Vampire lovers sacrificed mate for Satan
It was a match made in hell when Daniel and Manuela fell in love.
They carved into his chest
When Daniel Ruda was looking for love, he placed a lonely-hearts ad in a German heavy-metal magazine.
Car parts salesman Daniel, 26, knew exactly what he was looking for.
The ad read: Pitch-black vampire seeks princess of darkness who hates everything and everyone.
Quick to reply was Manuela Bartel, 23, and she was perfect for him.
The self-confessed wannabe vampire loved to spend her time in graveyards.
At 16, she’d run away from her middle-class parents and spent time in the UK, attending ‘bite parties’ where they’d drink each other’s blood. When she returned to Germany, she was deep into the satanic scene. She had teeth removed and animal fangs implanted, and promised to serve Satan. That same year, she replied to Daniel’s lonely-hearts ad and she was the girl of his dreams. From the age of 12, Daniel had craved the ‘metallic salty taste’ of human blood. Finding someone who shared his passion was like destiny. They travelled back to the UK together to attend devil worshipping parties and to sleep in cemeteries. When they came back to get a flat in Germany, they decorated it with fake human skulls, and used a coffin as a coffee table. Sometimes Manuela would sleep in it – and they both avoided the sun. The couple married in 2001, on the 6th day of the 6th month. It was the start of their attempt to complete the satanic number 666. To get the third, they needed a victim. A month after they married, on July 6, they acted on what they said was an order from Satan to kill. It would represent the final ‘6’. The couple chose Frank Hackert, 33. He was a quiet man who Daniel had worked with.
They thought he had a great sense of humour and would later say he was so funny that he would make ‘the perfect court jester for Satan.’
After luring Frank to their flat with the false promise of a party, they attacked him repeatedly with a hammer.
‘Then my knife started to glow and I heard the command to stab him in the heart,’ Manuela later confessed.
Frank was stabbed exactly 66 times on the coffin coffee table.
They then slit Frank’s veins and drank his blood from bowls.
A pentagram was carved into his chest and they left his body with a scalpel sticking out of his torso. Then they fled the scene. Suspicions were alerted when Manuela sent a letter to her mum after the killing. I am not of this
world, she’d written. I must liberate my soul from the mortal flesh. Her mum called the police and they went to their flat in Witten. The shutters were closed, but officers could see blood spattered over the bedroom walls. Inside they found Frank’s body. He was under a banner that said When Satan Lives.
Investigators found a long list of other potential victims.
It turned out that the couple had bought a chainsaw and intended to kill more before taking their own lives.
But they were arrested before they could.
In 2002, they both admitted they’d killed Frank Hackert, but denied murder.
‘It was not murder,’ Manuela said. ‘Satan ordered us to. It simply had to be.’ Daniel said that he’d
been acting as a tool for Satan, who had demanded that they ‘kill, sacrifice, and bring souls.’
‘If you run someone over with a car, you don’t prosecute the car,’ Daniel told the court. The trial was a spectacle. They both dressed up in Goth clothing for the media.
They made demonic hand symbols and intimated witnesses.
Manuela had long claw-like fingernails and an upside-down cross shaved into her hair, while Daniel had filed down his teeth to razor sharp points to make himself look more like a vampire.
The married pair seemed to revel in the attention the crime had brought them and even grinned at their victim’s loved ones.
Although Manuela’s request to black out the courtroom windows during the trial was denied, she was allowed to wear sunglasses due to her ‘typically vampire’ sensitivity to light.
She would cut a dark and disturbing figure in the court room.
Neither Daniel or Manuela showed any emotion when they were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
But in a controversial show of compassion, the judge said that although the couple had committed a ‘terrible crime’, they were ‘humans, not monsters’, and sent
them both to psychiatric hospitals instead of jail. It was decided that society had a duty to try and cure them of their severe mental disorders. Perhaps it was easier than accepting the increasingly popular trend of Satan worshippers that was quickly growing at the time of the trial. Daniel Ruda was committed for 15 years. His last words spoken to the public were: ‘May Satan remain with us always.’ Manuela Bartel was committed for 13 years. She did a satanic sign with her hands as she left court.
But that’s where their twisted love story ended.
The couple split and Daniel was even accused of trying to have Manuela killed while inside her hospital. Something he strongly denied. When Manuela was released in 2010, she was given a new identity and has had no more contact with her ex lover.
Daniel was released last year, grey-haired and claiming to be a changed man.
Only time will tell whether the couple who pledged their allegiance to the devil have really turned their back on the dark side.