Original subtitles

♪

-On November 17, 2006,

police in the German city of Cologne

searched the vehicle of a 47-year-old truck driver

suspected of murder.

What they found inside his cab

was a collection of gruesome memorabilia.

-When they searched the lorry, they found evidence

that this was not a one-off act.

There were Polaroid photographs of other victims.

There were trophies in the lorry.

-The driver was a man named Volker Eckert.

His arrest brought an end to a 32-year career of murder.

-Eckert was somebody who became much more skilled

at committing murder the longer that his killing went on,

so he had access, he had opportunity,

and he really honed his killing routine.

-The police have no idea just how many victims

this long-distance serial killer may have claimed.

-There will always be the question,

"Were there six dead women,

or were there 13 or even 19 or even more?"

-Back then, he was just beginning his brutal career.

I was incredibly lucky.

-Volker Eckert had terrorized Europe for decades

and become one of the world's most evil killers.

[ Theme music playing ]

♪

♪

♪

It was a case that spanned five European countries.

When 47-year-old truck driver Volker Eckert

was apprehended on the 17th of November, 2006,

the police had no idea

of the extent of his history of murder.

Eckert had been on the run for two weeks

after killing a Bulgarian prostitute

in the north of Spain.

When detectives searched the cab of his articulated lorry,

they found photographs and hair clippings

from five women whom he'd abducted and murdered

across Europe.

Eckert's defense lawyer was Alexander Schmidtgall.

-He confessed immediately after he got arrested by the police.

You have this quite often when you have serial killers

or when you have people who have a burden

carried with them for a long time.

It was like a relief for him to speak with someone

and to tell what he did to us,

so it was like a confession in a church for him.

-Schmidtgall couldn't believe the person he was talking to

was the same cold-blooded killer

he'd read about in the police files.

-So you think there's a monster in front of you,

but the actual communication with him,

he was a very normal guy.

He was like someone selling you life insurance.

He was nothing special.

-Prosecutors wanted to find out

what was going on inside the head of Volker Eckert.

He was sent off to be assessed by forensic psychologist

Professor Norbert Nedopil.

-He came from prison, guided by two policemen,

into my offices, and then he sat with me

for several hours alone without policemen

and without any handcuffs,

and we had a long and serious conversation,

sometimes sad,

sometimes for him, or frightening events.

Sometimes, also, were very nice and personal,

and even sometimes, we laughed together.

♪

-Eckert, who lived in the small town of Hof,

in Germany, had murdered his final victim

on November 2, 2006.

Local journalist Rainer Maier remembers the story well.

[ Man speaking German ]

-Volker Eckert's last victim was the prostitute

Miglena Petrova near Hostalric in Catalonia, North Spain.

He picked her up there and abused her in his lorry.

He spent another day driving around.

On the morning after, he dumped her at a nearby stone bridge.

On the way back from the stone bridge, he was caught on CCTV.

-Somebody was erecting CCTV cameras,

which hadn't been there before,

and just to test them, had panned.

One of the images it caught was Eckert's lorry,

and when the body that he dumped nearby was found,

almost the first place that police went was to look

at this entirely accidentally caught CCTV imagery,

which led them directly to Eckert.

-Eckert's job took him all over the continent.

A Europe-wide search was conducted,

and on November 17, 2006, detectives found him

and his truck at a car wash in Cologne.

-When they searched the lorry, they found evidence

that this was not a one-off act.

There were Polaroid photographs of other victims.

There were trophies in the lorry.

It was perfectly obvious that this was Eckert's lair.

Almost every serial killer, in one for or another,

has what's come to be known as a lair,

and in his case, it wasn't so much a flat

or a cottage or a house.

It was the cab of his lorry.

-After his arrest, Eckert immediately confessed

to a murderous career that had lasted for over 30 years.

It was the beginning of a huge international story.

[ Man speaking German ]

-There were five murders: three in Spain, two in France,

and from then on, it was a really hot story.

As a journalist, you don't have a serial killer very often,

and at that point, I tried to get as much information

as I could about this person.

-His story begins over 50 years ago.

♪

Volker Eckert was born in the small East German town

of Plauen on July 1, 1959.

From a very young age,

he developed a fascination with women's hair.

-When he was nine years old,

he started to be fond of the doll of his sister,

a doll which had long hair,

and he put it in front of him on his bed.

