In postwar Austria, lonely women answered marriage ads. A charming salesman promised a honeymoon by the water — then poured the drink that ended the trip. Max Gufler was convicted of four murders and suspected of as many as eighteen. Police later opened an attic in St. Pölten and found handbags, jewelry, dentures, and bottles of sleeping pills. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of the man newspapers called Bluebeard: how he lured, drugged, and drowned his victims, how one forged letter broke the case, and how many names the Danube never gave back.

In Vienna’s Lainz geriatric hospital, death was supposed to be ordinary. Between 1983 and 1989, nurse’s aide Waltraud Wagner and three colleagues turned Pavilion V into a killing ground — overdoses, insulin, and a ritual they called “mouth care.” They confessed to dozens of murders. The real number may never be known.

Host Alexander Lawson follows the case from the night-shift jokes that nobody reported, to the tavern boast that finally broke it open, the 1991 trial that stunned Austria, and the 2008 releases that enraged it all over again.

This is not a mercy-killing myth. This is what happens when the people trusted with the dying decide who gets a free bed with the Lord.

Vienna, January 1996. Detectives are at the door before dawn. The woman who opens it has already buried the men who rewrote their wills for her.

Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Elfriede Blauensteiner — the Austrian serial poisoner known as the Black Widow. She hunted lonely, wealthy pensioners through newspaper ads, moved in as carer and companion, then used a diabetes drug, an antidepressant, and ice-cold towels to finish them. Three murders proved. Five confessed, then recanted. Police suspected ten or more.

In court she held up a golden crucifix and said she washed her hands in innocence. She gambled the inheritances away. She died in prison in 2003.

A story of loneliness as a hunting ground, medicine as a quiet weapon, and a killer who timed the ambulance so the deaths would look like age.

A charming crime reporter walks into Vienna police headquarters and asks how the hunt is going for the man strangling women in the woods. Then he leaves — and another body appears.

Johann “Jack” Unterweger was Austria’s celebrated prison poet: convicted of murder in 1976, released in 1990 as proof that art could redeem a killer. Within months, sex workers were dying in Graz, the Vienna Woods, Prague, and Los Angeles — strangled with their own underwear, tied in the same hangman’s knot he had used sixteen years earlier.

This episode follows the double life of the man intellectuals championed, the journalist who interviewed detectives about his own crimes, and the nine murders a jury finally pinned on him — hours before he died in his cell.

I’m Alexander’s Lawson. This is A True Crime Podcast.

If you were in a German ICU in the early 2000s, the most dangerous person on the ward may not have been your illness. It may have been the nurse on shift.

Niels Högel injected patients with unprescribed heart drugs so he could crash their hearts — then rush in to “save” them. A court convicted him of 85 murders. Police and families believe the true number may be far higher.

Host Alexander’s Lawson traces how Högel moved from Oldenburg to Delmenhorst with a glowing reference, why deaths spiked on his shifts, and how it took years, exhumations, and three trials before Germany named him its worst peacetime serial killer.

Content warning: hospital murders, medical betrayal, death of patients.

In a quiet Bavarian hospital, patients went to sleep expecting morning. Between 2003 and 2004, nurse Stephan Letter walked the night ward with a syringe — sedative first, then a muscle relaxant that stopped the lungs. At least twenty-eight people never woke. Some were dying. Some were getting better. One was a young soldier with a fall injury.

Germany called it the worst killing spree since the war. Letter called it mercy. The court called him lord of life and death.

Alexander Lawson traces the missing vials, the exhumed graves, and the verdict that sent the “Angel of Death” of Sonthofen to prison for life.

This episode discusses hospital murders and lethal injections. Listener discretion advised.

In 1948, a man already in a German prison applied to be an official executioner. He signed the letter Rudolf Pleil, Totmacher a.D. — Deathmaker, retired. Then he told them where to look. They pumped out a well by the railway. They found the bodies.

Host Alexander’s Lawson traces Pleil’s crimes in the ruined Harz borderlands of 1946–47: women fleeing the Soviet zone, a guide who offered them a path through the woods, two accomplices, a merchant killed with an axe in Zorge, and a second trial in Braunschweig after the first sentence missed almost everything. Courts proved nine rape-murders plus manslaughter. Pleil claimed twenty-five, then forty. He wanted the title. He titled his prison notebooks Mein Kampf.

This episode of A True Crime Podcast covers sexual violence, murder, and the targeting of refugees. Listener discretion advised.

July 3, 1976. A little girl is missing in Duisburg. A neighbor reports a blocked toilet. The quiet man upstairs says the pipe is full of guts.

That man was Joachim Kroll — lavatory attendant, neighbor, and one of postwar Germany’s most notorious serial killers. For more than two decades he murdered across the Ruhr. Innocent men were arrested for his crimes. Some never recovered. He was convicted of eight murders and one attempted murder, and confessed to more.

Host Alexander Lawson traces the case from the first killing in 1955 to the attic flat, the trial, and the names that should not be forgotten.

Content warning: murder, sexual violence, crimes against children, mutilation, and cannibalism.

Düsseldorf, 1929. An eight-year-old is found under a hedge. Then a mechanic in the road. Then two sisters after a fair. The papers name him before they have a face: the Vampire of Düsseldorf.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Peter Kürten — the moulder, the husband, the man who spent half his life in German prisons and the other half turning violence into pleasure. From the 1913 murder of Christine Klein to the year a city locked its doors, the confession that became a book, and the guillotine in Cologne.

Nine murders the court proved. Dozens of attacks he claimed. The names the nickname erased.

This episode contains descriptions of murder, sexual violence, and crimes against children.

May 1924. Children playing by the River Leine in Hanover pull a human skull from the mud. Then another. Then hundreds of bones. At least twenty-two young men.

Alexander Lawson tells the story of Fritz Haarmann — police informant, former butcher, and the man Germany called the Vampire, the Wolf Man, and the Butcher of Hanover. Between 1918 and 1924 he lured boys and young men from the station with the promise of food and a bed. He was convicted of twenty-four murders and executed in 1925. The river never gave everyone back.

Content warning: sexual violence, murder, and dismemberment of young men and boys.