Fritz Honka

Honka fled to West Germany in 1951 and started work as an unskilled farm worker in the small village of Brockhöfe on the Lüneburg Heath.

In the years afterwards, his problems with alcohol prevented him from maintaining relationships with women, and he turned to prostitutes he met in pubs or around the Reeperbahn for sex.

[1] Honka sawed the corpse into pieces that he then wrapped up and hid in various places in the nearby area.

[2] Honka murdered again, four years later, when he strangled the 54-year-old sex worker Anna Beuschel in his flat in August 1974.

In December 1974 he killed 57-year-old Frieda Roblick in the same way and in January 1975 he murdered the 52-year-old sex worker Ruth Schult.

In all three cases, Honka cut the corpses into small pieces and hid them in his flat and in the house's attic.

Honka used large numbers of pine-scented perfume blocks in an attempt to mask the odour.

When very drunk he would vent his aggression on women, usually shorter than him and often toothless, to alleviate his fears of mutilation during oral sex.

Firemen tackling the blaze discovered a partially decomposed female torso in a plastic bag which prompted the police to search the flat.

In custody, Honka said he killed the women after they mocked his preference for oral sex over "straight" intercourse.

[7] Honka was released from prison in 1993 and spent his last years in a nursing home under the name of Peter Jensen.

In 1975, German musician Karl-Heinz Blumenberg recorded the black humour single Gern hab ich die Frau’n gesägt (“I loved to saw the women”, a titular reference to the 1920s Schlager Gern hab ich die Frau’n geküßt, “I loved to kiss the women”, sung by Richard Tauber) under the pseudonym of Harry Horror, in reference to Honka.

[8] German director Fatih Akin acquired the rights to Strunk's novel and made a movie adaptation which was released in 2019.