The Lunchtime Killer

Between 1960 and 1965, a series of robberies took place around the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, in which seven people were killed. Since the crimes always happened at lunchtime, the perpetrator was given the name “The Lunchtime Killer” in the media. The first robbery took place on April 22, 1960, on Tuchergartenstraße in Nuremberg. A man had broken into the apartment of an elderly woman. When she caught the perpetrator, she screamed loudly for help. Her subtenant and her fiancé immediately rushed to her aid, but the man shot them without warning. He then fled without any loot. Despite a large-scale search and a detailed description of the perpetrator by the elderly woman, the man, who had used a 7.65 mm FN Herstal as his murder weapon, could not be found. A year passed without a trace of the perpetrator, which is why one of the largest manhunts in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany was launched. In this manhunt, 50,336 people, all men born between 1939 and 1940 who had lived in Nuremberg at the time of the crime, were investigated. Then, on September 10, 1962, the perpetrator struck again. At lunchtime in Ochenbrück, he robbed a savings bank, shooting the branch manager Erich Hallbauer with a Walther PPK pistol and fleeing toward the train station with 3,000 DM in loot. Just 20 days later, the perpetrator robbed a savings bank branch in Neuhaus an der Pegnitz. During the robbery, he shot and killed company courier Oskar Seidel with a Walther P38. Seidel had not noticed the robbery and was searching his breast pocket for his reading glasses when he was fatally shot. The police were completely in the dark as to who the perpetrator was. Then, on March 29, 1963, the owner of a gun shop named Helmut Wannwacker and his mother Karola Wannwacker were shot dead. It turned out that the bullets, casings, and bullet marks came from the same Walther pistols that had been used in the robberies in Ochenbrück and Neuhaus. Almost two years passed before, on June 1, 1965, a man attempted to steal a woman’s handbag in a Nuremberg department store. When passersby rushed to help the woman, the perpetrator fled. After a shootout with the police, in which the department store’s janitor, Hermann Thieme, was killed and two others were seriously injured, the perpetrator was arrested. The man was Klaus Gosmann, the son of an officer, who, after dropping out of his economics studies at the Technical University of Nuremberg, had voluntarily enlisted as an officer cadet in 1964. He completed his training with various pioneer units in Koblenz and Munich and then repeatedly applied for discharge. This failed, which is why he deserted in April 1965 and had been living in Nuremberg under a false identity ever since. During a search of his apartment, pistols were found that could be clearly identified as the weapons used in the fatal robberies. Due to the overwhelming evidence, Klaus Gosmann made a comprehensive confession. On July 27, 1967, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for five counts of murder and three counts of aggravated robbery. As he was not yet 21 years old at the time of the first double murder, this was not included in the trial. On February 26, 2015, at the age of 74, Klaus Gosmann was released from Straubing Prison after 50 years of imprisonment. He had spent half a century behind bars and was Bavaria’s longest-serving prisoner to date.