Death of Rudolf Rupp

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The death of Rudolf Rupp occurred in October 2001 in Upper Bavaria . It is considered to be one of the most bizarre cases in recent German criminal history.

chronology

The farmer Rudolf "Rudi" Rupp , born in 1949, disappeared without a trace on October 13, 2001 after a visit to an inn where he got drunk.

On May 13, 2005, the jury at the Ingolstadt Regional Court sentenced Rupp's wife and ex-boyfriend of one of the daughters, Matthias E., to eight and a half years in prison for manslaughter . The accused had confessed to having killed Rupp in his house in Heinrichsheim (city of Neuburg an der Donau , district of Neuburg-Schrobenhausen ), dismembered and fed to the dogs living on the farm. The defendants revoked these confessions before the trial began. The two daughters, 15 and 16 years old at the time of Rupp's disappearance, were sentenced to two and a half and three and a half years of youth sentences respectivelyAiding and abetting condemned.

According to the verdict of the jury, Matthias E. lay in wait for Rudolf Rupp, who was returning home from the inn, in the stairwell and hit him on the back of the neck with a square piece of wood. Rupp's wife and two daughters are said to have cheered the young man on and molested the defenseless victim with obscene swearwords. According to the prosecution and court, Rupp's wife is said to have hit her husband on the head with a stick, and the daughters are said to have kicked their father, who was lying on the ground. In the cellar, Matthias E. and his fiancée are said to have hit Rupp's temple with a hammer with a hammer. The next morning, according to the verdict, they cut up the dead farmer with a knife, a saw and an ax. In his confession, Matthias E. described how he severed the farmer's arms and legs, cut open the body, removed the organs, skimmed the blood into a bucket with a margarine beaker and sent the body parts to the Dobermans, the bull terrier and the living on the farm Shepherd fed. The verdict was based exclusively on the (revoked) confessions of the accused; Despite intensive efforts by the investigating authorities, no forensic evidence of this incident was found.

In February 2009, two cars were located in the Danube above the Bergheim barrage and recovered on March 10, 2009. One of the vehicles was the missing Mercedes 230 E from Rupp, its remains were in the driver's seat. The corpse was partially skeletonized by fish eating, but otherwise completely and showed no injuries that would indicate a homicide. It could be ruled out that the dead man had been slain.

Although this proved that essential parts of the conclusions reached by the jury in its judgment could not be correct, the judiciary refused a retrial for a long time. It was not until March 9, 2010 that the Munich Higher Regional Court finally granted the defense's applications for retrial.

On February 25, 2011 (all convicts had meanwhile been released from custody after having served two-thirds of their prison sentences) a chamber of the Landshut Regional Court acquitted the accused. Despite the complete lack of a plausible hypothesis, the court was still convinced that one or more of the accused had killed the farmer, who was considered to be a tyrant, and ruled out an accident or suicide. It is simply not possible to determine who is responsible for death.

How the detailed false confessions came about before the first trial has not been processed legally. The police released videos showing how investigators re-enacted the alleged act with the accused on their court. Although the statements contradicted each other massively and in some cases were almost mutually exclusive, this apparently did not raise any doubts. Rather, the judging court assumed all individual statements to be true to the detriment of the accused and linked them to a continuous offense. Henning Ernst Müller , Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Regensburg, spoke of "inquisitorial and suggestive questions" after analyzing the video recording of the reconstruction of the crime. You can't hear anyone like that. ”Nonetheless, the Landshut Regional Court refused or reduced their compensation on the grounds that they were to blame for the conviction themselves because of their false statements. According to the court, the unexplained circumstances in which the confessions were made played just as little a role as the fact that the confessions had been withdrawn before the trial. At Munich Higher Regional Court and the Federal Constitutional Court , however, complaints lodged were unsuccessful.

The case triggered a lot of media coverage. In March 2012, Spiegel online and the television magazine Spiegel TV spoke of a judicial scandal and made serious allegations against the judiciary. The confessions of the accused relatives were obtained under pressure. A contribution on the Frontal 21 broadcast (ZDF) on July 30, 2013 drew parallels to the Horst Arnold judicial scandal and the Gustl Mollath case , which many also consider a judicial scandal.

Prosecution of the scrap dealer Ludwig H.

