Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: The Satanic visitation that began with a bloody killing on July 6 ended prematurely for Manuela Ruda and her husband, Daniel Ruda:
She says they went to cemeteries at night, climbed around ruins, talked about this and that, and drank blood — their own blood, or that from so-called givers. Would-be drinkers of blood can find willing givers on the Internet, Mrs. Ruda says, explaining: “You just have to be careful not to hit an artery.” Givers are happy to offer their arms or legs for a bite, she says.
According to her story, it was around this time that she had her incisors removed and replaced with longer, sharper implanted teeth identical to those seen in vampire films. She dedicated her soul to the service of Satan and swore to accept his “every word” as law. Mrs. Ruda says she tried therapy but stopped, out of fear that she would be locked up if she revealed what she was really like.
Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 14:57:37 -0800
From: Brian Chapman (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected) (spam-protected)
Subject: Murder Suspects Express Sympathy for the Devil
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung | 18 Jan 2002
Murder Suspects Express Sympathy for the Devil
By Karin Truscheit
BOCHUM. The Satanic visitation that began with a bloody killing on July 6 ended prematurely for Manuela Ruda and her husband, Daniel Ruda.
Plan A, Plan B and Plan C all failed. After they beat Frank Hackerts to death with a hammer and stabbed his body several dozen times, Plan A was to slash their own wrists, they say. Plan B was to drive to Denmark, get a gun and shoot themselves. Plan C was to fill up the trunk with diesel fuel canisters and then have a head-on collision with a truck.
All three suicide plans failed because, as the couple say, Satan chose to end his possession of them too soon. Instead of dying, the couple ended up driving back and forth across Germany. They changed tires, withdrew some money from a bank in Hannover and headed east.
The couple finally ended up in the hands of the police, who arrested them on July 12 in Jena, a city in the eastern state of Thuringia. Six months later, the Rudas are on trial in the western city of Bochum, where they are providing detailed descriptions about their motivations for killing Mr. Hackerts.
Everything started out so well. Sometime around last March, Mr. Ruda says he received four numbers in a vision: 6,6,6,7. Their significance was obvious, to him. The couple would marry on June 6, or 6/6. And on the 6th of July, or 6/7, they were to kill themselves after first carrying out a “sacrifice” to the dark lord. The purpose of the marriage was to guarantee legally that “our remains could be buried together.” As for sacrificing a victim to Satan, whom they both claim to serve, the couple had been toying with the idea for some time.
Choosing the victim was easy. Mr. Ruda’s coworker, Mr. Hackerts, known to his friends as Hacki, “was always so funny” and therefore seemed like the perfect candidate for “court jester” to the dark lord, according to a written statement by Mr. Ruda, 26.
Mr. Hackerts, 33, was anything but a Satanist. A “nice guy,” he maintained contact with the couple after many other people refused to associate with them. Together with Mr. Ruda, he sold car accessories at a parts dealer in Herten, a city located just north of Bochum in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Mr. Ruda apparently succeeded so well in separating his private from professional life that no one at the store wondered about any thoughts, desires or fantasies he might have had while selling bumpers and side mirrors.
Allowing a glance into his emotional world, Mr. Ruda wrote in his statement that he realized at an early age that he was Satan’s messenger of death. He hated people, and things like embraces disgusted him, the statement says. After original “visions” at the age of 13 or 14, he began to explore the dark side of his soul and later had fantasies of slaughtering people and “bloody dreams,” as he wrote in the confession. He discovered “religious deviations” and the Satanist bible, then took out a classified ad in a scene magazine. Manuela answered it.
They met and liked each other. It was a “harmony of souls,” says Mr. Ruda in the statement, which stresses that he rejects the “terrestrial lust” of sex.
Mrs. Ruda, 23, also says she discovered her brand of Satanism at a very early age. Elementary school was normal, but she dropped out after the 10th grade because “the others” could not deal with her and she could not deal with them. Deciding she did not fit into this world, she tried to give herself “an overdose of H,” heroin, at age 14.
It did not work. She took a few jobs and went to demonstrations “against everything.” She traveled to Scotland in 1996 and spent some time in London, where she discovered a club visited by “vampires” and other people. She could tell they were vampires because they were “extremely sensitive to light.” Returning to Germany in 1997, she worked at cafs and led an increasingly isolated life, studying “chaos magic” and preferring the company of vampires and their friends.
