A young married couple who admitted to a ritual Satanic killing were yesterday told they could spend the rest of their lives in a secure psychiatric unit after a trial which has raised the spectre of bizarre underground occult groups in Britain.
Manuela Ruda, aged 23, who told a German court she had become a vampire in London, and her husband, Daniel, aged 26, were given prison sentences of 13 and 15 years respectively after admitting to the hacking to death of a friend in their flat in Witten, in the Ruhr valley.
The victim, a 33-year-old colleague of Daniel's, Frank Hackert, was targeted as suitable prey for his mild temperament and love of The Beatles, and was lured to their apartment where he was attacked repeatedly with a hammer.
Manuela Ruda told the court: "Then my knife started to glow and I heard the command to stab him in the heart."
The couple stabbed Hackert 66 times, carving an occult pentagram on his chest and collecting his blood in a bowl and then drinking it.
When police broke into the flat they found a scalpel still embedded in his stomach with his body lying beneath a banner saying "When Satan Lives".
They also found imitation human skulls and a coffin in which Manuela slept during the day.
The judge in the case, which has led to disturbing scenes in court, coupled their jail terms with an order that they be held indefinitely for psychiatric treatment.
Neither of the two self-styled devil worshippers showed the slightest emotion as the sentences were read out to a courtroom dotted with supporters and admirers of the bizarre couple, many dressed in black and holding roses.
Throughout the trial in the western town of Bochum, the couple had remained defiant, making rude gestures, rolling their eyes maniacally, sticking their tongues out and flashing smiles at journalists.
Manuela had told the court how, after working in the Scottish Highlands, she had headed for north London where she se cured a job in a gothic club. It is here she made her first forays into the world of bloodsucking. In the words of her lugubriously bizarre testimony, it was frequented "by both vampires and human beings".
Returning to Germany she began to give substance to her sinister fantasies. She started to mix with people who went to graveyards at night where they would "have a perfectly normal chat and drink some blood". The blood came from donors contacted on the internet.
She also learned how to suck blood from another person's neck without penetrating the artery. And she had two of her teeth removed and replaced with long animal fangs.
A psychologist said she appeared to have been unable to develop any feeling of self-worth. Born into a working-class family, she was selected to attend a gymnasium, the German equivalent of a grammar school, intended to groom its pupils for university. But she dropped out at the age of 14, at about the same time as she tried to kill herself with an overdose.
When she was on the stand, Manuela's lawyer asked her if she had actually signed over her soul to the devil. "That was two-and-a-half years ago, on the night before Halloween," she replied, adding in quasi-Biblical language: "That was when I placed myself in, and swore myself, to, the service of our Lord, his will to perform."
Her Lord, though, was Satan, and he had come to play a big role too in the life of Daniel, the car parts salesman she met through an advert he placed in a heavy metal magazine in August 2000. "Pitch-black vampire seeks princess of darkness who hates everything and everyone," he wrote.
She and her husband were arrested after being spotted at a petrol station after a nationwide manhunt. Police found a list in their flat of their intended future victims. There were 16 names on it.
Manuela, in verbal testimony, and Daniel, in a statement read to the court, both denied murder on the grounds that they were acting on a command from a higher authority. "I got the order to sacrifice a human for Satan," Daniel insisted.