Norbert Hans Poehlke (15 September 1951 – 22 October 1985), The Hammer-Killer (Der Hammermörder), was a German police officer (1971–1985) and serial killer who after he committed suicide in 1985 was found to have committed several bank robberies and related murders. He was tagged as the "Hammer-Killer" for his modus operandi of killing drivers of cars and using a sledgehammer in later bank robberies in which he would use his victims' cars as getaway vehicles. Early life Poehlke was a police officer in Baden-Württemberg, employed from 1982 as a high-ranking sergeant of Mühlhausen am Neckar's canine division. After winning 36,000 Deutsche Mark from the lottery, he built a house for his family (consisting of his wife, two sons and a daughter) in the village of Strümpfelbach in Backnang, where he took care of the finances. After the construction of the family home, the family became heavily indebted. In March 1984, his daughter Cordula died from a brain tumor at the age of three. Shortly thereafter, he began a series of robberies and bank robberies, three of which proceeded in the same pattern: First, he lured a random victim in a remote rest area to get into his vehicle. He killed his victims with his service weapon, a Walther P5, by shooting them in the head. After the crime, he would drive with the stolen vehicle to a bank to rob them. Masked, he smashed the windows of the ticket counter with a sledgehammer, robbed cash, and then escaped with the other vehicle. The series of murders displaced the residents of Heilbronn-Ludwigsburg for more than a year. The unknown perpetrator was soon dubbed in the media as the "Hammer-Killer", although the sledgehammer was not his preferred murder tool. The crimes On 3 May 1984, 47-year-old engineer and commercial traveler Siegfried Pfitzer from Aschaffenburg was found dead, shot in the head, at a highway rest stop in Marbach, West Germany. His car, found a quarter-mile from his body, was linked to a bank robbery the same day in Erbstetten. The assailant had smashed the teller window with a sledgehammer, and taken the money on the other side. Despite extensive police investigations, the initial search for the perpetrator was unsuccessful. On 21 December, 37-year-old Eugene Wethey, an English expatriate living in Nuremberg, was found shot dead in a rest stop near Grossbottwar. A week later, Wethey's car was used in a bank robbery