killed for several years until he settled down and got married. He was kind and loving to his wife, so much so that she didn’t believe him when he confessed his crimes to her. He never sexually abused or hurt his wife. Like many serial killer, he was a master of compartmentalization and led the perfect double life.
From February 1929 to 1930 he terrorized the city of Dusseldorf, earning himself the nickname the Dusseldorf Vampire. He stabbed men, women, and children, drank their blood, mutilated the bodies, and tossed them into the river.
A quick glance at a few sources also mention bestiality and cannibalism. So much cannibalism at this time in Germany.
Kurten was found guilty of murder and beheaded in July 1931.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017HMAWSS/ ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO
VIII.Final Announcements
A. Episode has been sucked!:
Karl Denke has been sucked. And Fritz Haarman got sucked a little bit as well.
And we even learned a little about inflation.
Strange topic and a strange episode.
Thank God these fuckers are the exception to the rule.
B. Thank you to Timesuck Team:
Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions Team for all the help in making Timesuck! Queen of Bad Magic Lynze Cummins, Reverend Doctor Joe Paisley, the Script Keeper Zaq Flannary, Sophie “Fact Sorceress” Evans, Bit Elixir, Logan the Art Warlock running BadMagicMerch.com. Running the the socials with Liz Hernandez!
Thanks to Olivia Lee Grace for digging up so many details for today’s topic.
Lot of people have been joining the new Cult of the Curious private Facebook group page - thanks to Liz Hernandez and her All Seeing Eyes helping run it. Thanks to others who have been downloading the free Subgroup Social Pack in the downloads section of our robust store.
So cool that there are awesome Cult of the Curious Subgroups out there, like Cooks of the Curious. Over 700 members in their exchanging grilling tips and shit. I love it not. Perfect for summer!
And Beefsteak and almost 10,000 meatsacks are on the Timesuck Discord channel.
C. Next Episode Preview: What’s on the docket for next week?
The Trail of Tears. Finally!
I say finally because this topic has almost but not quite won the Space Lizard Patreon topic vote probably ten times. Easily the topic that has almost won but not quite won far more than any other topic.
Lot of Meatsacks been waiting on this one. We’ll try and make the wait worth it and do it justice.
We’ve mentioned this historical topic several times but have never dedicated a full Suck to it.
The Trail of Tears refers to the march - the forced relocation that the Cherokee people undertook at gunpoint, beginning in May of 1838.
US Army troops, along with various state militia, moved into the tribe’s homelands and forcibly evicted more than 16,000 Cherokee Indian people from their homelands in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia.
The Cherokee name for the Trail of Tears literally translates to "The trail where they cried.”
Nearly a quarter perished on the way, with the remainder left to seek survival in a completely foreign land.
Imagine that? Even a worse overall situation than what we just went over in Germany.
And there were other tribes that would suffer the same forced relocation. So many more would undergo the same process— losing their land, possessions, and sometimes their lives on the hard journey.
Some tribes did try to resist.
The Seminole resistance in Florida was formidable, resulting in a war that began under Chief Osceola [ os-ee-oh-luh] and lasted into the 1840s.
The US would spend millions of dollars fighting the Seminole.
The Cherokees used legal action to resist. When the government of Georgia refused to recognize their autonomy and threatened to seize their lands, the Cherokees took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court and actually won a favorable decision.
But it wouldn’t be enough.
How did this happen? Why did it happen? What horrors did various tribes suffer on the road to relocation— and did people at the time know it was a bad thing?
Tune in next week for all of this and more.
D. Segue to Timesucker Updates:
And now let’s head on over to this week’s Timesucker Updates!
PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO
IX.Timesucker Updates
1. Starting off with new message regarding an old episode. Listening to the old Jonestown Massacre Suck helped save thankful meatsack Lizardboy Mcstuffins - birth name I’m guessing - from a terrible and real fucking cult-y job. Lizard boy writes!
Most Esteemed Lord Suckins, I’m a fairly recent convert to the Cult of the Curious, and still making my way through this INSANELY MASSIVE backlog of episodes just finished your suck on the Jersey Devil, but I’m writing in reference to an even older episode: The Jonestown Massacre.
While I may not have any information to add, I’d like to say that your reading of cult red flags at the end of the episode helped me get out of the worst job I’ve had in my life.
I was working for a family member, one excommunicated from the rest of my family for reasons I now understand.
His interactions with me and the rest of his employees - I was the last to leave - checked off 9 of the 10 warning signs you shared.
He kept me isolated from my friends and family, paid me just enough to keep me from starving - far less than someone of my skill level in our trade should be paid - and attempted control of every aspect of my life, far overreaching the boundaries of an employee-employer relationship, saying that he “knew what was best for me” and that “no one in my family truly had my best interests at heart.”
