Crime + Investigation U.K. details how Fritz Honka’s first victim met her end. Gertrude Bräuer was a 40-year-old hairdresser that was struggling to make ends meet. To earn extra income, she was a part-time sex worker, which is how she met Honka. The two became acquainted in a Hamburg bar, and he paid her to accompany him home one evening in 1969. When dawn broke, he became enraged that she wouldn’t have sex with him again. Honka lost control and strangled the woman to death. But this presented a problem for the killer. He assumed that she probably wasn’t going to be missed for some time, but disposing of the body was going to be difficult, as he wasn’t strong enough to drag her out of the apartment without attracting a lot of attention. What to do?
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Honka decided to dismember her body and bury some of her remains. Perhaps scared of being caught in the act, he hid the rest of them in the attic of the apartment building. It took a year, but workers uncovered the parts of her that Honka had buried. She was identified, but no one thought of Honka as a suspect. The next time Honka lured a sex worker into his apartment, she was able to escape. This led to Honka being charged with rape. But it only deterred him from killing again for a brief period. By 1974, he was at it again, taking three more lives until his capture in 1975.