He was feeling sexual arousal

plunging his hands into the hair of this doll.

-We describe him as a trichophiliac.

This is somebody who gains sexual pleasure from hair,

essentially,

and I think he would have been aware of the fact

that this was something odd.

This was something out of the ordinary,

and I think that would have create a bit of a sense

of shame within him, so he was aware

that this was something that he had to keep hidden.

-As Eckert entered adolescence,

his parents' marriage began to break down.

-Well, he had quite a turbulent time during his teenage years.

His parents divorced, and he reacted really badly to this.

-The separation for him was influential

because the father had to leave the house,

and he said, "I swore to myself, that will never happen to me,

and I will not marry because I don't want to work all the time

and then be thrown out of the house,"

and he took sides with his father after that,

but he lived -- continued to live with his mother.

-He went off the rails, and one incident involved

taking his parents' car

and going off on a bit of a joyride,

and then he returned home,

and he was in a lot of trouble for that,

and it wasn't too long after that incident

that he actually went and physically attacked

and killed one of his classmates.

-In 1974, aged just 14,

Eckert experienced taking a life for the very first time,

but it wasn't until his arrest in November 2006,

over three decades later, that anyone knew about it.

[ Man speaking German ]

-Volker Eckert confessed to killing a classmate

and to disguising her murder as a suicide,

and that crime was not solved for years --

for almost 32 years.

-On May 7, 1974, Eckert had knocked on the door

of his 14-year-old school friend

and neighborhood, Silvia Unterdorfel.

Realizing her parents weren't home,

he took the opportunity of living out the fantasy

he had dreamed of since playing with his sister's doll

as a child.

-And then he thought, "Well, I have to do it

with a real girl,"

and he, of course, like many fetishists, they realize,

"They won't do it voluntarily with me,

so I have to force them."

-She was somebody who had very long, very beautiful hair,

and he developed a real fixation,

a real obsession, with her hair,

and he went to where she lived, her home,

and basically wormed his way in.

[ Man speaking German ]

-First, this girl only played a role in his fantasy,

as a victim,

but the point came when this fantasy wasn't enough anymore.

He wanted to do it.

He wanted to stroke her and then kill her.

-He started right away after she let him in, closed the door,

and he started getting at her throat

and started to strangle her, and when she was unconscious,

he plunged his hands into her hair.

-Even as a teenager, Eckert had the sophistication

to try and disguise the murder.

-He strangled her with a clothesline,

but he was quite cunning

because he thought he needs to cover this up,

so what he did is attach the end of the clothesline

to a door handle to make it look as if she'd killed herself.

-It is physically possible to hang yourself from a doorknob.

You don't have to have your full body weight on the neck,

and it's something that is occasionally seen,

although it's uncommon.

[ Man speaking German ]

-Just as her mother was getting home from work,

she walked in to find her dead daughter.

Of course, like with every unnatural death,

the East German investigational authorities began their work

and came to the conclusion that it was a suicide.

-At the end, Eckert managed to set up the scene

so cleverly that the police fell into his trap.

And for 32 years, right up until Volker Eckert's confession,

her parents had lived with the belief

that their daughter had taken her own life.

-At the time, the Spanish police were extremely proud

to have uncovered this series of murders.

They wanted publicity.

They wanted to be congratulated for their success.

They needed a pat on the back

and also wanted to show the public that it was all over.

Nothing like this would happen again.

We've caught this monster of the highway.

-Eckert admitted to the killings

of 21-year-old Nigerian Sandra Osifo in 2001

and Polish national Agneska Bos in 2006, both in France.

Journalist Francois Barrere could barely believe

the scale of the investigation.

[ Speaking French ]

-We realized that we were dealing with someone

who had been traveling the roads of Europe

for 10, 15 years

and that this person had possibly committed crimes,

certainly in many European countries.

A lot of journalists did the same as the police, namely,

questioning the existence of case files of unsolved crimes

that might match Volker Eckert's style of killing.

-Over the years, Eckert had developed a very familiar MO.

-They always started with strangling

and that the woman got unconscious,

that he felt the power, and he always spoke about

to see the consciousness go away from the eyes,

and this was his attraction, here, to have control

and to have power over another person

and to have the fetish with the female hair,

with long female hair.

-He was a man who had come to have a taste

for strangling the life out of women

who were not able to protect themselves.

He wasn't a particularly big man.

He wasn't a huge strong man, but he was wiry.