But I believed him.
I was completely convinced that this was my only future. That is, until I could see that his preaching of fear, manipulation of my life, and constant degradation were the ravings of a selfish egomaniac, abusing the last remaining member of his family, not only willing to put up with his shit, but blind to it.
I’m now enrolling in college - better late than never, majoring in a field I’m not only passionate about, but where there are numerous career opportunities that may help others in similar or worse situations.
I am eternally grateful - unless this totally blows up in my face, in which case, SUCK you, this is all your fault.
But seriously, thank you for your incredible show, thank you for putting out amazing, irreverent content, and thank you for creating the base on which the Cult of the Curious was founded.
Hail Nimrod! -Lizardboy McStuffins P.S. I’m not far enough along to know if shoutouts are still a free service - if it isn’t, that’s completely understandable. I’m sure you get a million a week, but I’d like to shoutout to the Suckers on the Forbidden App. Part of the ship, part of the crew.
So happy for you Lizardboy! And no - shoutouts are free here.
And also - at the risk of sounding like a HUGE BOOMER - what the fuck is the Forbidden App?
Is sounds fun! I hope I’m not promoting some kind of horrific snuff film app or something I don’t know about when I say that.
Seriously - glad you got out. That relative did sound like a shitty cult leader.
Hail Nimrod to you sir!
2. And now a cool message about staying connected from sweet Sack Samantha Gallery. Samantha writes:
Hello Master of the Suck! My name is Sam, and I just wanted to thank you!
A little about me- my husband serves in the United States Marine Corps and will be coming back home from an 8 1/2 month deployment soon!
Before he left, I was turned onto your podcast and shared it with him. Since he was unable to have cellphone usage during this deployment, he was only able to download a few of the episodes to listen to before he left. After he left, I listened to your podcast every night when I went to bed as it helped to keep my mind occupied from the emptiness of my bed and loneliness and worry I felt every night as I went to bed. Your episodes have kept me distracted and educated me on so much! When my husband has been able to call to talk, I often would tell him about the latest episode I’d listened to!
We both are eager to learn and be educated, and this podcast has let us do that. I appreciate you getting me through this long and difficult deployment as it was much easier than the one prior, when I had not been blessed with being introduced to the suck. I look forward to Monday every day, and can’t wait until my husband is home and we can continue listening to your show together! We hope if you ever tour again in San Diego, we can go. As always, hail Lucifina, praise Bojangles, and glory be to Triple M. Your Grateful Sucker, Sam
Sam! First off - thank your husband for his service from me. We here appreciate men and women like him doing whatever needs to be done to let jackasses like me say the shit I say and live in safe and secure nation.
I’m glad you both have something interesting to talk about with all the weird shit we cover. Sounds you like to learn as much as I do. I like the constant challenge of these topics. I like the side roads. Had no idea I’d learn something about economics when we picked a German cannibal. Feel like I kind of understand a little about how inflation works for the first time in my life now.
Enjoy that husband being home now. Praise Bojangles!
3. Quick and interesting Q Anon slash Antifa update now from Small Town Sucker Jason Wharton. Jason writes:
Dear Master sucker and insert ridiculous nickname here.
First don't beat yourself up so hard I think you did the Qanon/ Antifa suck amazingly. Should those subjects have not been put together?… yeah sure. Maybe should have included some of the few things that can be proven... ok yeah.
But you said it, it's hard to prove who is in Antifa and what they've all done.
I feel like our community tries to deal in hard facts when we can.
Now although Antifa isn't a complete scapegoat it seems they definitely are being used as one.
I live in a small town Iowa. We had a BLM protest and it went off with out a hitch thanks to the amazing organizers and our wonderful police department who were in step and kneel with us.
Leading up to this event we were threatened with violence and death on social media, and there were several fake reports of bus loads of Antifa being dropped off in town to work people up.
Just thought you'd like to hear an instant of them actually being used as the boogie man from a BLM supporting cop loving loyal Timesucker - yes you can be all three. Not sorry one fucking ball hair off Bojangles glorious nut sack for the length of this email.
Keep up the good work, long live the suck and keep on sucking.
Love that message, Jason! Yes - you sure can be someone who supports BLM and the police. I do too.
Resist the urge to be pushed into some confining this-is-how- you-need-to-think-about-all-this-shit little marketing box so various companies can sell you shit more easily and various politicians can count on you for votes.
Fuck that. I get get to a la carte my views from the left, right, and middle as much as I fucking want to and so do all of you.
Appreciate your message.
4. Now for a drug reform update from longtime sucker Jacquie Berry. Jacquie writes:
Hello Suckmaster Supreme and worshipper of the great God Nimrod!
