Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
One of the most mysterious cases in German criminal history is the murder of the ballet master Hans Storck. It was 22 May 1962 when 13-year-old Axel Rumpf von Mansfeld, who was staying with his grandmother for a few days at her flat at 22 Hegelstraße in the west of Stuttgart, was woken in the night by a blood-curdling scream. Startled, he sat up, but as he heard nothing more, he thought he must have dreamt the scream and lay back down. At around 4.30 am, Fanny Großhans was out delivering newspapers, as she was almost every day. She suddenly noticed smoke coming from a flat at 22 Hegelstraße. She immediately rang the doorbells of the residents. Just five minutes later, the emergency call came in to the fire brigade. As the smoke was coming from the flat of the subtenant, Hans Storck, Hans Wruck – the landlady’s son-in-law – rang his doorbell. When Storck didn’t answer, he kicked the door in before the emergency services had even arrived. When he entered the flat, there was a huge pile of clothes on the bed, and countless candles had been placed around it. The sight was rather eerie. By then, the fire brigade had arrived on the scene and found Hans Storck’s body beneath the mountain of laundry, with a hot iron lying amongst it. The post-mortem revealed that Hans Storck had been suffocated following a scuffle. Two wine glasses and an empty bottle of 1959 Beaujolais were found in the flat; the label bore fingerprints that did not belong to Hans Storck. He had had a visitor before his death. Alongside Hans Storck’s white poplin coat, size 44, his wallet and keys were missing. But who could have murdered the reclusive 64-year-old ballet master Hans Storck? The investigators focused on his life. Hans Storck had been born on 11 August 1897 in Magdeburg as Hans Ewald Storch. After training as a dancer, he worked at the Wilhelmstheater in Magdeburg and at Circus Busch in Berlin. In 1925, he performed for a year as a solo dancer at the Stuttgart State Theatre. Due to professional differences with his superior, the dance mistress Walcher, he moved to Zurich, where he made a name for himself as a ballet master. In 1938, he moved to Görlitz and married a dancer named Ella. Accused of inciting a boycott and poaching a dancer, Storck was imprisoned from 4 November to 11 February 1956. Upon his release, Hans Storck, now a widower, fled to Stuttgart to stay with friends. The capital of Baden-Württemberg became Hans Storck’s new home, and from then on he lived on the brink of the subsistence level, taking on odd jobs. He came to the attention of the police in 1959 for sexual offences involving male prostitutes and in 1962 for bar fraud. Most recently, Hans Storck had been working at the Savoy nightclub in Stuttgart’s Stephanstraße, where he gave dance lessons to women. However, he was sacked two days before the murder. On that day in May, Hans Storck had first visited a watchmaker before spending time at the Café Orient on Hindenburgbau between 5.00 pm and 6.45 pm. At around 9.00 pm, he had visited the fast-food restaurant Picnic on Fritz-Elsas-Straße, where he presumably encountered his murderer. A witness had seen him there with a man aged between 23 and 28, 1.75 to 1.80 metres tall, of slim build, with wavy dark hair and a southern European appearance. The man had spoken German and French. Hans Storck had gone back to his flat with this unknown man at around 11.35 pm. This had been observed by a tenant standing at the window. After the two had drunk a bottle of wine in the flat, an argument must have broken out between them – perhaps over the money for the agreed sexual encounter? In any case, his encounter with the young man, who was presumably a migrant worker, had cost Hans Storck his life. Despite a reward of 2,000 marks for information leading to the perpetrator, offered by the public prosecutor’s office and the city of Stuttgart, the perpetrator could not be apprehended. Even an appeal for witnesses on 30 May 1962, issued in three languages, proved fruitless. To this day, Hans Storck’s murderer has not been found, and with every year that passes, the chance of ever finding him dwindles. However, as there is no statute of limitations for murder, there remains hope that, thanks to the fingerprints found, this cold case might yet be solved.