He was capable, and many of these young women

would not have expected to have been treated in this way.

-Strangling someone, the main thing that happens

is that the blood supply to the brain is cut off,

and once that's cut off,

then you will lose consciousness in the order of 10 seconds.

It takes a lot longer to actually die,

but you can render someone unconscious

very quickly by strangling them.

-Eckert was somebody who became much more skilled

at committing murder the longer that his killing went on,

so his first murder was quite opportunistic,

and it was somebody that he knew.

It was incredibly risky,

and I think he was very lucky to get away with that,

and I think he realized that his luck

was on his side at that time,

and in later years, he targeted sex workers

because I think there was an awareness there

that these people often go off the radar

for long periods of time.

They're a vulnerable group of people

who will get into your lorry willingly, so he had a access.

He had opportunity,

and he really honed his killing routine.

-Eckert knew that prostitutes were far less likely

to be reported missing immediately, if at all.

-Lorry driving was the perfect subterfuge

for a man who wished to kill women on the edge of society.

He wasn't picking famous people.

He wasn't picking rich people.

He was picking people who no one would miss.

-I think he had a real understanding,

a real knowledge of the sex-worker community,

of how transitory it is, of how temporary it sometimes can be,

and he realized that this was easy pickings for him.

It wouldn't require much effort to indulge his fantasies

and get away with them.

-After his arrest in November 2006,

Eckert had confessed to six murders in total.

He appeared to have a complete lack of empathy for his victims.

-He's speaking about tremendous,

horrible things and details of killing

or actually sexually abusing other women,

and there was no... Like, there was no fear.

There was no shivering.

There was no turning away of the eyes.

There was nothing like a reaction you would expect

if a normal person was telling this.

I was always asking, "How you felt when you killed the woman?

What did you do the day after?

Did you look in the newspaper? Did you think to the parents?

Did you think to the family of the girls?"

His emotions were missing.

He spoke about himself like a monster

who was not able to control himself

and that he has some defects. He knew this.

-Although he admitted taking the lives of six women,

Eckert still tried to separate himself from the murders.

-He spoke about himself in the third-person,

like he's building a distance between the Mr. Eckert

who was committing the crimes

and who was really doing horrible things,

and the person who was sitting here next to you

and speaking with you.

So I think this was the way for him to handle this

because to think that the person who was committing

the crimes is someone else

because otherwise you cannot live, you know?

You cannot live with this,

knowing that you are this monster.

-Detectives believe that Eckert had likely committed

many more murders over the previous 32 years.

[ Man speaking German ]

-So the investigators are

relatively sure that it was probably 13 cases in total,

even though it's not possible to prove this 100 percent.

And in a further six cases,

there was at least the possibility that it was him

because he was driving in the area.

-Eckert's movements as a long-distance lorry driver

were easy to track using fuel receipts,

GPS records, and details of where he had spent the night.

[ Man speaking German ]

-Investigators from the whole of Europe

dug out their old cases

and compared them with the movements of Eckert

that the police in Bayreuth had mapped out...

and they tried to find crimes that had taken place

when Volker Eckert was driving through this country.

-Scotland Yard came over to Germany to question.

Then there was the French police as well

because every police knew there's a serial killer,

so look at the cases where there was a woman sexually abused

and maybe this Mr. Eckert was nearby,

yeah, at the time she was killed.

-Investigating officers could link Eckert

to the murder of three more prostitutes

between 2002 and 2004 based on his movements:

one in France, one in Italy, and one in the Czech Republic.

Francois remember visiting a crime scene

that bore all the hallmarks of an Eckert murder.

-This was a prostitute

who worked near the entrance to a motorway in Montpellier

who disappeared one day and was found 300 kilometers

away in a motorway rest area near Montélimar.

That's in the area of going back up north,

so in other words, potential routes Volker Eckert

could have taken when, for example,

he returned from Spain to get back to Germany.

And this young woman, who had a... who was...

I remember because I used to see her

on my way to get a newspaper.

She had a very thick head of brown hair,

and we knew that Volker Eckert actually had a hair fetish,

and this young woman was found dead,

stripped naked in a motorway rest area 300 kilometers

from the place where she worked.

This matched Volker Eckert's modus operandi exactly.

He often moved the victims he had abducted somewhere

and killed somewhere else, disposing of the bodies

tens of kilometers away to cover his tracks.

