Wolfgang Schmidt

Early life Schmidt was born Wolfgang Schmidt in Lehnin, East Germany, as the eldest of three children. Schmidt started to engage in cross-dressing around age seven by wearing female underwear to purposely urinate and defecate in them. Schmidt described feeling "overwhelmingly pleasant feelings" in this manner. After finding the dirty garments hidden in a barn, Schmidt's mother refused to let Schmidt go outside to play with other children. After a doctor's visit left the parents without a diagnosis, they began locking their clothing cabinets, with Schmidt instead scavenging women's clothing from dumpsters and landfills. Schmidt began masturbating at the age of eight or nine, gradually developing more specific and definitively sexual practices such as self-covering in feces, defecating into bras and wearing soiled underwear backwards.

In 1985, Schmidt applied for a ten-year tenure in the Volkspolizei in Potsdam, reaching the rank of Unteroffizier, and switched from train supervisor to police duty in the 20th unit of Volkspolizei-Bereitschaft. Schmidt frequently showed up drunk to jobs, stole items from workplaces, got into physical fights with colleagues and once willfully damaged the apartment of a girlfriend and her family while intoxicated. The couple broke up after a relative of the girlfriend found several knives hidden in Schmidt's bedroom, which were reported to the police, but not investigated further.

Murders On 24 October 1989, Schmidt broke into the house of Edeltraut Nixdorf, 51, in Deetz to steal underwear. Nixdorf saw the intruder from the garden and confronted Schmidt with a rake. Schmidt forced Nixdorf to the ground and choked the victim before bludgeoning her to death with a hammer. Schmidt then raped the corpse and wrapped the body in a blanket, being spotted by a neighbour in the process and fleeing thereafter. A large shoe print, size 49 EU, was found at the scene, with the sole imprint identified as that of a NVA-issue boot, worn by soldiers and certain VoPo officers. Nixdorf's husband committed suicide by pesticide poisoning in March 1990.

On 24 May 1990, Schmidt fatally strangled Christa Naujoks, 45, with an electric cable near a garbage dump in Ferch. The body was raped post-mortem and discovered the next day by Naujoks' ex-husband, who worked on the site as a groundkeeper. Soiled pink women's underwear was found around the dumping site. Police also received report of a tall individual harassing women in an adjacent forest.

On 13 March 1991, Schmidt attacked Inge Fischer, 34, while walking home through a forest between Borkheide and Neuendorf. Fischer was beaten and kicked before being dragged off the beaten path, where she was raped and then killed with a stab wound to the neck. The body was found over a week later by hikers.

On 6 April 1991, Schmidt broke into an apartment in Fichtenwalde, fatally strangling Talita Bremer, 66. Her corpse was raped and her death discovered two weeks later by a relative. The murder was connected as clothing drawers had been rummaged through. Sperm samples and a pubic hair were found by police forensic teams.

Non-fatal assaults and rape On an unspecified date in summer 1990, Schmidt got into a fight with a homeless woman over recyclable trash at a landfill. The victim was beaten nearly to death with a truncheon. By this time, Schmidt was engaged to a 19-year-old woman and living at her house in Rädel. in Brandenburg an der Havel. Forensic psychiatrist had argued in favor of a punishment with involuntary commitment after diagnosing Schmidt as having a "sexual-pathological development [...] with paraphilic, coprophilic, transvestite, and sadistic elements", resulting in diminished responsibility. Gerhard Mauz criticized press coverage for dehumanizing Schmidt as "a spawn of Hell", finding the response excessive, even for the magnitude of the crimes, as this affected related persons such as Schmidt's fiancée, who had an abortion before the trial due to public pressure following an open campaign entitled "Abort the child of the Pink Giant" by a Springer newspaper. The campaign claimed that Schmidt's violent impulses were genetic, arguing that the child would be at risk of inheriting similar defects. In July 2013, Schmidt's restrictions were loosened for unsupervised walks on the facility's green space. Further privileges for day trips into Brandenburg an der Havel were briefly granted following "first steps forwards" during therapy, but revoked after media published CCTV images of Schmidt buying pornographic magazines at a gas station.