Chapter 1
The Beginning
(April 2001; Vienna)
To begin, let us touch upon the actions of the German Monster.
At the present time, the BKA has not revealed whether the perpetrator "J" is alive or not, or who he really is. Based on the information we have, we can deduce that J is the victim of the darker side of the era of East-West German
division that was never meant to be public.
German TV, newspapers, magazines, and all other forms of media report that J might have killed over two hundred people. But the BKA has commented that the only crime they can prove J's involvement in was the 1995 murder of the
lockpick Adolf Junkers. Why? Because for any of the other murders, J's testimony is required, but he was shot in the
head and remains in a coma that will likely last for the rest of his life.
The BKA has only labeled this suspect with the initial "J." It could be an issue of privacy, but according to
them, nobody knows what his real name is. Several
newspapers and internet sites have said that J stands for "Johan."
One of my good friends, a German journalist, also calls him "Johan." Therefore I replaced "J" with "Johan" and continued my research.
The Johan case begins in 1986, before the
reunification of Germany, and claimed the lives of many before
finally coming to an end over ten years later. First, I will run through the chief events in chronological order. The first tragedy happened in Dusseldorf. In March of 1986, German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Trade Advisor Michael Liebert sought political asylum in West Germany. He brought along his wife and children - twins. After a series of interrogations and hearings, he was approved for asylum, and expressed a wish to live in Dusseldorf.
The family thought they had finally obtained a peaceful life, but on one rainy night that same month, the couple were
attacked and killed in their temporary mansion. Their children survived, but the boy was on the verge of death with a
bullet in his head, and the girl was in a state of severe shock. They were taken to Eisler Memorial Hospital,
where
the boy's life was saved by the expert hand of Japanese brain surgeon Kenzo Tenma.
The police investigated the attack on the Liebert family under the assumption that it was the act of an Eastern
terrorist, but they never found the killer.
On the last day of the same month, Eisler Hospital director Heinemann and two of his employees were killed with
candies laced with a poison made with nitric acid, at the same time that the Liebert twins in the care of the
hospital
escaped and went missing. Despite a desperate search by the police, no likely suspects ever arose. There was no connection to be found between the poisoning and the disappearance of the children. The truth of the incidents was
lost in the haze.
Only Agent Heinrich Lunge, a detective dispatched from the BKA, felt suspicion about one man: Dr. Kenzo Tenma.
He had saved the life of the twin boy, but because of that surgery, he had to cancel another. The patient he failed to
operate on was the mayor of Dusseldorf - who died in the hospital. Tenma was rebuked, lost his position for the next
term, and let his engagement to the director's daughter slip from his grasp. The people who stole Tenma's future away from him were his boss and fiance's father, Eisler Memorial Hospital director Heinemann and two of his chief doctors - the three men who were poisoned.
The next time such macabre events would occur at the Dusseldorf hospital was nine years later, in 1995 - after Germany had been reunited, people flowed from east to west, and the economy was thrown into chaos.
At this time, Inspector Lunge was in charge of a string of cases involving wealthy couples with no children
being killed, called the Middle-aged Couple Serial
be robberies,
but the inspector caught the scent of different motives. Lunge knew professional lockpicker Adolf Junkers had been witnessed near the scene of each crime. When he received word that Junkers had been in a traffic accident and
taken to
Neue Rhine General Hospital, the inspector rushed over. Junker's doctor was none other than Kenzo Tenma. When he heard
that Tenma had been promoted to Chief Surgeon at Eisler Memorial Hospital after the poisonings, seeds of doubt were once
again planted in Lunge's mind. It seemed that Tenma had gained the most out of the three murders.
Inspector Lunge visited the hospital for a few days and questioned Junkers. Junkers persisted in staying silent,
until one night he was discovered shot to death in an abandoned building near the hospital. The police officer who had
been guarding his room was poisoned dead with a piece of candy, the same way the doctors were, nine years before.
It was Dr. Tenma, already under suspicion, who came forth and claimed to have seen Junker's killer. Of
course,
Tenma was already Lunge's #1 suspect.
Dr. Tenma wearily turned to Inspector Lunge and gave a startling announcement.
The person who poisoned the three doctors nine years ago was one of the missing twins - the boy who had been shot in the head and saved by Tenma's surgery. Now an adult, he was responsible for the new string of murders across
Germany, and he had killed Junkers to silence him. His name was Johan... the elder brother had turned into a monster.
[Picture] (A parking lot filled with cars and flanked by buildings on both sides)
The former Eisler Memorial Hospital lot, located in central Dusseldorf. The hospital's business decreased dramatically
after the director's murder, and in 1998 moved from Fringennort (Translator Note: I am 95% sure that this name was made
up and does not exist) to the other side of the Rhine in Niedersachsen. The buildings are now state-run housing.
After hearing this, Lunge felt utter confidence in the following theory.
