Jack the Ripper of Schwalbach

Nine months after Manfred Seel from Schwalbach im Taunus was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in November 2013, he died at the age of 67. Just a few months earlier, his beloved wife had passed away. After Manfred Seel’s funeral, his daughter began clearing out her parents’ house. Her fiancé took care of clearing out the garage on Nordstraße in Schwalbach, which her father had rented for his clearing and landscaping company in 2008. Among car batteries, buckets, and all kinds of odds and ends, he discovered two blue plastic barrels with black lids. When he opened one of them to see what was inside, his stomach turned. Inside were two legs with the feet stretched upwards and a right arm. He immediately called his fiancée, who drove over to him right away. Together, they alerted the police. The police opened the second barrel, which contained the torso and head of a woman, with the left arm missing. The woman’s body was later identified as Britta Simone Diallo, a 43-year-old street prostitute known to the police and missing since 2004, who had been working in the Frankfurt train station area. Britta Simone Diallo’s arms and legs had been severed with a hand saw. Eight nails had been driven into her knee, pelvis, breasts, and vaginal area. Her body also had several stab and cut wounds. She had been mutilated. Britta Simone Diallo’s body had been in the barrel for more than five years. Was Manfred Seel her murderer? During the investigation, it emerged that the deceased family man Manfred was a regular customer of hers. A prostitute who was friends with Britta Simone Diallo testified that Manfred Seel had also paid her for sex once, but had cruelly abused her in the process, which is why she had called a hotline for prostitutes to warn other prostitutes about him. Investigators soon suspected that Britta Simone Diallo might not have been Manfred Seel’s only victim. That is why experts from the State Criminal Police Office formed the Alaska Special Investigation Unit, as Manfred Seel was a big fan of Alaska who also liked to wear fur in the summer. But was a serial killer really hiding behind the bourgeois façade of the caring family man? The results of the investigation suggest so. Manfred Seel was born on October 30, 1946, in Königstein im Taunus. He grew up as an only child in Kronberg. From 1957, he attended secondary school in Oberursel. He then completed an apprenticeship as a cliché etcher and subsequently began his two-year military service. He worked as an etcher in Frankfurt am Main and, from 1974, attended evening school to obtain his high school diploma. Once he had achieved this, he studied art and social history at Goethe University in Frankfurt, but did not complete his studies. Seel married in 1973. The marriage produced a daughter, who was born in 1979. From 1986 onwards, he ran a junk removal and gardening company in Schwalbach together with his childhood friend Werner Lederer. Manfred Seel, who played saxophone and clarinet in the jazz band Overall Jazz Gang from 1985 until his death, had a serious alcohol problem, which is why he went into rehab in 1994 and entered a clinic for addiction problems in 1996. He had been sober ever since. Manfred Seel was a sociable guy who enjoyed traveling the world with his wife. He led a perfect double life. Until the discovery in the garage, no one had suspected that Manfred Seel was a sadistic serial killer who enjoyed visiting forums dealing with extreme acts of violence and necrophilia. In the basement of his house, investigators found several computers with over 32,000 violent pornographic and violence-glorifying photos and videos, including cannibalism, on their hard drives. Investigators also found a comic drawing in which a woman resembling the murdered Britta Simone Diallo had nails in her genital area in exactly the same direction. Believing that Britta Simone Diallo was not Manfred Seel’s only victim, investigators focused on unsolved crimes that bore similarities to his sadistic modus operandi and indeed found four other murdered women who fit perfectly into the brutal series of murders. Manfred Seel’s first victim was probably 19-year-old nurse and cleaner Gudrun Ebel, who was found in a garden shed near Bad Vilbel on February 6, 1971. Her killer had strangled her, slit her stomach open, and removed her small intestine, uterus, and right ovary. Just two months later, in April, the body of 23-year-old Turkish guest worker Hatice Erülkeroğlu, a colleague of Gudrun Ebel, was found. At that time, Manfred Seel had his training and later workplace not far from the retirement home where both women were employed. Parts of Hatice Erülkeroğlu’s left breast and labia had been amputated. She had numerous cuts and stab wounds. Then twenty years passed until June 1991, when the body of 36-year-old Frankfurt street prostitute Gisela Singh was found in a parking lot in the Hofheim Forest. The homeless, drug-addicted, and HIV-positive woman was the perfect victim that no one would miss. Her killer had covered her body with branches and leaves. Her shoes, pants, and socks were carefully draped next to her head. Her abdomen had been cut open and her small intestine removed. In December 1993, a street cleaner discovered the torso of 31-year-old Dominique Monroe in a blue plastic bag on Friedberger Landstraße. According to the forensic examination, it had been stored in a freezer for 10 days. Like Britta Simone Diallo, Dominique Monroe was a Frankfurt street prostitute who was drug-addicted, homeless, HIV-positive, and sold her body for less than the usual average price. Two months later, more body parts were found at the Spaghetti Junction on the A661. All the body parts had been expertly severed. Had Manfred Seel, dubbed the Hessen Ripper or Jack the Ripper of Schwalbach by the press, murdered these women between 1971 and 2004? All of these women were missing body parts, and the dead Britta Simone Diallo was also missing a body part, her left arm. It was suspected that Manfred Seel might have three more drug-addicted prostitutes on his conscience. Much of the evidence pointed to Manfred Seel as the murderer, a man with whom everyone wanted to go for a beer and whom no investigator would ever have targeted as a murderer without the discovery of the woman’s body in the barrel. Manfred Seel had been dead since 2014 and there was no clear evidence, which is why the Alaska special investigation unit was disbanded and the case never went to trial, even though so much evidence pointed to Manfred Seel as the murderer, leaving his entire circle of friends and family, including his daughter, completely stunned and shocked. But as we all know, you can’t see inside people.