In: Jean Rises: Germany's Worst Serial Killers. Serial Pleasures Publishing, 2024
Foreword by Dr. Mark Benecke
Some find serial killers dazzling, attractive or strange.
Others need a counter-image to themselves that is so gruesome and undeniably bad, that their own outrages pale into insignificance.
Still others wonder why they were abused and tortured. Serial killers make the answers to these questions easy, as they are so clearly on their human-despising mission that even their own tormentors seem less complicated.
But what the world throws at serial killers and wants to see in them, they are not. They are lonely, deeply sad figures. And pushed. Shifty, too, but their most striking characteristic is their lack of commitment.
In their loneliness, serial killers don't know how to form deep and trusting bonds. They eat others, rape, torture, hunt, trick and lie. This is how they fill their emptiness.
But they don't realize that it would be warmer and calmer inside of them if they could experience beauty not in blood, bones and eventually fading screams, but hand in hand with people in the sunset, connected and peaceful.
Jeff Dahmer turned himself into a clown until his classmates found him too creepy. Peter Kürten hoped to hear his own blood rushing when he was beheaded, and my client Garavito sincerely believed that God and he could colonize a loving and understanding realm together.
For whatever reason you picked up this book: It is one of the most impressive experiences in criminalistics when and that we see that perpetrators like Samuel Little or Fritz Haarmann thaw out when we approach them as experts in - well, serial murder.
None of the killers in the time since Haarmann and Denke would have had to talk to us. The official rules did not originally provide for such conversations either. After the knowledge about serial killers, which had long been described in German-speaking countries, had sunk into oblivion, colleagues from the United States and, less well known, from the Soviet Union and Russia, discovered the power of comparative questioning in serial murder cases.
My colleague Robert Ressler, with whom I investigated a long series of murders in Mexico, gave me one of my later favorite pieces of advise in view of the often unexpected openness of many serial killers: "Don't ask for written permission in in such cases, because someone in the authorities might say no. Just do it. Go ahead and do it."
I have stuck to this rule and thank not only the offenders who help us with their statements to prevent the next crime (or at least make it less likely) by checking traces and stains.
I would also like to thank you, the readers, because without your attention to the offbeat subject and without your encouragement for the authors of reports on real cases, we would have fewer sources that span the ages and could therefore do less to prevent it.
Mark Benecke
Weimar, KL Buchenwald
Februar 2024