The murders of the hospital director and his employees, Junkers and the security guard, and even possibly the
childless couples across Germany were all the work of Kenzo Tenma. But he created a fictional person named Johan, and
blamed all of the killings on that young man... could he have dual personalities inside his head?
Dr. Tenma was the number one suspect on the police's list, but he continued to do his job at the hospital as always, and used his off-duty time to look for clues about Johan. The place he ended up with was Heidelberg.
In 1999, the time that these events became public knowledge, the newspapers and magazines used this
explanation
for what Tenma had learned during this period, and why he was going to Heidelberg.
Tenma, trying to find a link between the childless couple murders and Johan, visited the sites of the
murders
and found a common link between each of them, when talking to the residents of the neighborhood.
Koln, Hamburg, Hanover... the couples in all of these areas had, at one time in the past, taken in a boy. Nobody knew if they were sons-in-law or foster children, but in each case, the boy suddenly disappeared one day.
At Munich, the last place Tenma visited, he found the same thing. However, now his investigation had come to a dead end. He would not have known what to do next, had he not heard the surprising words of an old blind man who lived
across the street from the house of the murdered couple. The old man was the boy's only friend. The boy's name was Franz, and he lived across the street with the Haynaus for about one year. The boy was a rabid studier and fiercely intelligent. Occasionally he would tell the old
man about Tenma, and describe his gratitude to the doctor. He said that Tenma was "even more than a father." But the
one who the little boy loved more than all was his
sister, who had been left somewhere else. He said that when she
turned twenty, he would go to see her.
supposedly living in Heidelberg.
In May of 1995, a shocking incident occurred in
Heidelberg. Christianne and Erich Fortner, along with a visiting newswriter from the Heidelberg Post, Jacob
Mauler, were shot to death in their home. The Fortners had a
daughter attending Heidelberg University named Nina, who went missing after the murders. On the same day, the strangled
corpse of gardener Ivan Kurten was discovered at Heidelberg Castle.
Hessen state investigators, without referencing any link between the two cases, requested that Dusseldorf police
detain Eisler Memorial Hospital's chief brain surgeon Kenzo Tenma on suspicion of the murder of Ivan Kurten and as a
critical reference in the murders of the Fortners and Jacob Mauler. The BKA was also pressuring the same local police
for Tenma to brought in as a reference to the middle-aged couple serial murders.
Now let's take another look at this string of events, referencing the coverage of several newspapers,
especially
the Heidelberg Post, that worked to expose the truth in 1999 after the entire affair had ended.
Arriving in Heidelberg, Tenma visited the little Heidelberg Post offices and began to look through their old
articles. He was hoping to find some clues; articles about adopted twins, or a missing boy. Mauler, struck by Tenma's
zeal, asked him his reasons, and decided to help. After a long night of searching, an October 1986 newspaper turned up
a small article about an 11-year old boy gone missing. They rushed to the house the boy disappeared from - according
to the company's materials, the twins' birthday was that very day.
Later, the BKA would admit that the Mannheim Station officers Messner and Muller were responsible for the
murder
of the Fortners, but they still avoid drawing a
in the Fortner
house, there is little room to insert any doubt of that. Now, Nina Fortner is the other half of the twins; Johan's younger sister. After three years, she and Tenma both
returned to society. Reporters and writers from all over Germany rushed to Heidelberg in hopes of scoring an
exclusive
interview, but she firmly refused to make any comments. The university she returned to formed a vigilante squad that
kept the media off the school campus. It was not until the state governor delivered a scathing indictment of the media's relentless practices and violations of civil
liberties that the information war was silenced.
At that point in time, I was particularly interested in what kind of conversations must have passed between Tenma
and Nina about the twin brother... and how to deal with the monster that Johan had become.
As to why Nina wasn't present during Messner and Muller's deeds, and why Tenma left Mauler behind at the Fortner
house and went somewhere - the supposition these
mysteries leads me to is that Tenma succeeded in finding Nina before
she could be reunited with Johan.
[Picture] (photo of a waterfront town with a castle looming above it)
Heidelberg is recognized for the oldest college in Germany and its castle, built in the Middle Ages. Heidelberg Castle,
the site of a recent murder, served as the home for the count palatine (German: pfalz) throughout history and is famous
for its long stone-paved hill road.
It is at this point in the Johan case (which would eventually turn out to include the highest number of murders
in modern German history) that a large change occurs, with the disappearance of Nina, and Kenzo Tenma's choice to go
on the run.
If I wanted to solve all the mysteries, I would clearly need to speak with Kenzo Tenma. But no other
media
companies had been given permission for interviews, and my own request was politely turned down with a letter sent
through the MSF, whom he now works for. His beautiful handwriting and perfect German (hard to imagine from a non-native
speaker) seemed to tell me much about his personality. I decided to put together a history of Kenzo Tenma's medical career and a portrait of his personality, by
interviewing as many of his friends in Japan and acquaintances in Germany as I could.
