Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
One serial killer who murdered out of pure greed was Maximilian Gufler, who went down in Austrian post-war history as the Bluebeard of St. Pölten. Like the fairy-tale king Bluebeard, he killed his wives out of greed. Max Gufler was born on May 1, 1918, and at the age of 9 suffered a serious skull injury in an accident, which led to unpredictable outbursts of violence. During World War II, he worked as an ambulance driver for the Wehrmacht on frontline missions. While doing so, he was injured again in the head by shrapnel. From then on, his outbursts of rage became uncontrollable and turned him into a cold-blooded serial killer. After the war, he lived as a bookseller in the Lower Austrian town of St. Pölten, where he met the daughter of a tobacconist in 1951 and soon married her. Max Gufler sold illegal pornographic photos in his father-in-law’s kiosk, which landed both him and his father-in-law in prison. After his release from prison, he had become infected with the criminal virus and committed his first murder on 50-year-old prostitute Emilie Meystrzik, who was found with her skull crushed in a flophouse in Vienna’s red-light district in Leopoldstadt, the 3rd district of Vienna. The eloquent Max Gufler earned his living as a washing machine salesman, whose favorite hobby was responding to marriage ads from wealthy, older women. Once they had fallen for the marriage swindler, he killed the women as soon as he had gotten his hands on their fortune. Between March 1952 and October 1958, he promised marriage to countless women. Once he had their possessions, he took them on a trip and mixed the sleeping pill Somnifen into their liqueur. He then undressed the unconscious victim and threw her into a lake to make it look like suicide. In the summer of 1958, Max Gufler was arrested on suspicion of murdering 47-year-old Maria Robas. Max Gufler had had Maria Robas’ loan paid out by a master butcher. However, the butcher wanted the registration certificate for his car, a green DKW, as collateral. This led the police to Max Gufler, who, after a house search, was found to have murdered 18 women. But it was not only women who fell victim to Max Gufler, but also two men. In 1951, Max Gufler shot jeweler Karl Kovaricek in order to rob his store. On October 23, 1957, he gave jewelry dealer Richard Wagner a drink laced with somnifene and ran him over with his car in Tullnerfeld in order to steal his jewelry. However, both men survived. On May 5, 1958, Max Gufler, who could only be proven guilty of four murders and two attempted murders, was sentenced to life imprisonment. In order to convict him, Viennese forensic scientists developed a new procedure that identified two sleeping pills separately and individually. Max Gufler died of stomach cancer at the age of 56 in Stein prison on August 9, 1966.
