Beheaded Bunnies

String of Brutal Rabbit Murders Haunts Germany

By Charles Hawley

A disgusting spree of brutal killings continues to haunt Dortmund. Over 40 pet rabbits have been killed, with many bled dry and decapitated. So far, police are clueless.

Pet rabbits are in danger in Dortmund these days.

Fussel was just three years old when he met his horrifying fate. The pet rabbit was jerked out of his cage in the western German Ruhr Valley along with his sister Marianne. Both were decapitated and bled dry. Their lifeless bodies were left behind for their distraught owners to discover the next morning.

That was last Christmas. Since then, such cases have become almost a weekly occurrence in the city of Dortmund and its surroundings. Police have recorded 22 cases, almost all involving rabbits and most of them following the same, brutal pattern. Over 40 animals have died in the crime spree.

The most recent bunny murder was committed in the city late on Sunday night: One rabbit disappeared completely, while a second was left behind -- without its head.

Police in the area are at a loss. "We have a number of officers working on the case," Oliver Peiler, spokesman for the Dortmund police department, told SPIEGEL ONLINE Tuesday. "We really have no idea who could be doing this. We are investigating intensively, but so far we are in the dark."

According to police just outside the Dortmund city limits in the municipality of Witten, the serial killings began late last summer. At first it was just a few isolated cases, but this spring, the pace of the murders has picked up. Just in the last month, there have been at least four additional slayings. Given the similarity of the crimes, police assume they are being committed either by a single perpetrator or a small, well-organized group.

Indeed, the killings have become such a problem that the Witten police has even set up a special task force to investigate. Since April, five officers have been working on the case full time. To date, they have interviewed over 300 people in the search for clues and possible witnesses. So far, they have found nothing.

"This task force is a lot like what we do when investigating murders," the audibly frustrated Witten police spokesman Volker Schütte told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Unfortunately, we still haven't found a hot lead."

Speculation in the local press has been rampant since the crime spree began, with many conjecturing that Satanism or occultism may be at work. Sabine Riede, who runs a group devoted to monitoring religious sects in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, told the paper Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung that "there is a possibility that young Satanists could be involved." The fact that the blood is apparently drained from many of the rabbits could indicate, she said, that Satanists are gathering material for a ritual.

According to Schütte, police are not, for the moment, discounting any theory. A €2,500 ($3,860) reward has been put up by rabbit owners and animal rights groups for information leading to the killer's capture.

Schütte, though, thinks that it is likely a local who is terrorizing Dortmund's rabbit owners. "The person must have a very good knowledge of the area," he said. "It's not like after the war when everyone had a rabbit in the backyard -- they aren't that easy to find and many of the cages can't be seen from the road."

There is even speculation that the criminal or criminals could be using Google Earth to find victims, Schütte says, explaining that the computer program, which lets users examine detailed satellite photographs, might be powerful enough to allow hutches to be located in people's gardens. "We aren't discounting anything at this point."