One of The Worst Humans To Ever Exist - Fritz Honka

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Gertrude Bower
2. 3:00 – 6:00: Anna Bushell
3. 6:00 – 9:00: Freda Robick, Ruth Schul
4. 9:00 – 12:00: Friedrich Paul Hunger

Notable quotes from "One of The Worst Humans To Ever Exist - Fritz Honka "

• Gertrude Bower was a 42year-old woman living on the margins of Hamburg St.

  about Gertrude Bower · at 0:12

• In summer of 1974, he set his sights on a woman named Anna Bushell, a 54 yearear-old woman who, like his other victim, had fallen on hard times. Anna was a local woman who often drifted through the same bars as the killer. She.

  about Anna Bushell · at 4:15

• Struck again before the year was out. In December of 1974, he met a woman named Freda Robick. Freda was a 57year-old woman and she had spent years on the fringes of society and…

  about Freda Robick · at 6:59

• Ruth Schul was a 45-year-old woman. She had a similar life to the previous victims and was known to spend time in the bars where the killer would frequent. At some point, she crossed.

  about Ruth Schul · at 8:24

• The building and waited for this man to return. And moments later, he did. He identified himself as Friedrich Paul Hunger, otherwise known as Fritz, a 39-year-old man. Fritz…

  about Friedrich Paul Hunger · at 11:26

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Gertrude Bower — Person · 1 mention · first at 0:12
• Anna Bushell — Person · 1 mention · first at 4:18
• Freda Robick — Person · 1 mention · first at 7:05
• Ruth Schul — Person · 1 mention · first at 8:24
• Friedrich Paul Hunger — Person · 1 mention · first at 11:32

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Hello, please subscribe or you'll be on my naughty list. This case takes place in Germany and spans over many years. Gertrude Bower was a 42year-old woman living on the margins of Hamburg St. Paulie district in 1970. She got by as a hairdresser and an occasional worker of the night, struggling with alcoholism and bouts of homelessness. One winter night, she met an unassuming local man in a tavern off the reaper barn. He offered her warmth, more drinks, and a place to stay until the morning. Gertrude followed this stranger to his flat in Zitstrasa, grateful for a bed and oblivious to any signs of danger. In the early hours of December 1970, the small apartment turned into a scene of pure horror. After a night of drinking, the man who brought in Gertrude expected something. He expected intimacy as payment for his hospitality. When she resisted his demands, he exploded in violence. This man fulfilled his desires

1:08 regardless, forced himself upon her, and then strangled this woman to death. She struggled, but the flat was small, and there was no way to escape. As daylight crept in, her killer stared at her lifeless body on his floor, and he began to panic. He lacked the strength to carry her intact down the stairs, and he didn't want to arouse any suspicion, so he grabbed a saw. Working methodically, he dismembered Gertrude's body on the apartment floor. He wrapped severed limbs in rags and plastic. Over the next several nights, this killer disposed of the parts in stages. He buried some bundles of her remains in frozen ground besides a local rubbish heap and snug others into the attic above his flat. For days afterward, this man braced for a knock on the door from the police. He expected to be caught. He knew for a fact that he had been seen drinking with Gertrude at the bar, and he feared that someone

2:11 might connect the dots and link him to her disappearance. But no one came forward. Gertrude's absence went entirely unnoticed, something tragically far too common for women like Gertrude. On the 2nd of November 1971, nearly a whole year after the murder, a construction worker clearing the rubbish heap stumbled across a bundle of human remains. The police were immediately called. The police arrived to find some decomposed body parts. A woman's hands, breasts, a leg, and a human head. Investigators pieced together clues and eventually reconstructed the victim's face from the skull. They identified the remains as Gertrude, but they had no leads on who had killed her. The murderer had been able to get away. In the following years, the unknown killer faded into the crowded anonymity of Hamburg's night life. He spent evenings drinking in dimly lit bars, blending in with dock workers, drifters, and lonely

3:15 souls. He learned that from his first murder, the woman he targeted was easy prey. No family, no friends, no one cared that she was missing. The killer also learned that by throttling his victims in his own apartment, he made sure that there were no loud struggles, no gunshots, and nothing to alert the neighbors. For nearly 4 years after Gertrude's death, there were no other known victims. But this man's violent ages did not disappear. One encounter in August of 1972 nearly turned deadly when this man tried to force himself upon a woman named Ruth. Ruth managed to escape naked into the street after he attacked her and she later went to the police.

