innocent civilians who wanted no part of his violence.
Ogorzow didn’t want to risk losing this opportunity, in the event that the female passenger left at the next station or someone else entered the train’s second-class section. And he knew that his time was limited. Once he attacked, he felt that he needed to throw his victim from the train before it reached the next station.
The passenger was Elfriede Franke, a twenty-six-year-old nurse wearing her uniform. The attack was as vicious as it was sudden. Ogorzow pulled the iron rod out of his jacket sleeve and went over to Franke. Without saying anything, he hit her hard over the head with it.
He’d learned from his last attack. When he’d hit Elizabeth Bendorf a month ago, he had not used enough force to achieve his goal of incapacitating her. Instead, she had managed to fight back against him, despite multiple blows to her head. This time he made sure that he did not make the same mistake.
The blow came down so hard on Elfriede Franke that it shattered her skull and damaged her brain. She fell down onto the train’s floor. She was dead.
Even with the speed and effectiveness of his attack, there still was not much time for Ogorzow to enjoy this moment. He never had much time with his victims on the train, as the interval between stations was so short. He would have liked to have more time, but this was a drawback he accepted as the cost of using the S-Bahn for his attacks.
He set down his weapon and walked over to the compartment door to open it. Unlike with his last attack, this time when he turned around and returned to his victim there were no surprises.
He had dragged his last victim by her feet to the open door. There’s no reason to believe that he did things any differently this time. Staring out into the darkness of blacked out Berlin with the cold winter wind rushing over him, he felt excited.
He experienced a kind of cocaine-like high—a feeling of being all-powerful—as he threw Elfriede Franke’s body into the night. Although this moment felt amazing to him, he needed to return to the real world, starting with the mundane task of pulling the handle to close the door when he was done.
As wonderful as he felt, there still was an element of frustration. He was not able to commit a rape on the train, as there was never enough time. Even here, where he had acted right away and killed his victim with a single blow, he still was not able to sexually assault her corpse. Over the course of his many attacks, when it came to sexually assaulting a woman, he did not seem to care one way or the other if she was alive, dying, or recently deceased.
He never left a victim on the train to be there when it arrived at the next station. The first time the reason for this was his fear of being caught. Since then, he’d learned that he also enjoyed dumping the bodies out of the train, so it now served two purposes—protecting him and the pleasure of the act itself.
He’d tried to kill on the S-Bahn twice before and failed. But now, in the early hours of Wednesday, December 4, 1940, Paul Ogorzow had committed his first successful S-Bahn murder.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Examining the Body
Just three hours after Ogorzow murdered Elfriede Franke, the police stood around her dead body. They were next to the train tracks between the Karlshorst and Rummelsburg S-Bahn stations. It was still nighttime, and the heavy-duty lamps the detectives used to light up the crime scene provided the only visible illumination in a city otherwise cloaked in darkness. The light gleamed off the gold bracelet still on the victim’s wrist. Her pocketbook was nearby. There had been no robbery. The only thing stolen from her was her life.
Although the blackout was still in effect, the police were able to use their discretion in lighting up this scene. If they heard an air raid warning, they would instantly spring into action and cut all the lights they were using.
Dr. Waldemar Weimann, the
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