Wolfgang Tier was first identified by the Watcher network while serving as a Prussian soldier taking part in the partition of Poland. Contemporary reports from Gustav Hurst, the Watcher who first identified him, describe him as “cold and aloof, preferring not the company of his fellow soldiers but the solitude of his own thoughts, which appears amenable to the men who find him a frightful compatriot.” Hurst noted that his skill in combat and with the sword were “as extraordinary in their precision as they are brutal in their cruelty,” leading him to speculate that Tier was likely quite old and may have held a previous identity known to the Watchers.
By 1777, Tier was recorded as serving as a Hessian soldier for the British forces in the American colonies by two separate Watchers. Of particular concern was his almost sport-like penchant for foregoing killing his enemies, preferring instead to inflict particularly painful and cruel wounds that would cause his enemies to suffer and die over hours or days.
Over the next century, his involvement was tracked in 47 European wars, leading a few of the more superstitiously-minded to suspect he holds some supernatural ability to sense conflict and travel toward it like a moth to a flame.
Of note, since he was known to be in London in 1888, there has been speculation among some in the Watcher community that Tier may have been the notorious Jack the Ripper. A detailed analysis of the murders makes it unlikely that Tier was responsible, given the deviation from his well-established preferred methods for killing. However, the number of resources expended in this investigation provides an indication of the serious concerns held by the Watcher community for Tier’s violent tendencies.
He served in the German military during both world wars. Of note, during the second world war, he is recorded as a medical doctor who performed often barbaric experiments on prisoners of war and internment camp prisoners. The grisly nature of these experiments would later resurface in the late-1990s when, disillusioned by the diminishing scope and casualties of wars, he set his sight on new hunting grounds.
Tourists reported missing in the Orlando area were hardly unusual and, most often, would be resolved with time. Particularly in the cases of international tourists, exact itineraries were rarely known and a missing persons case would generally be closed when the tourist called home after a few days of sightseeing or partying, none the wiser that they had been reported missing in the first place. However, in the late-1990s, there was a growing trend in missing persons cases that – at first – went unnoticed, as it crossed multiple police jurisdictions. The true scope of the problem didn’t become clear until Florida and federal police agencies began to share more details of open criminal investigations, when it was discovered that dozens of tourists had been reported missing with no resolution.
It was around this time that routine maintenance conducted on a ride at the Disney World resort discovered the concealed remains of a man. Further investigation discovered more bodies, leading to a search of the entire resort yielding the remains of dozens of victims within the park. The investigation led to the realization that there was a previously undetected serial killer on the loose when they confirmed 32 bodies found at the park, but privately suspected that there may have been many more fed to the park’s alligator population. Ultimately, the investigation led to Wolfgang Tier as the prime suspect.
Surprisingly, Tier never uttered a single word during the countless hours of interrogation, mental health evaluations, or the subsequent arrest and court appearances. Instead, he simply sat unmoving and showing no emotion other than what many interpreted as amusement. He showed no reaction upon being convicted or sentenced to death sentence. He did, however, kill three sheriff’s deputies in the elevator on the way out of the building, but made no attempt to escape or even to remove his handcuffs and shackles. When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, he simply waited by the bodies as other officers took him back into custody.
Given the danger to himself and corrections staff, Tier was remanded into the special security unit at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