-Back then, he also committed

several more crimes in Plauen.

He waylaid women during the night,

threw them to the ground and strangled them

but didn't kill them.

-Eighteen-year-old Eckert was jailed for a year

for sexual assault

after he was caught strangling a woman in 1978,

but it did not curtail him.

Between 1979 and 1987, he assaulted dozens more women.

-He had attacked several of them.

He talked about 30 women in the dark

so that they wouldn't recognize him without killing them.

He strangled them.

He gripped into their hair,

and then he went home and masturbated.

That was for several years, or more than two at least,

but he said 30, maybe more,

attacks against women like that in his hometown.

-There are no official records

of how many women survived or died after Eckert's attacks.

He was finally stopped in 1987

after he assaulted two women in Plauen

and left them for dead.

Both were able to identify him to police.

One of those women,

whose name we have changed to protect her identity,

is Claudia, who was only 16 at the time.

[ Speaking German ]

-I was on the way home from a party together with my friend.

I took her home first

and wanted to walk the rest of the way by myself.

As I continued to walk alone,

I noticed after around 100 meters

that somebody was following me.

When I walked faster, the person behind me also walked faster,

and when I slowed down, also he was slowing down.

At that point, I already felt a bit threatened,

so I grabbed my bunch of keys,

hoping to be able to defend myself.

Maybe I could hit him in the case.

He suddenly came up behind me at a crossroads

and pushed me to the ground.

Then he put his hands around my neck and choked me.

I then tried to defend myself, but he was stronger, heavier,

more powerful.

I had no chance.

I tried to play dead in the hope that he would let go,

but that didn't work.

He knelt on top of my legs,

so there was no chance for me to move anywhere.

He was strangling me with his hands.

I really struggle to describe it, this pain and the pressure.

It was very brutal and incredibly violent.

At that moment, I gave up my life.

That was it.

I knew it was over.

I saw a tunnel with a white light at the end of it.

It was really like that, a near-death experience.

♪

-Incredibly, Claudia survived the attack

and was able to give a detailed description

of her attacker to the police.

-To this day, I still can't forget his face.

-Eckert had applied to leave communist East Germany behind

and move to the freedom of the West,

but when a drawing of Claudia's description of his face

was distributed amongst the police,

an officer recognized him, and he was immediately arrested

before he could flee the country.

-The day of his court hearing arrived,

when he was about to be convicted.

He was sitting only a few meters away from me,

and suddenly he apologized to me.

For me, well, there can be no excuse for a crime like this.

-In 1988, Eckert was sentenced to 12 years in prison

for attempted murder.

During his time behind bars,

he underwent therapy for his sexual deviance,

which the prison authorities saw as a success.

-The doctor or the psychologist

who saw him was very certain

that Volker Eckert could control his sexual urges from then on,

and this was apparently supposed to have been ensured,

as he was supposed to undergo more therapy

when he made it out of prison, but he didn't do it.

-Unbelievably, Eckert served just six years of his sentence,

and in 1994, he was released into the world yet again,

and he headed straight for the woman

who had put him behind bars.

[ Woman speaking German ]

One night, he was standing in front of my door.

He rang the bell wearing a boiler suit,

one of these blue ones, and said,

"There is a burst pipe. You must let me in."

I had a little peep hole in the door,

a tiny, little hole where I could look through,

and there I recognized him.

I did not open the door, but I know it was him.

He tried to find me.

I don't want to know what he wanted to do with me.

Now it's over, thank God,

but he definitely wanted to attack again.

-By 1994, the Berlin Wall had fallen,

and Eckert was free to travel wherever he wanted.

-After he got out of prison, he was able to slip

through the net of the authorities.

He was able to give them as much as they wanted,

but not too much, to see that there is a dangerous person

who is still dangerous for the society.

He was still running through life with this...

Yeah, let's call it disease, with these criminal obsessions.

-I felt sorry for the women

because, one, he had been in prison,

psychologists and other similar professionals

would have actually realized

that he was still a danger to society,

but because of the reunification of Germany,

he was released, and nobody seemed to care.

Even though he was a tried murderer,

he was let go without any sort of assessment,

and the women could all still be alive

if only someone had acted differently.

-Eckert settled in the small town of Hof,

just 20 miles from Plauen.

[ Man speaking German ]

-So he had landed on his feet

in Hof and settled in well and was well-liked.

His landlady also said

she had rarely encountered such a nice tenant,

and everyone was completely flabbergasted

when they found out just what sorts of crimes Volker Eckert

had committed despite everyone considering him

to be a nice guy.

-By 1999, 40-year-old Eckert had taken a job

as a long-distance lorry driver,

a profession that suited the killer perfectly.

-It allows them to go off the radar

for quite extended periods of time.

They work unsupervised.

They don't answer to anybody,

and they have these long stretches of time to ruminate

and to basically get lost in their own thoughts,

so that creates an environment

in which their fantasies start to become a reality,

and then when they do offend,

we often find that they can dump the bodies of their victims

in a completely different police jurisdiction

to the one that they picked them up in,

and that creates something called linkage blindness

within the police who are investigating these crimes.

They don't always connect them immediately.

-When police finally caught up with him in 2006,

Eckert's truck was like a shrine to his victims.

Photos and hair clippings had been collected in his cab.

-They were his trophies, if you like,

along with hair and various other things.

They represented, for him, the reason.

The body itself was disposable,

but that memory and that lock of hair or locks of hair

were his explanation to himself about why he was doing it.

That was what he was there for.

-He also made notes of the details of each crime

on the back of these Polaroid pictures

so that he could later remind himself

of what had happened in each attack.

He kept the prostitutes' hair in little plastic bags,

having cut it off after the crime.

He kept items of clothing,

but the owners of some items of clothing

still haven't been determined today.

-What caught our attention straightaway

was the fact that the killer was a fetishist.

In other words, this was someone who kept souvenirs

of their crimes,

who took things from their victims,

including locks of hair, things like that,

keeping things, souvenirs, fetishes,

keeping them in a kind of... like some kind of treasure.

He is the kind of character you don't find too often

in European crime stories,

and in this case, we were almost imagining a film character.

-He created a little repository, essentially,

and this is something that's quite common for serial killers,

and it serves several functions for them,

so it enables them to relive their crimes,

to revisit that moment when they were all-powerful

and fully in control,

but it also acts as a bit of a stimulus to do it again,

so it really is a vicious circle when it comes to trophies.

-Most criminals get rid of any evidence

that could link them to their victim.

This guy, he kept it all, and that alone is something

you hardly ever see in criminal cases.

-Prosecutors had sent Eckert to be assessed

by forensic psychologist Professor Norbert Nedopil,

and the killer seemed to open up during the sessions.

-In the end he said, "Well, for several months,

I was very withdrawn in myself.

Now I could even laugh, and I was free."

He said, "I'm glad I talked to you."

The three or four days that we were together, he said,

"I slept better.

I talked better. I was more relaxed than usual."

-Professor Nedopil analyzed Eckert's psychological condition

for the upcoming court case.

-The actual conclusion is that he is psychiatrically a sadist,

a sadism developed from fetishism,

and this, in the legal sense, is a mental disorder,

and this mental disorder would lead to a diminished

responsibility concerning the sexual acts

but not the killings that have been done to prevent detection

and that he would be a repeat offender,

and if released, even after a prison sentence,

would not stop.

-He was really preoccupied

with what other people thought of him,

and he was being portrayed in a way

that he didn't think was fair.

He's been committing these crimes for over 30 years,

and I think he's developed quite a grandiose sense of self,

and when he's reduced to the label of a monster,

he's really not happy about that at all.

-For local journalists in Hof,

the trial of this perverse killer,

due to take place in the local courthouse,

was set to be a huge story.

[ Man speaking German ]

-Every headline is good for a newspaper,

and every spectacular story is good for a newspaper,

and it isn't the newspaper's fault that it interests people,

but everything that isn't normal stirs people,

and if someone living in a community finds out

that the nice uncle was not actually the nice uncle

that everyone thought he was,

but a perverse serial killer, then that stirs people, too.

And then they want to know as much as possible about it,

and we're there for the purpose of delivering that information.

-While waiting for his trial in custody,

Eckert had lost the support of his family.

-I remember very well. He was very desperate

that he had completely lost the contact to his family

because his sister was always a very important point

of contact for him through his whole life,

and she didn't want to have contact with him.

[ Man speaking German ]

-He was sitting inside his cell in the prison of Bayreuth

and had a lot of time to think.

On his 48th birthday, the 1st of July, 2007,

he knew that he would be officially charged with murder

within the next few days.

Nobody came to see him that day.

His sister didn't visit, and neither did his brother.

-It all became too much for him.

On the night of his 48th birthday,

July the 1st, 2007,

Volker Eckert was left alone in his cell.

The following morning, his body was found hanging from the bars.

-He was all alone,

and during the night, he brought justice to himself

and hanged himself in the cell.

-It would seem rather strange that here we have somebody

who was obsessed with harming other people by strangulation

and he makes a decision to take his own life by the same means,

and it is a way to end your life when you're in prison,

and it's not difficult to get ahold of items

to achieve that outcome.

-Eckert's death meant he would escape justice.

It came as a surprise to the people

who had got to know him better than most.

-I talked to him about suicide on several occasions,

and he said several times, "I am a coward. I won't do it,

but I know that I have no chances."

If you ask me how I feel -about him,

I cannot say I like him, but you're a human being,

and you are in contact with this man.

I never see him killing someone.

I only read this, but you have contact.

You see him twice, three times a week,

and you see how he's reacting and you feel how all the court,

all the authority of the state is against him,

how the press is calling him a monster, a murder.

In this way, he doesn't deserve this treatment

also in the public, and he deserves, for sure,

a fair trial and to defend him as best as you can,

and I felt sad when I heard that he killed himself

because you develop a relationship,

also, with your clients in prison,

especially when you take over the case for such a long time.

You develop a relationship,

and he ended this in a way that...

Yeah, like he ended other lives, he ended his own life himself.

-Claudia, who survived a brutal attack by Eckert in 1987,

had been planning to attend his trial.

[ Claudia speaking German ]

-When I got a call from a journalist telling me

that Volker Eckert had killed himself,

my first thought was,

"Coward -- a coward who is dodging responsibility

for the gruesome acts he committed."

After a considerable amount of time,

I was then running out of accusations.

I had come to terms with the situation,

and was even glad that he had killed himself

because this gruesome human could no longer hurt anyone.

-On the one hand, I believe

it was simply the best solution and the fairest solution,

as if he wanted to say, "I'm taking my own life,

just like the lives I have already taken."

But on the other hand, a lot of things

that haven't yet been explained will never be clarified.

-There were many questions still to be asked

about Volker Eckert's crimes.

His death means they will remain unanswered.

[ Man speaking French ]

-I has a feeling of frustration above all.

I knew that Volker Eckert's death meant the end

of any investigations

that could have been reopened on the old case files,

that no one was interested anymore...

And which had only reappeared in police and media news.

In this end, these mysteries would never be solved,

and that is what's truly shocking

about the death of Volker Eckert,

that those victims will never be granted justice.

-In December 2007, five months after his death,

police closed the file on Volker Eckert.

The Europe-wide investigation was over.

[ Man speaking German ]

-He could remember many of his crimes very well,

and, indeed, very precisely.

Surely that would have been a massively exciting trial

for the press,

and, of course, also for the readers

who would have wanted to keep up with the news.

The trial would have taken months,

with enormous coverage from international media

because the crimes had been committed across half of Europe.

-Just how many helpless women

were killed at the hands of Eckert may never be known.

-I am quite sure that there was no gap of time

where he didn't do anything,

so because he always spoke about himself as someone

who is not able to control the desire and his obsessions,

so if you ask my personal opinion,

I think there's a high percentage

that he did more than he admitted to, yes.

-There will always be the question,

"Were there six dead women,

or were there 13 or even 19 or even more?"

He has taken this mystery with him forever.

-There have been estimates of 22 across Europe:

France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Spain.

He was relentless,

and he was successful

in evading the attentions of the police

for a very considerable period of time.

-The shadow of Volker Eckert remains

not just over the women he murdered

but also the ones that got away.

-There will always be a part of me

that will probably never forget.

I can't imagine it.

I experienced it.

I know what I had to go through.

-Volker Eckert was a relentless predatory serial killer

preying on vulnerable women.

He took pleasure in it.

He took a great deal of sexual satisfaction from it.

He was a man who deserves the epithet evil.

-Eckert was a callous murderer

who showed no remorse for his actions.

He took the life of a 14-year-old girl

for his own gratification

before embarking on a 32-year-long killing spree.

It will never be revealed

exactly how many young women he murdered.

By cowardly taking his own life,

Volker Eckert robbed many families of justice

and proved himself to be one of the world's

most evil killers.

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