Occultist Digs Up Graves and Molests Corpses in Hopes of Becoming Handsome
Starting in 1971, West German police were disturbed by reports that somebody was robbing graves, exhuming bodies from cemeteries, and gnawing on them. The female corpses were sexually abused as well. In May of 1972, a morgue attendant came across somebody kissing a cadaver. When he tried to stop him, the culprit pulled out a pistol and fired, but missed.
The morgue worker gave police a description of the assailant, and they threw a dragnet. It eventually led to the arrest of Kuno Hofmann, a deaf and mute laborer who had lost the powers of speech and hearing after his alcoholic father beat him in childhood. Hofmann had a rap sheet, including nine years in prison for theft. When the cops interrogated him, he readily confessed to a bizarre crime spree.
In prison, Hofmann had developed an obsession with self-improvement via occult “sciences”. He read extensively on satanic rituals, witchcraft, dark magic, and especially on vampirism and necrophilia. His occult readings led him to believe that he could become handsome and popular by performing dark magic rituals with corpses. Hence, the grave robbing.
On at least 35 occasions, Hofmann snuck into graveyards or mortuaries and even managed to get copies of the keys to a local cemetery. He wanted the recently dead, so chose his victims from recent death notices in newspapers. He would try to get them in the morgue, but if he could not, he would wait until they were buried, then dig up their graves. Once he secured a corpse, Hofmann would perform rituals that involved stabbing and slashing it, cutting off the head on occasion, and drinking the blood. Other times, he would chew on the corpse, and if it was of a female he found attractive, he would have sex with it.
When that failed to make him handsome and popular, Hofmann decided it must be because the corpses were not fresh enough. So he decided to get the freshest possible corpses, by killing people. His first victims were lovers in a car. After shooting them dead, he drank the blood from their wounds, then he had sex with the girl’s corpse. As he told police, he liked her more than the graveyard corpses. He killed another victim, and would have gone on killing more, if his spree had not been cut short by his arrest. He was deemed insane, and ordered confined in a mental asylum for the rest of his life.