The scrap dealer Ludwig H., who lives near Neuburg an der Donau, was accused by the criminal police of removing Rudolf Rupp's missing Mercedes. As a result, H. was in custody for five months, innocent.

Years later, the interrogation methods used by the police at Ludwig H. were the subject of criminal proceedings against H. In the retrial against the four convicted persons in the Rudolf Rupp case, H. described in 2010 as a witness before the Landshut regional court, as he was told by an official of the Ingolstadt criminal police had been pressured to confess their involvement in the act. The interrogator held his service pistol to his temple with the words "We can do different things, it's about murder, we can do anything" when H. refused to sign the interrogation protocol. The Landshut public prosecutor then sued H. in 2012 at the Landshut district court for false suspicion without even having examined H.'s allegations. In his pleading at the main hearing , Hubert K., the representative of the public prosecutor's office, described the defendant H. as “the dregs of humanity” and demanded a prison sentence of 20 months without parole.

Ludwig H. was acquitted because the judge did not believe the statements of the police officers; instead he criticized both the Ingolstadt prosecutors and the Ingolstadt and Landshut public prosecutors. The judge stated u. a. to have reasonable doubts that the defendant wrongly accused the police officer. Furthermore, the judge accused the chief public prosecutor of various illegal and dutiful acts in connection with the questioning of the scrap dealer. The judge also reprimanded the representative of the prosecution for his phrase "scum of humanity".
The process caused a considerable public stir.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Farmer killed: Court acquits in the Rupp family case. In: Spiegel Online . February 25, 2011, accessed February 25, 2011 .
  2. ↑ Thomas Röll, Göran Schattauer: “Completely unharmed” . In: Focus , No. 17, April 20, 2009, pp. 36-37.
  3. ↑ Rudolf Rupp is buried in his hometown . ( Memento of the original from December 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Donaukurier , April 2009. Retrieved December 16, 2014. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.donaukurier.de
  4. ↑ spiegel.de March 19, 2012: Police videos prove manipulation of the statements
  5. ↑ a b c Hans Holzhaider: Methods of the Police: Oddities from the interrogation room. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . December 18, 2012, accessed December 18, 2012 .
  6. ↑ a b Justice scandal in the Rudi Rupp case . In: Spiegel Online . Retrieved March 20, 2012.
  7. ↑ a b c d Julia Jüttner: The riddle of Rudolf Rupp. In: Spiegel Online. October 20, 2010, accessed February 25, 2011 .
  8. ↑ Hans Holzhaider: First long prison sentences, now acquittals . In: sueddeutsche.de . February 25, 2011, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed May 19, 2017]).
  9. ↑ File number 3 Ws 109 - 112/10
  10. ↑ Der Spiegel 9/2011 / Gisela Friedrichsen : "Isn't anyone ashamed?"
  11. ↑ Silke Bigalke: Innocent behind bars - How the German judiciary abandons its victims. In: Süddeutsche.de. September 1, 2012, accessed August 18, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Nationwide extensive reporting, including Focus , Sueddeutsche.de ( Hans Holzhaider ), Rheinische Post , Welt Online , Donaukurier and T-Online .
  13. ↑ Video Frontal 21: Mollath - In the Mills of Justice (9:00 p.m., from 4:20 a.m.)  in the ZDFmediathek , accessed on February 11, 2014. (offline)
  14. ↑ Harald Jung: Public prosecutor insults scrap dealers as "scrap" , Augsburger Allgemeine from December 5, 2012, accessed on November 22, 2018.
  15. ↑ Acquittal for scrap dealers. The court massively criticizes investigators and public prosecutors . Weekly newspaper of December 17, 2012
  16. ^ The aftermath of the Bavarian judiciary in the death of Rudi Rupp . Strafakte.de, accessed on August 31, 2016
  17. ↑ a b sueddeutsche.de December 18, 2012: Senior Public Prosecutor with a catalog of sins
  18. ↑ Always trouble with the public prosecutor ; in: Süddeutsche Zeitung Online from October 22, 2012
  19. ^ "Scrap": Public prosecutor's office demands 20 months without parole ; in: Augsburger Allgemeine from December 3, 2012
  20. ^ Acquittal for the scrap dealer ; in: Augsburger Allgemeine from December 17, 2012