She says they went to cemeteries at night, climbed around ruins, talked about this and that, and drank blood — their own blood, or that from so-called givers. Would-be drinkers of blood can find willing givers on the Internet, Mrs. Ruda says, explaining: “You just have to be careful not to hit an artery.” Givers are happy to offer their arms or legs for a bite, she says.
According to her story, it was around this time that she had her incisors removed and replaced with longer, sharper implanted teeth identical to those seen in vampire films. She dedicated her soul to the service of Satan and swore to accept his “every word” as law. Mrs. Ruda says she tried therapy but stopped, out of fear that she would be locked up if she revealed what she was really like.
In the courtroom on Wednesday, she wore black sunglasses to match her black hair as she sat at the defendants’ table. The presiding judge allowed her to wear the glasses after rejecting her request that the lights be turned down in the courtroom. Her lawyer asked the court ts be understanding on this point because his client had lived nocturnally and slept during the day. And her chosen place of sleep was usually a coffin.
In the courtroom, she revealed plenty of tattooed skin and posed for photographers like an ill-tempered movie star, raising her hand in a “devil’s sign” for the next day’s newspapers.
As the trial proceeded, the court heard the details of the crime spelled out in the defendants’ confessions. Mr. Ruda claims that he was already in a mental haze when he went to Mrs. Ruda’s apartment in Witten, east of Bochum, last July 6. His perceptions “seemed distant” because Satan had taken over his body, according to the statement. He says he later saw Mr. Hackerts lying on the floor, a pentagram carved in his abdomen, but this was the only thing he says he remembers of that day.
His wife’s memory is more detailed. She says the couple spent most of the day “just hanging out.” She took a short rest in her coffin before they wrote farewell letters to their family and friends. At 6 p.m., they picked up Mr. Hackerts, whom they had invited to a party at her place. As they entered, she says she felt a “force field” and the presence of “entities.”
“We were no longer alone,” Mrs. Ruda says.
Satan took possession of them as they sat on the couch, she says. Mr. Ruda got up and left the room. When he returned, surrounded by a “flickering aura,” he hit Mr. Hackerts over the head with a hammer, Mrs. Ruda says. Mr. Hackerts staggered to his feet. She says a mysterious light suddenly revealed a knife on the windowsill and a voice gave her the order: “Stab him in the heart!” She grabbed the knife and went to work.
Mr. Hackerts was stabbed 66 times, according to the medical examiner’s report. A forensics specialist who testified Thursday said that the couple used many different objects in killing their victim. Police confiscated one short knife, a carpet cutter and a machete. When Mr. Hackerts could no longer move, they used a scalpel to cut a pentagram into his stomach. At that point, “the visitation” came to an end. They packed their things, fled in the car and waited for more orders.
Since Mrs. Ruda would prefer not to answer any questions in court, her lawyer assisted her confession with a few queries designed to reveal her mental state. “What do you say about the prosecution’s accusation that you committed an act of murder,” the lawyer asked.
“We are not murderers,” she replied. “It wasn’t meant in a bad way. We wanted to release his soul from the hateful flesh, so that he can serve Satan. It was in his own best interest. We only followed orders.”
She insisted that she and her husband liked Mr. Hackerts, and that his killing was nothing personal. “Hacki is still here,” she said, although he was no longer visible. Well within view, the victim’s parents sat across from her in the court. They showed no emotion as they listened to the woman with the sunglasses talk about their dead son.
A police detective, Franz Sobolewski, gave the court a different view of the couple’s actions. He said he interrogated Mrs. Ruda after the couple was arrested in Jena, and that both told police that Mr. Hackerts had been killed with a single blow and that the stabbings were a spontaneous act. Then they sliced open the victim’s forearms as a “rehearsal” of their own suicides.
“Suddenly, they realized that killing someone is not that simple, that it was monstrous and brutal,” Mr. Sobolewski testified. “They didn’t want to repeat that with themselves. They did not have the courage.”
During the interrogation, Mrs. Ruda cried because, she said, Satan had abandoned her. At the time, she added that she would gladly take it all back.
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