The Serial Killer - Part XII
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Peter liked children. He especially liked to eat them. He consumed 14, none less. I guess when you get the taste of it, it gets hard to quit. I never had the curiosity to try human flesh, myself. I am not a man eater. Nor a man lover, in the global scence. I hate people, every kind of people, so eating them would be, at the least, a paradox, at the most a masochistic experience. And I am certainly not a masochist. A sadist, perhaps. Although I do struggle sometimes with the definition of that concept. But we are not talking about me now.
Peter. Peter Stumpp. A german, born in 1564, nicknamed "The Werewolf of Bedburg of Danvill." The surname Stumpp may have been related to the fact that his left hand was cut off leaving only a stump. Peter was (again) a wealthy farmer and influential member of the rural community. For twenty-five years, Stumpp was allegedly an "insatiable bloodsucker" who gorged on the flesh of goats, lambs, and sheep, as well as men, women, and children. Being threatened with torture he confessed to killing and eating fourteen children, two pregnant women, and their fetuses. One of the fourteen children was his own son, whose brain he was reported to have devoured. Not only was Stumpp accused of being a serial murderer and cannibal, but also of having an incestuous relationship with his daughter, who was sentenced to die with him, and he coupled with a distant relative, which was also considered to be incestuous according to the law. In addition to this he confessed to having had intercourse with a succubus sent to him by the Devil. In fact, he confessed to having practiced black magic since he was twelve years old. He also claimed that the Devil himself had given him a magical girdle, which enabled him to metamorphose into "the likeness of a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like fire, a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth, a huge body, and mighty paws." Removing his belt, he said, made him transform back to his human form.
I do love the richness of the self-description. Serial killers tend to be narcisistic. But that is a subject we will come to again later.
If Peter led a brutal life, his execution was none less one of the most brutal on record: he was put to the wheel, where "flesh was torn from his body", in ten places, with red-hot pincers, followed by his arms and legs. Then his limbs were broken with the blunt side of an axehead to prevent him from returning from the grave, before he was beheaded and burned on a pyre. His daughter and mistress had already been "flayed, raped, and strangled" and were burned alive along with Stumpp's body. As a warning against similar behavior, local authorities erected a pole with the torture wheel and the figure of a wolf on it, and at the very top they placed Peter Stumpp's severed head.
However, just as in the case of the "Blood Countess", it seems Peter might have been wrongly accused. The years in which Stumpp was supposed to have committed most of his crimes (1582-1589) were marked by internal wars in the Electorate of Cologne after the abortive introduction of Protestantism by the former Archbishop Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg. He had been supported by Adolf, Count of Neuenahr, who was also the lord of Bedburg. Stumpp was most certainly a convert to Protestantism. The war brought the invasion of armies of either side, the assaults by marauding soldiers and eventually an outbreak of the plague. Murder and violence were the rule. When the Protestants were defeated in 1587, Bedburg Castle became the headquarters of Catholic mercenaries under the command of the new lord of Bedburg - Werner, Count of Salm-Reifferscheidt-Dyck, who was a staunch Catholic determined to re-establish the Roman faith.
So it is not inconceivable that the werewolf trial was but a barely concealed political trial, with the help of which the new lord of Bedburg planned to bully the Protestants of the territory back into Catholicism. If it had only been just another execution of a werewolf and a couple of witches, as sprang up around this time in various parts of Germany, the attendance of members of the high aristocracy – maybe including the new Archbishop and Elector of Cologne – would be surprising. Furthermore, the trial remained a singular event, nor did the judges refer to the new paradigma of werewolfism (explaining the animal transformation as an infernal delusion).
Werewolf or not, again the interesting part of the story here remains the imagination of those who might have made it up. People always had a fascination in general for the gruesome, the horrid, the unspeakable. Maybe because everyone has a little part inside them which just might be able, if given the right circumstances and motives, to do the gruesome, the horrid, the unspeakable.
