A serial killer who has been described as a modern-day Jack the Ripper admitted that he derived a twisted pleasure from knowing that innocent people would stumble across the remains of his horribly-mutilated victims
A twisted serial killer who derived sick sexual pleasure from handling his victims’ entrails held the heart of one of his victims in his hands after she died. Frank Gust was dubbed “The Rhine-Ruhr Ripper” because the way he mutilated his victims was said to resemble the Victorian-era Jack the Ripper murders.
A new episode of the Bizarre Bazaar True Crime Podcast explains how the real turning-point for the quiet, introverted Gust as a child came when he was around nine years of age.
Desperate for affection, he had bought himself a guinea-pig from a classmate’s family – only to be told that he couldn’t keep it at home because his stepfather was allergic to its fur. After Gust begged his grandmother to let him keep the animal at her house she bluntly told him: “Get rid of it,” describing the pet as a “filthy rodent.”
Gust, rather than returning the little creature to the original owners, embarked on a pattern that was to end in years of cruelty and murder. The podcast explains: “He took the animal outside, tied it down, and slammed a paving stone onto its tiny body as its intestines burst out… He was fascinated. He touched them. And to him, they were warm and soft, literally pulsating with life just moments before.
“The intensity of the experience thrilled him. He would later say, ‘I like the feeling and the warmth when I reached inside the abdominal cavity’.”
From then on Gust, like many other serial killers before him, became more and more obsessed with animal cruelty. Soon it wasn’t enough to simply kill animals, and he began to steal rabbits and cats from neighbours’ gardens and cut them apart while they were still alive. He later said that torturing animals made him feel in control, telling investigators: “I was no longer a victim.”
In his early 20s, he obtained a hunting license and held a legal gun license, which enabled his killing of larger and larger animals. On one occasion, Gust shot a horse and then slit its body open so that he could crawl inside the still-warm body and lie naked in the dying animal’s bloody entrails.
But it was already clear that Gust would eventually begin to prey on human victims. While still in his teens, he had begun to break into the nearby Oberhausen cemetery and violate the bodies of those awaiting burial.
His first murder was a 28-year-old hitchhiker from South Africa named Catherine Thompson who was travelling around Europe. She hitched a lift from Gust, hoping to get closer to the flat in the Netherlands where she had been staying. But instead of taking Catherine where she wanted the twisted killer drove them deep into deserted woodland.
There, under the pretext of needing to urinate, he got out of the car. After he told Catherine that he had mislaid his car keys she also got out of the vehicle to help him find them but as soon as her back was turned Gust shot her in the head.
The podcast explains: “He dragged her lifeless body into the forest, stripped her naked, and forced himself on the corpse repeatedly. Then he slit open her stomach, and reached inside, touching her warm organs.
“Afterwards, he began to stab her breasts and genitals before severing her hands and her head to make it harder for her to be identified. He disposed of her hands deeper in the forest, but he kept the head. He left her mutilated body near the road. He wanted her to be found.”
Part of Gust’s motivation for committing the unspeakable acts was the idea of other’s people’s shock and disgust when they found the horribly-mutilated bodies of his victims. But while he had left Catherine’s body in an easily-seen spot, Gust kept his victim’s head for a while, using it for sexual pleasure several times before disposing in a river.
The discovery of Catherine’s horribly-mutilated body a day or two later hit the headlines, and Gust boasted to his disbelieving girlfriend Elsa that he had been responsible. Even when he showed her Catherine’s bloodied ID card, and drove her out to the murder scene to show her were he had buried the young woman’s hands, Elsa thought it was some sort of elaborate sick joke.
Gust returned to his routine of animal torture for a while, before returning to murder in 1996. In October of that year, he picked up sex worker Svenja Dittmer-el-Din. Gust was actually stopped by police in a routine check while she was in the car with him, but the officer sent them on their way.
While he was having sex with Svenja, Gust shot her in the back of the head. It was only while he was in the midst of beheading her that he realised she was still alive, but he carried on with his sick ritual – eviscerating the woman and holding her still-warm heart in his hands before depositing it between her legs. He later commented “She had her heart in her c*** anyway.”
After Gust told his mother Dagmar what he had done she spoke to two police officers who were friends of hers, but they didn’t believe the lurid confession she described, telling her: “You know he’s full of s***. Just forget it.”
Gust had spoken of his crimes to other disbelieving family members, and experts believe that Gerlinde Neumann – his first wife’s aunt – had been planning to inform on him. Gust killed her in April 1998, and later alleged that she had asked him to assist in her suicide. Her body was never found, and Gust is believed to have thrown her remains into a wildlife feeding station.
Gust’s final victim was another sex worker, Sandra Aus der Wiesche. He had promised to pay her 400 Deutschmarks – the equivalent to about £140 at the time – if she would let him tie her up for a sadistic sex session. The desperate woman agreed and Gust bit her, burned her with a cigarette lighter and continued to torture her for over two hours.
After he was eventually arrested, Gust told his captors that at one point he had injured Sandra so severely that he considered taking her to hospital. But instead he handed his severely-injured victim a loaded gun and told her: “If you don’t shoot me now, I will kill you.”
When Sandra said she couldn’t do that, and pleaded for him to release her, Gust untied her and let her walk a few steps away from his car before shooting her in the back.
Gust was planning another, even more horrible murder when he was arrested, and had even made an experimental test-run. The killer bought a sheep and packed its vagina with explosives, blasting its body to smithereeens. “In my imagination, I was talking to a woman whom I actually saw in front of me,” he said.
After his arrest in 1999, Gust told psychologist criminologist Petra Klages that he saw women as “cattle for slaughter’ and whenever he saw a woman he fantasised about torturing them to death. “Everything around me becomes irrelevant in a split second, and just as quickly an accurate image of how I’m torturing and killing her builds up,” he confessed.
Despite admitting that he would always remain a threat to other people, Frank Gust is scheduled for release some time in 2026.
