Bruno Ludke was born in Germany in 1909 and it was reported that he was odd from the start. It was obvious at an early age that he was mentally unbalanced and retarted and began torturing animals for fun as a youth. When he started taking his sadistic pleasures with unwilling women is up for debate but it is generally accepted that by the late 1920's Ludke was well on his way to an impressive number of kills. A sterilization procedure ordered after a rape arrest, not a rare accurence in Nazi Germany, did nothing to stop his thirst for butchering women.

It was not until 1943 that Ludke was finally stopped. Arrested for the killing of an acquaintance named Frieda Rosner, who had been strangled to death in January. Ludke soon admitted his guilt and went on to confess to eighty-five slayings, all women who had been strangled and/or stabbed to death. Ludke also confessed that he had often had sex with his victim's dead bodies.

As a mental defective German law at the time did not allow Ludke to be jailed and he was instead sent to a Vienna hospital to be used as a human guinea pig. He died during one of the experiments on April 8, 1944. The true total of murders is still contended with some claiming that many of his confessed kills could merely be the result of detectives taking advantage of Ludke to clear troublesome unsolved cases.