Joachim Kroll Murders
By: Tiara Memeh
About My Killer
Classification: Serial killer
Characteristics: Cannibalism - Rape - Mutilation
Number of victims: 13 +
Date of murders: 1955 - 1976
Date of arrest: July 3, 1976
Date of birth: April 17, 1933
Victims profile: One man / Girls and women
Method of murder: Stabbing with knife - Strangulation
Location: North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Status: Sentenced to 9 terms of life-imprisonment on April 8, 1982. Died in prison on July 1, 1991
Joachim Georg Kroll (17 April 1933 - 1 July 1991) was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the Ruhr Cannibal, Ruhr Hunter and the Duisburg Man-Eater. He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a total of 13.
Method and Motive
Capture and Trial
Kroll was arrested for kidnapping and killing a four-year-old girl named Marion Kettner. As police went from home to home, a neighbor approached a policeman and told him that the waste-pipe in his apartment building had blocked up, and when he had asked his neighbor, Kroll, whether he knew what had been blocking the pipe, Kroll had simply replied; "Guts". Upon this report, the police went up to Kroll's apartment and found the body of the Kettner girl cut up: some parts were in the fridge, a small hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water with corm and potatoes and the intestines were found stuck in the waste-pipe.
Kroll was immediately arrested.
Trial and death
He admitted killing Marion Kettner and gave details bragging of 14 other murders and one attempted murder over the last two decades.
Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery bills. In custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted murder. In April 1982, after a 151-day trial, he was convicted on all counts and was given nine life sentences.
He died of a heart attack in 1991 in the prison of Rheinbach, near Bonn.