I am super torn on this whole drug reform thing! For a really quick back story, I was raised by two addicts, lived a pretty rough life and even struggled with addiction myself. I have always been strong in my stance against drugs.
Until I heard your fucking stance and you made my last surviving brain cells start fighting. I love the idea of regulation and, as someone who is working towards a degree in medicine, I love the idea of being able to talk with patients and open doors for people to deal with addiction!
But here is where I struggle: addiction, no matter what type, is swarmed by never ending stigma. I have been told that my family members, as well as myself, are weak minded and weak willed because they “allowed themselves” to be addicted. I have lost friends and even some family members who have had the audacity to tell me that allowing addicts to die is better than treating them, because it weeds them out of the population.
This stigma ruins the ability of addicts to be open and seek help, even with health care providers. And even with legalization and regulations, the stigma will remain for a long long time. Alcohol has been legal since 1933, and there is still a massive stigma around people with an alcohol addiction. I have dealt with patients that I could smell alcohol on and are obviously having some type of withdrawal, but who have told me they haven’t drank in years.
People are afraid to be open, because they don’t want to be hated for being sick.
I guess I want to know how we can fight this? How do we fight a stigma that is burned into our society? I come from a place of fear for addicts, because even though death rates will go down, they will still be present. Considering my vow in life is to protect others lives and well being, I just can’t get past the lives lost!
Also, if you or someone you know is an addict, please please please get help. You’re not irreparable, you’re not replaceable and you deserve to live a healthy life. You have a sickness and you need to get help from people who want to give you a new chance at life! Reach out!
There are always resources.
Thank you for everything you do suck master! Thank you for constantly making my head hurt and making me think outside of my little echo chamber! Hail Nimrod and Praise Bojangles!
Jacquie B
What a great message Jacquie B!
Yeah - you’re right, there is a stigma with addiction and I think legalization and regulation is a great step in working towards destigmatization because there is also a stigma with felons. With criminals.
Removing THAT stigma from addicts I think helps remove the overall stigma. But much more will have to be done. Most government funded PSAs. More celebrities being open about addiction and treatment. More people like you sending in the kind of messages you just sent it.
Thanks for helping like you just did.
And thank you and everyone else from keeping me from falling into an echo chamber. So glad we have listeners from the left, middle, and right.
So important to be continually exposed to different view points.
5. Last message today is not an email - just some interesting message my cousin Matt Cummins texted me.
His mom and some of his other relatives - I’m related to his dad, his dad is my dad’s brother, so they’re both likely murderers - his relatives likely went to school with Angel’s Landing Cult Leader Daniel Perez down in Aransas Texas.
His mom’s brother’s wife remembers going to school with him. Says he dropped around 8th grade.
We get more and more messages like this now - people who know people who know the subjects we talk about. People who know the subjects directly.
If you have messages like this - some kind of personal connection to the topic in some way, send them in to either [email protected] or use the Timesuck app that now has a cool drop down menu to make sure updates go straight to me in the Contact Timesuck message feature.
Keep ‘em coming and Hail Nimrod!
PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO
X. Goodbye!
A. Goodbye!:
1. Thanks for listening to another Bad Magic Productions Podcast, Meatsacks.
Please don’t fucking eat anyone this week. Or any week. And don’t make pubic hair suspenders out of human skin. This week or ever. Don’t be a Denke. Just keep on sucking.
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Books:
Cannibal: The True Story of Karl Denke by Nathan Hayes Cannibal Killers: The Impossible Monsters by Moira Martingale
Websites: https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl.htm https://murderpedia.org/male.D/d/denke-karl-photos.htm https://www.inyourpocket.com/wroclaw/karl-denke-the-cannibal-killer-of- ziebice_72922f https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vmZ8ArHijQ http://www.denke.org/stowoe.htm http://www.denke.org/gazetae.htm https://thetruecrimedatabase.com/case_file/karl-denke/ https://killer.cloud/serial-killers/show/20/karl-denke https://www.newspapers.com/image/586961757/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://www.newspapers.com/image/443899354/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://www.newspapers.com/image/252682463/? terms=Karl%20Denke&match=1 https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2011/09/14/140419140/the- economic-catastrophe-that-germany-cant-forget https://www.history.com/news/germany-world-war-i-debt-treaty-versailles https://www.history.com/news/treaty-of-versailles-provisions https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-democracy/ primary-sources/weimar-economics https://www.histproj.org/completed/COX_War,%20Blockades, %20and%20Hunger.pdf https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/z8vt9qt/revision/4 https://freshhellpodcast.com/2019/06/05/episode-13-murder-karl-denke/
PAUSE IDIOTS OF THE INTERNET INTRO
XI.Idiots of the Internet
A. Today’s Video: