Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
Prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, which is still frowned upon by the public today, but continues to be secretly practiced. This double standard was particularly evident when the high-class prostitute Helga Matura was murdered in 1966. For weeks, the media reported on the dissolute life of Helga Matura, who sold her body to strange men, and how the high-class prostitute Rosemarie Nitribitt was murdered in her apartment in 1957. Helga Matura was found dead on December 26, 1966, in her four-room apartment on Gutleutstraße in Frankfurt with 16 stab wounds to the back of her neck. At the time of her death, she was 32 years old and wanted to leave the entertainment industry. She had become engaged to Rainer Gutherz, who was ten years her junior, and wanted to start a middle-class life with him in Munich. But that was not to be. Helga Sofie Matura was born on August 19, 1933, in Bottrop. Her father was a waiter who later ran a small tobacco shop. Her mother was a housewife. After elementary school, the pretty brunette Helga trained as a milliner and wanted to leave the coal mining region as soon as possible. At the age of 19, she married Horst Wanders, a merchant from Düsseldorf. Shortly afterwards, she gave birth to a child who died of pneumonia at the age of five months. The marriage broke down and Helga got divorced. In 1957, she moved to Luxembourg, where she worked as a barmaid and dancer and had breast augmentation surgery to earn more money. She then went to Beirut and became the mistress of Saudi Prince Hussein, whose initials she had burned onto her right thigh. In 1961, she wanted to open a judo school in Karlsruhe, but decided on the spur of the moment to move to Frankfurt am Main. She became a second Nitribitt, who was considered the uncrowned queen of Frankfurt’s nightlife and bore great similarities to Nitribitt. Like her, she had a penchant for luxury cars. Unlike Nitribitt, she did not drive a black Mercedes-Benz 190 SL with red leather seats, but a white Mercedes-Benz 220 SE, which she used to pick up customers on Frankfurt’s Kaiserstraße. Helga Matura loved luxury and fulfilled her clients’ desires in her 7,000-mark four-poster bed, where her angora cat Désirée and her tomcat Casanova usually romped around. Her clients were mainly wealthy businessmen, whom Karin, as Helga called herself, also pampered with bizarre sexual practices. Was Helga’s murderer perhaps a sex offender? The homicide division followed over 400 leads, but neither her murderer nor the murder weapon have been found to this day. The murder of Rosemarie Nitribitt, who was the same age as Helga Matura and was first knocked down and then strangled, has also never been solved. The fact is that Helga Matura’s business was extremely lucrative; the woman, who owned over 50 pairs of shoes, left her mother more than half a million German marks. A small fortune at the time, but it was of no use to her, as someone had killed her with 16 knife wounds. A happy ending with her fiancé remained out of reach. To this day, the world’s oldest profession is booming. Unfortunately, the dream of Pretty Woman, one of the greatest romances in film history, in which a rich businessman falls madly in love with a prostitute, would probably never have existed without Disney. Because, sadly, the reality is different. But what would the world be without dreams?
