Authorities believe cult leader Torsten Weiss, 53 — the owner of a medieval fetish shop — directed the gory, murder-suicides that left himself and two women impaled with crossbow bolts, The Daily Beast reported, citing German news accounts.
Two other women who were also under Weiss’ sway were days earlier found dead in an apartment of what may have been poisonings.
“Investigators suspect they were all members of a kind of sex circle with a focus on the Middle Ages,” the Daily Beast said, quoting an investigator who spoke to RTL news.
“[Weiss] may have been the guru of the group.”
Weiss, described as having a long white beard that extended down to the middle of his chest, and two of the women were found dead last weekend in a quaint Bavarian bed and breakfast in Passau, Germany.
A chambermaid found Weiss and 33-year-old Kerstin Enders dead on a double bed with crossbow bolts protruding from their skulls and necks.
Authorities believe they had been shot by Farina Caspari, who is suspected of having honored Weiss’ “dominator command to first kill him and Enders, and then take her own life,” the Daily Beast reported. Caspari, 30, was dead in a pool of blood at the foot of the bed.
The two other women cult members had been found days earlier back at Caspari’s apartment in Lower Saxony, some 250 miles south of the B&B. One was Caspari’s lover, identified only as “Gertrud C.”
Weiss and the two lovers were frequent guests at the B&B and would engage in what sounded through the thin walls to be sadomasochistic activities, a police spokesman told the Daily Beast.
All four of the dead women were under Weiss’ hypnotic control and engaged in extreme sexual acts involving bondage and sadomasochism under his direction, their pals told authorities.
Weiss’ store sold replica longbows, spears and battle axes and offers jousting and medieval reenactment classes.
The four women had lived on a farm property with their Gothic guru until the landlord kicked them out after Weiss’ dog mauled another dog to death on the property, landlord Alexander Kruger told Bild, the Daily Beast reported.
“His tone with them was strange” Kruger told Bild. “They were almost submissive… holding their heads down. If I did not know better, I’d say they were really scared of him.”