Jonathan Kellerman - The Conspiracy Club

His father died in 1948. Fully certified in three subspecialties, Dergraav moved to his mother’s home city, Berlin, where he built a highly successful practice delivering babies and attending to the disorders of women. His patients adored him because of his sensitivity and his willingness to listen. All were unaware of the six hidden cameras in Dergraav’s examining room that allowed the doctor to amass a six-hundred-reel library of naked women.

Early details of Dergraav’s childhood were lacking, and author Pugh supplanted fact with Freudian speculation. One fact had been verified: Shortly after arriving in Germany, the urbane young doctor began picking up prostitutes and torturing them. Ample payments to the street women procured their silence. So did the absence of scars; Dergraav had a brute’s lust but a surgeon’s touch. Later interviews with the early victims revealed Dergraav’s penchant for humiliating his victims, and a secret cache of videotapes from the doctor’s later years showed him whipping, punching, biting, and jabbing with hypodermic needles over two hundred women. He also enjoyed plunging their hands into icy water and compressing their limbs with blood-pressure cuffs, then measuring time latency till pain sensation. Frequently, Dergraav filmed himself, as well, in close-up. Smiling subtly.

A handsome man, Pugh claimed, though no photo confirmation was offered.

During the late fifties, Dergraav married an upper-class woman, the daughter of a fellow physician, and fathered a child.

Shortly after, bodies of prostitutes began showing up in the slums of Berlin, cut into pieces.

Street gossip eventually led to attention being focused on Dr. Dergraav. Questioned in his office, the gynecologist professed surprise that the police would suspect him of anything sinister, and he evinced no anxiety or guilt. The detectives had trouble imagining the charming, soft-spoken surgeon as the demon behind the horrific mutilations they were encountering more and more frequently. Dergraav was filed as a low-probability suspect.

The prostitute butcherings continued on and off for nearly a decade. The killer’s disdain for his victims intensified, and he dehumanized them by mixing up body parts and combining them, so that limbs and organs from several different women came to be found bagged together in plastic sacks and left in trash bins. When forensic evidence from a victim in 1964 led the coroner to conclude that a laser had been used for dissection, the police reviewed their notes and discovered Dergraav traveled to Paris, yet again, to learn how to use the still-experimental instrument for eye surgery. This seemed curious, as Dergraav wasn’t an ophthalmologist, and they questioned him again. Dergraav apprised them of his ophthalmologic training, proved it with certificates, and claimed he was thinking of switching back to his former subspecialty because of the promise offered by lasers for corneal ablation.

The police asked if they could search his office.

The doctor’s consent was needed; no grounds for a warrant existed. Charmingly, smilingly, Dergraav declined. During the interview, he laughed and told the investigators they couldn’t be farther off the mark. His use of the laser was limited to academics, and the instrument was far too expensive for him to own. Furthermore, his gynecologic specialty was the surgical treatment of vulvodynia- vaginal pain. He was a physician, his mission in life was to alleviate agony, not cause it.

The police left. Three days later, Dergraav’s office suite and his home were emptied and padlocked and wiped clean of fingerprints. The doctor and his family were gone.

Dergraav’s wife surfaced a year later in England, then in New York, where she professed ignorance of her husband’s behavior and his whereabouts. She sought, and was granted a divorce from Dergraav, changed her name, and was never heard from again. Colin Pugh cited speculation that the doctor had been taken in by American officials as payback for wartime cooperation by Dergraav’s father. The Oslo-based diplomat had deceived his Nazi masters and passed crucial information to the Allies. However, this remained rumor, and subsequent sightings of Gerd Dergraav placed him far from the States: in Switzerland, Portugal, Morocco, Bahrain, Beirut, Syria, and Brazil.

The last two locales were verified. Some time during the early ’70s, Dergraav slipped into Rio de Janeiro using a Syrian passport issued in his own name and managed to obtain expedited Brazilian citizenship. Remarried, with a child, he lived openly in Rio, purchasing a villa above Ipanema Beach and volunteering his services to a human rights group that offered free medical service to the slum dwellers of the city’s fetid favillas .

Dergraav swam, sunbathed, ate well (Argentinian beefsteak was his favorite) and worked tirelessly without pay. Among the human rights workers and the favillitos , he came to be known as the White Angel- a tribute to both his pale coloring and his pure soul.

During his known residence in Rio, that city’s prostitutes began showing up dead and cut into pieces.

Degraav’s second reign of murder lasted another decade. In the end, he was snared by the most banal of circumstances. The screams of a prostitute he was attempting to asphyxiate attracted a gang of hoodlums from the neighboring slum, and Dergraav fled into the night. The thugs exploited the bound and gagged woman’s helplessness by gang-raping her, but they left her alive. After some indecision, she reported the doctor to the police.

Dergraav’s house was searched by Rio detectives, less concerned than their German counterparts with due process. The cache of videotapes was found, including one in which the doctor reduced a woman’s body to forty chunks using a laser scalpel. In the film, Dergraav narrated as he mutilated, describing the procedure just as he would a bona fide surgery. Also retrieved was a suede box filled with women’s jewelry and a cache carved of rosewood, rattling with vertebrae, teeth, and knucklebones.

Imprisoned in Salvador de Bahia prison, Dergraav awaited trial for two years, ever the charmer. Jailers brought him international newspapers, literary magazines, and scientific journals. Catered food was delivered. Citing worries about his cholesterol, Dergraav ate less beef, more chicken.

Rumor had it that money would soon exchange hands, and the doctor would be deported under cover of night, back to the Middle East. Then German authorities learned of the arrest, requested and received permission to extradite. That process stretched on, and Dergraav could be seen sitting in the prison’s courtyard, relaxed, dressed in tropical whites, nuzzling with his wife, playing with his child.

Finally, the German authorities got their way. The day after the extradition certificate was drawn, Dergraav blocked the peephole in his cell with chewing gum, ripped up his jail-issue clothing, knotted the strips into a rope, and hung himself. He was nearly sixty, but had the appearance of a forty-year-old. The jailer who discovered him remarked on the healthy, peaceful appearance of the White Angel’s corpse.

Nearly seventeen years ago, to the day, Gerd Dergraav’s ashes had been strewn at sea.

Seventeen years ago jump-started Jeremy’s memory.

The first laser article had been published that very year.

Norwegian authors. Russians, an Englishman. He rechecked the names. No Dergraav.

It was the date he was supposed to notice. Origins in Oslo.

Seventeen years ago, a murderous doctor had hung himself.

Laser surgery, physician suicide.

Oslo, Paris, Damascus by way of Berlin.

Gerd Dergraav had been born and trained in the Norwegian capital, learned female surgery in France, settled and tortured and murdered in Berlin.