Pommerenke, Henry

Heinrich Pommerenke was born on July 6, 1937 in Bentwish . Previously, he spent his childhood in Rostock , where his father worked in the port. Pommerenke had a sister. The father of the future killer died at the end of the war . In 1949, Pommerenke's mother moved to Switzerland, leaving her children in the care of her grandparents. In 1953, Pommerenke graduated from art school and committed the first rape of a girl. When he was put on the wanted list, he fled to West Berlin , where he was nevertheless caught by supervisory authorities and sent to his mother for living in Zurich . A year earlier, his sister had moved there.

Pommerenke managed to find work at a market in the city of Schaffhausen , but was soon again detained by police on charges of raping a girl. The court failed to prove his direct involvement in the crime, but by decision of the local authorities he was deported to Germany with a ban on entry into Switzerland for a period of 10 years. ^[1] For some time, Henry lived in the city of Bregenz , where he also became suspected of having committed several thefts and a series of rapes and moved to Hornberg .

Assault and Kill Series

As he later admitted, already during interrogation by the police, Pommeranke himself came up with the idea of ​​killing women after watching the Ten Commandments movie, when Pommeranka, in his own words, suddenly realized that women are “the root of all problems” and decided to start “cleaning the world”. On the same evening , February 26, 1959, he committed the first murder raped and cut the throat of 49-year-old Hilde Counter in the city of Durlach .

In March 1959, Pommerenke robbed and raped 18-year-old Katherine Ward in an abandoned building on the outskirts of Khorenberg. Her body was discovered in late March on the banks of the Gutakh River. On May 30, 1959, Pommerenke in the city of Singen , entered the room of an 18-year-old girl through a window, after which he tried to rape and strangle her, but she managed to resist the maniac and raise a cry, as a result of which Pommerenka was frightened and hastily retreated from the scene of the crime . The girl was able to give a detailed description of the criminal, but the police did not associate this attack with the previous two murders.

The very next day, on May 31, 1959, Pommerenke sat on the train station in Heidelberg, the next one to the Italian Riviera killed 21-year-old Dagmar Klimek with a knife in the chest in one of the cars, after which he threw her body out of the train and calmly pressed the stop-crane and got out he dragged the body out of the car behind a railway embankment, where he committed sexual intercourse with him . Despite the pressed stop-crane, Pommeranke managed to disappear unnoticed, and Klimek's body was found by trackmen only on June 5, 1959 .

On June 2, 1959, Pommeranke at the Triberg im Schwarzwald railway station attacked a 25-year-old cafe worker, the offender beat her with a wooden stick and robbed and then disappeared, the victim managed to survive, but she did not remember the face of the attacker. Already on June 6, while in the city of Karlsruhe, a criminal riding a bicycle attacked two women in a park and stabbed them and then disappeared, the women managed to survive. On the night of June 8, 1959, Pommeranke entered through the window into the room of a 15-year-old girl and tried to rape and strangle her, but the victim raised a cry that her father ran to. The frightened maniac hastily retreated from the scene of the crime for the first time leaving his fingerprints . The next day , June 9, Pommeranke raped and killed 16-year-old Rita Walterspacher in Baden-Baden, leaving her body in a forest belt that was discovered the next day.

Meanwhile, on June 10, 1959, the offender entered a weapons store in Baden-Baden and stole a small-caliber pistol and a semi-automatic rifle of a small caliber there as well. On June 18, 1959, threatening Pommeranke with stolen weapons with a mask on his face, he robbed a railway ticket office at Durlach station in the amount of 540 marks , then he got on the train and left for Khorenberg, where he took his previously left suit from the tailor. In addition, by chance, he forgot the bag in the room, which contained a pistol and a rifle that he had previously stolen from an arms store. Pommeranke also made a fatal mistake by registering with a tailor an order for his personal passport data.

Arrest and trial

Shortly after leaving Pommeranke, a tailor by the name of Schneider noticed a packet accidentally left by the criminal and, learning about its contents, decided to call the police. By that time, the law enforcement authorities had already linked up attacks on women, breaking into an arms store and robbery at the railway ticket office, so the police tailor who arrived at the scene provided the details of the person who had forgotten the package, and on the afternoon of June 19, 1959, 22-year-old Heinrich Pommeranke was detained on the peron of the Hornberg railway station where the train was waiting.

The practical criminal immediately began to confess and in total admitted his guilt in committing 65 crimes since 1953, including four murders, seven attempted murders, 27 rapes, five cases of robbery and several cases of hacking, and more than two dozen theft. The trial of Heinrich Pommeranke began on October 3, 1960 , and on October 22, 1960 the Freiburg im Breisgau District Court found him guilty of 4 murders, 7 attempted murders and 16 other other criminal offenses, and sentenced him to 6 terms of life imprisonment and an additional 165 years in prison with the right to parole after 15 years .

From 1960 to 2006, Heinrich Pommeranke was held in a special regime prison in the city of Bruchsal . During his imprisonment since 1975, he filed petitions for pardon or review of the case several dozens of times, but each time Pommeranka was refused with the wording “due to the special gravity of the crimes committed and the prisoner's exceptional danger to society”.

In July 2006, in connection with leukemia discovered in Pommeranke, the offender was transferred to a specialized hospital at the Heilbronn prison. A year later, he was transferred to another hospital at the Gogenasperg prison, where he died of leukemia on December 27, 2008 . At the time of his death, he was the criminal who spent the longest time in custody of all those convicted in Germany , having spent a total of 49 years, 6 months and 8 days in custody. In 2012, his record was broken by another killer, Hans Nyman, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1963 for double murder.