Joachim Kroll Joachim Kroll, commonly known as "The Ruhr Hunter", was an impeccable example of a man who had been suffering from mental illness, but who had skillfully evaded police discovery for almost twenty years a year. Kroll was classified as someone who preferred young children as friends, had a weak vocabulary and short memory, acted impetuously, and was incapable of understanding or accepting consequences. Serial killers dealing with a mental handicap usually need a partner to help them rape their victims, abandon the bodies, and help them cover their tracks. Even with an IQ of just 76, Kroll managed to do all of these things on his own. His methods and the time frame of his murders took the police in a completely different direction, looking for someone who was incredibly intelligent, but did not suspect that he was an inferior individual with the abilities of a third grader (Wellman 1). Joachim George Kroll was born in the town of Hindenburg on April 17, 1933. He grew up as the eighth child in a family of miners. Kroll's father was sent to war during World War II, where he became a prisoner and died. Kroll and his family then moved into an insufficient two-bedroom apartment that he shared with his six sisters and one brother. Joachim attended school there for less than five years, then worked on the family farm. He continued to live with his mother until he was twenty-two, perhaps due to a fear of being alone in the “real world” (Wellman 1). Kroll eventually ended up moving to Duisburg, in the northwestern part of Germany. He held a job as a cabinet assistant after his mother's death in 1955. Could this have been one of the reasons Kroll began his new journey of committing murders? He ena... ... middle of paper ......t the murders, which shows that he didn't do everything to get attention. He also had no idea he was being searched. He attributed his abnormality to having witnessed pig slaughter as a young man. It stuck in his head for the rest of his life, he explains to the policeman. His second reason for committing the crimes was that the grocery bill was drastically high. He used the flesh of his victim's buttocks, forearms and calf as meat. He described his hunger and how the meat of small children was the tastiest meat he could find (Wellman 4). The ongoing trial lasted 151 days. It began on October 4, 1979 and ended in April 1982. Kroll was sentenced to nine consecutive prison sentences, but died of a heart attack on July 1, 1991 at the age of fifty-eight. The infamous Ruhr Hunter will never be forgotten.