Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
Horst David was a true wolf in sheep’s clothing who went down in German criminal history as the Strangler of Regensburg. Horst David was an unassuming man who worked as a painter, was married, had two sons, and lived in the small village of Hainsacker near Regensburg. This man, who led an almost bourgeois life, turned out to be a seven-time murderer of women. Horst David was considered a nice neighbor, but his excursions into the red-light district, where he squandered his hard-earned money, did not quite fit with his image as a respectable man. Ultimately, this also led to the failure of his unhappy marriage. Horst David was born in Breslau in 1938 as an illegitimate child; his father was unknown. At the age of five, he was placed in a children’s home after being found alone on a train platform in Hof with a name tag around his neck. It was 1944, in the middle of World War II, so it was assumed that the boy had been left behind while fleeing. When he was nine, his mother was located through the children’s home. However, she did not want close contact with her son and did not take him in. He committed his first murder in Munich in 1975. His victim was 24-year-old prostitute Waltraud Frank, whom he visited in her Schwabing apartment on August 22. After sex, they got into an argument because she demanded more money for her services. When she started screaming, he squeezed her throat until she was dead. He then took her earnings, returned to his hotel room, showered, and went dancing. Just two days later, he used the services of 23-year-old Fatima Grossart, who worked under the stage name Soraya and was considered the most beautiful call girl in the city. He also got into an argument with her about payment, and when she screamed, he strangled her. He stole her money as well. Horst David then returned to his normal life in Hainsacker. The police initially assumed it was a pimp war, and Soraya’s husband, the well-known artist agent Klaus Grossart, came under the investigators’ scrutiny. He had met the most expensive call girl on the Isar in 1972 in a brothel in Las Palmas, taken her to West Germany, and married her in Tondern in 1974. He found her clients through advertisements in Munich daily newspapers. Grossart was charged with murder but acquitted. Almost 19 years passed. The murder cases had long since been closed. Then a hot lead to the perpetrator emerged, which led to Horst David. In 1993, 85-year-old Mathilde Steindl, Horst David’s neighbor, was strangled. Although fibers from her clothing were found on Horst David’s undershirt, nothing could be proven against him. However, the fingerprints he had submitted proved to be his undoing. In 1994, the automated fingerprint identification system was used for the first time. It accessed all archived fingerprints since 1947 and compared them with traces found at crime scenes. A match was found with Horst David’s fingerprints, which had been found on a glass in the apartment of his first murder victim, Waltraud Frank, but which no one had pursued at the time. Despite this sensational match, Horst David had to be made to talk, and criminal investigator Josef Wilfing succeeded in doing so. During the interrogation, Horst David confessed to seven murders, four of which had even been certified as natural causes of death. From 1975 to 1993, he had killed seven women. Six years after his first two murders, he killed 59-year-old Barbara Ernst in 1981, 67-year-old Martha Brenz in 1983, 70-year-old Maria Bergmann in 1984, 84-year-old Kunigunda Thoss in 1992, and finally 85-year-old Mathilde Steindl in 1993. In December 1995, Horst David, who was diagnosed by an expert as having “encrypted matricide” as his motive for the crimes, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Munich Regional Court. On November 8, 2020, he died at the age of 81 in the infirmary of the Straubing prison. He showed no remorse until the end. He believed the women were to blame for their own deaths because they had humiliated, insulted, and hurt him. He merely wanted to silence the “furies.” So he squeezed their throats until they were quiet forever. This method of murder earned him a place in criminal history as the Strangler of Regensburg.