3:59 The very man who had dismembered Gertrude and now attacked this woman was charged with assault. Shockingly, the police didn't probe too much deeper. And because of this, he didn't stop there. By 1974, the killer was hunting again. In summer of 1974, he set his sights on a woman named Anna Bushell, a 54 yearear-old woman who, like his other victim, had fallen on hard times. Anna was a local woman who often drifted through the same bars as the killer. She had once been a housewife, but by that year, she was struggling greatly, and she had to accept money to do favors for men. She and the killer were both regulars at a tavern. One night in August of 1974, the killer invited Anna back to his flat for more drinks. He was heavily intoxicated, and she was too.

4:54 They both had been drinking for hours. At some point after they entered his apartment, they had intercourse. When it was over, the man seethed with dissatisfaction. He complained that Anna just lay there like a plank in bed. Encouraged by what he perceived as her lack of passion, he grabbed Anna and wrapped his hands around her throat. Inside the flat, he strangled her to death, just as he had done to Gertrude. And once again, the killer was faced with a corpse at his feet. He dismembered Anna's body on the premises, cutting her into manageable pieces for concealment. This time, he didn't even bother trying to haul her remains out to a scrapyard. Instead, he carried Anna's severed body parts up a staircase to the unused attic above his flat. Piece by piece, he hid all the evidence of the crime, and nobody came looking for Anna.

5:49 In fact, her disappearance went entirely unreported to police. But the killer then ran into a problem. In the weeks after Anna's death, a foul odor began to permeate through the building's upper floors. Eventually, one concerned neighbor approached the building's caretaker and complained about this stench. They said that it smelled like rotting flesh. Soon enough, the caretaker of the apartments knocked on the killer's door. When this man was questioned, he offered a reassuring explanation. He blamed his Greek neighbors living upstairs. They accepted this excuse, and nobody checked the attic. Meanwhile, the killer realized that he had been careless about the practical realities of storing human remains. To further avoid suspicion, he took steps to mask the odor of death emanating from his property. He obtained dozens of strong air fresheners, pungent pinescented cleaning blocks, and hung

6:49 them throughout his apartment and in the attic crawl space. For a time, this did mask the smell of decomposition. With his confidence restored, the murderer struck again before the year was out. In December of 1974, he met a woman named Freda Robick. Freda was a 57year-old woman and she had spent years on the fringes of society and had to turn to intimate work to fund her drinking habit. And in doing so, she crossed paths with the killer in these late night bars. Freda accompanied this man home one freezing night near Christmas of 1974.

7:27 Sometime during their encounter, he discovered that Freda had taken money from him. He had apparently paid her 200 Deutsch mags for intimacy. But then he realized that she had stolen another 200 mags from his wallet on top of that. This betrayal, whether real or merely imagined, in his drunken state, sent him into a fury. Just as with the others, he strangled Freda to death in a sudden outburst of violence. Just like he had done before, he sought Freda's body into pieces and carried them up into the attic to join Anna's remains. Despite all the air freshener he bought, tenants continued to complain about a stench coming from someone's property, but nothing was done. Winter then turned to a new year, and the killer's appetite for destruction only grew. Barely a month after Freda's murder, he claimed his fourth known victim in the year 1975.

