US Edition TWO satanists who stabbed a friend to death because they said the devil told them to grinned mockingly at their victim's parents yesterday before being sent to secure psychiatric units.
Daniel Ruda, 26, and his wife Manuela, 23, who said she learnt about satanism in England and Scotland, were committed for 15 and 13 years respectively. Both stared blankly ahead as sentence was passed at Bochum, western Germany.
Judge Arno Kersting-Tombroke said they had committed a "terrible crime" in murdering their friend, Frank Hackert, 33, by stabbing him 66 times.
But he said the accused were "humans not monsters". Society had a duty to try to cure them of their severe mental disorders.
Manuela Ruda's final gesture was to make a satanic sign with her little and index fingers and inch-long black nails. Mr Hackert's parents sat holding hands opposite the killers.
Daniel Ruda, a car parts salesman, and Manuela, had admitted the killing, but said they were not responsible because they were acting on the devil's orders. "Kill, sacrifice, bring souls," was how they described the command.
The couple said they had chosen "Hacki", as they called him, for sacrifice because he was "so funny and would be the perfect court jester for Satan".
Throughout the trial, the Rudas showed off, appearing in outlandish costumes, flashing their devil-horn signals and threatening witnesses.
Daniel Ruda did the same yesterday, drawing gasps from a packed public gallery. The first clue to the crime was contained in a letter that Manuela wrote to her mother shortly after the killing. "I am not of this world," she said. "I must liberate my soul from the mortal flesh."
Her mother went to the police and accompanied officers to the couple's flat in Witten, western Germany, on July 9 last year. The shutters were closed and the lights were not working. But the police could see blood spattered over the bedroom walls.
In the bathroom there was a black and white poster of hanged women. Skulls, scalpels stained with blood, vampire teeth and coloured contact lenses lay scattered around. On the floor in the main room was a great deal of blood and a coffin in which Manuela sometimes slept.
The body of Mr Hackert, a former colleague of Daniel Ruda, lay among the chaos. Besides having been stabbed 66 times, his arms and face had been savaged with a machete.
A scalpel was lodged in his stomach and next to it was a pentagram cut into the skin. A note, which police believe was a death list of 15 intended victims, was found near his body.
The judge said the couple met three years ago after Daniel Ruda put an advertisement in a lonely hearts column. It said: "Vampire seeks princess of darkness that hates everyone and everything."
They married on the 6th of the 6th month, June, last year and decided to kill on the 6th of July. That gave them the 666 number, the biblical symbol of the devil.
They invited Mr Hackert to a party. Daniel Ruda picked him up from his home and took him to the flat, where they chatted and played music. Then, as Ruda hit Mr Hackert on the head with a hammer, his wife shouted: "Stab him in the heart."
Manuela said she saw the light in the flat flicker as Mr Hackert died. She took that as a sign that the "soul was on its way down there".
Daniel Ruda told the court: "I was in a state of euphoria." After the killing the couple drank their victim's blood and prayed to Satan. "We were empowered and alone," Manuela said.
She described how disappointed she was after the killing that she did not turn into a vampire, "because as a vampire I would not have needed the streets".
Manuela, an only child who loved animals, shocked her middle-class parents from the age of 13 with her punk haircuts and garish clothes.
At 16 she ran away to England, living first in London. There she told how she met other satanists and went to "bite parties" where people drank each others' blood.
"Men were always trotting after me," she said. "They were my blood donors." She then headed to Scotland where she worked as a chambermaid in a hotel in the Highlands.
When the hotel shut for the winter she lived with a 62-year-old man called Tom whose body was tattooed "like a leopard".
Back in Germany, she threw herself into the satanic scene, had her teeth removed and animal fangs implanted. On Halloween night in 1999 she dedicated her soul to Satan and promised to serve him after her death. That year she also met Daniel Ruda.
From the age of 12 he had felt what he described as a "lust for blood, the metallic salty taste" and had recently been searching for a soul-mate. The couple married in black the following year.
Some of Germany's most eminent psychologists have worked on the Ruda case, which has shocked a country with a growing problem of young satanists. The latest estimates put the number of followers at 6,000.
The cult is most common in the depressed towns and villages of the former Communist east of the country.