8:24 Ruth Schul was a 45-year-old woman. She had a similar life to the previous victims and was known to spend time in the bars where the killer would frequent. At some point, she crossed paths with the killer, and on a cold evening in January, Ruth went home with him. They spent the night drinking, but as they drank, she made a fatal mistake. She mocked him. It was later reported that Ruth laughed at his inability to get it up, which was something that the killer was deeply insecure about. Flying into a drunken rage, the killer lunged at Ruth. He picked up an empty glass bottle and smashed it against her head, knocking her to the floor. Dazed and bleeding, Ruth could not fight back as he wrapped a liature around her neck.

9:12 One account says that it was a woman's stocking. Ruth died there on the floor that night, the final known victim of this unseen predator. When he attempted to haul Ruth's body up the attic, the killer encountered a problem he had not faced before. Ruth was larger and heavier than the others. Like the prior victims, he mutilated her body with his handsaw, hacking off limbs and even disfiguring her face to make the pads easier to conceal. He then pried away a panel in his own apartment wall and shoved a portion of Ruth's butchered remains into the void behind it. By the start of 1975, the apartment housed the remains of four women. The disappearances of Anna, Freda, and Ruth had never been noticed to the outside world. The killer carried on as normal.

10:02 By day, he worked as a factory security guard, and by night, he drank at the bars where he would find his victims. It was only a matter of time before something cracked the facade. On the 15th of July 1975, something happened. Shortly after midnight, a fire broke out in the apartment. Flames ignited the ground floor unit and smoke filled the stairwell. Residents fled into the street as fire crews arrived and battled the blaze. The flames were contained to the lower level, but firefighters climbed to the top floors to check for any smoldering embers. When they forced open the loft crawl space above the second floor apartment, they were hit with the unmistakable reek of decomposing and cooking flesh. In the process of ventilating the area, firefighters uncovered the human remains, and with this, the police were summoned. Before too long, suspicion zeroed in on one particular tenant, the man living in the small flat directly

11:05 below the attic. He was absent from the crowd outside, and neighbors recalled complaints about a foul smell near his door in the past months. Then the police learned that this tenant kept the only key to the attic space where the bodies were found. This was a crucial clue. As dawn approached, the officers sealed off the building and waited for this man to return. And moments later, he did. He identified himself as Friedrich Paul Hunger, otherwise known as Fritz, a 39-year-old man. Fritz was taken into custody as the sole suspect in the attic murders. At the police headquarters, detectives launched an intense investigation. Faced with the evidence unearthed in his home, Fritz broke down after several hours of questioning. He confessed to killing three women, but he refused to talk about a fourth victim.

12:02 But by the end of July 1975, investigators firmly connected Fritz to the four missing women from Hamburg's red light district. The fourth being Gertrude. The city awoke to shocking headlines. They had been living amongst a serial killer. But who was Fritz? He was born on the 31st of July 1935 in Leipzig, Germany. He came into the world already marked with hardship. He was the third of 10 children who grew up in poverty and of course war. His father, also named Fritz, was a communist and so he was imprisoned by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. His father was freed at the end of World War II, but he came back a broken man. He died in 1947 from alcoholism. Fritz's mother was overwhelmed by raising such a large family alone, she simply couldn't cope.

12:56 Young Fritz spent his formative years shuttled between children's homes in Germany. He received little formal education and struggled with a speech impediment that made himself conscious and withdrawn. At 16, seeing no future in East Germany, he fled to the communist block and crossed into West Germany. By 1956, he moved to the city of Hamburg in search of opportunity. But that same year, he was involved in a road collision while riding his bicycle, which left his face permanently disfigured. His nose was crushed and healed crookedly, and he developed crossed eyes. Yet despite his troubles, Fritz attempted to settle into a normal life. In 1957, at the age of 22, he married a woman and soon fathered a son with her. For a brief period, he tried to play the role of husband and father, but alcoholism had already sunk its claws into Fritz. He drank heavily and also cheated on his young wife. These

13:59 behaviors quickly destroyed the normal life he led. His wife divorced him. After the divorce, Fritz moved to the small attic level apartment in a district of Hamburg. He spent all of his free time drinking in the local pubs. Psychologists later described Fritz as a man nursing and enormous hatred of women, likely fueled by his feelings of inadequacy and repeated rejections. He had a deformed face, was 5'6 in tall, and had a meek, awkward demeanor. Fritz often sought the company of women who he perceived as lower than him. Inside Fritz's apartment, they found the saw that he had used to dismember the women.

14:42 And throughout the flat, there was physical evidence of Fritz's lifestyle and mindset. Sets of adult magazines and hundreds of pinup photographs were plastered on the walls and ceilings. The sheer volume suggested a serious obsession. The women's bodies were also taken away for autopsies. The autopsy examinations described the extensive mutilations inflicted postmortem. One report noted that both of Ruth's legs had been sorn off at the thigh bones. Both of her breasts were removed and her ears cut away. He had even cut off the tip of her nose and sliced off her tongue. As Fritz's interrogation continued, he gave a full confession to all four killings. But at one point, Fritz claimed that he acted on supernatural orders, insisting that the long deadad Jack the Ripper had instructed him to commit these murders.

15:37 Investigators dismissed this as a ploy to appear insane. They believed that the true motive was Fritz's uncontrollable rage and feeling humiliated by women. So instead, he tried another tactic. He said that he was blackout drunk when he killed these women and that he simply just couldn't remember. The trial of Fritz began in Hamburg in November of 1976. Spectators and reporters packed the courtroom, eager to see the man accused of such unspeakable crimes. From the outset, Fritz's defense didn't dispute that he had caused the women's deaths.

16:13 The strategy was to save him of a full murder conviction by emphasizing his impaired mental state. Fritz had recanted his earlier confessions, now claiming that he had absolutely no memory of murdering these women. Psychiatric experts then testified. They described a deeply disturbed man plagued by feelings of inferiority, sexual dysfunction, and resentment towards women. He was diagnosed with alcohol dependence and a personality disorder. They explained that he only felt power when dominating vulnerable women. They also presented that because Fritz concealed the murders, he knew exactly what he was doing. His claims of blacking out just didn't add up. On the 20th of December 1976, the Hamburg court delivered its verdict. Fritz was found guilty on all counts, but crucially the panel of judges accepted that his responsibility was substantially diminished by alcohol. And so ultimately he was only found guilty of one murder

17:16 and three counts of manslaughter, not the full four murders. For these crimes, Fritz received a sentence of 15 years in a secure psychiatric institution. In 1993, Fritz was released on schedule after completing his sentence. He was now an aging man in his 50s, and he assumed a new identity to avoid any public scrutiny. He took up residence in a nursing home in a small seaside town. To those around him, he was just another frail pensioner. Yet, in his final years, Fritz couldn't escape his past. According to the care staff, he was plagued by paranoid hallucinations. He would complain incessantly about a terrible smell that no one else perceived, insisting that the room rire of rotting corpse. On the 19th of October 1998, Fritz died in a Hamburg hospital. He was 63 years old.

18:11 Tragically, for decades, the four women he murdered remained in the shadow of his infamy, and their names were rarely spoken. Nearly 50 years after their deaths, the city of Hamburg finally sought to correct this. In May of 2025, a memorial stone was unveiled in a cemetery bearing the names Gertrude, Anna, Freda, and Ruth. Now their names are etched in stone, ensuring that the four lives savagely cut short by Fritz will not be lost to memory.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "One of The Worst Humans To Ever Exist - Fritz Honka "?

In order: 0:00 Gertrude Bower; 3:00 Anna Bushell; 6:00 Freda Robick, Ruth Schul; 9:00 Friedrich Paul Hunger.

What is mentioned in this Disturban episode?

5 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Gertrude Bower, Anna Bushell, Freda Robick, Ruth Schul, Friedrich Paul Hunger. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "One of The Worst Humans To Ever Exist - Fritz Honka "?

The episode runs 19 min; the transcript is about 2,839 words in 21 timestamped sections.

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