Hans Günther Hermann Stumpe

Hans Günther Hermann Stumpe (* 1936 ) is a German businessman convicted of murder . He killed the German prostitute Helga Casu in the Danish holiday resort of Vorupør in 1985 . The crime caused great excitement in both countries and was considered to be the first recent case of its kind in Denmark . It was the first Danish criminal case to be solved using genetic engineering.

In September 1985, the day the duck hunt began, a hunter found parts of a dissected woman's corpse in Lake Roddenbjerg not far from Agger in southern Thy . After months of intensive research, the Danish and German police were able to solve the carefully planned crime. The 49-year-old Wolfsburg businessman Hans Günther Stumpe had invited the 36-year-old hairdresser and prostitute Helga Casu from Braunschweig on vacation to Vorupør on the pretext of discussing business related to opening a restaurant. For this purpose, Helga Casu had taken out a loan of DM 40,000; Stump presumably appropriated this money.

The planned, apparently perfect crime was solved by a coincidence of circumstances:

• Because no Danish woman with the license plate in question was missing, and because four fifths of the tourists in the region were German, the police assumed from the start that the victim was probably a German.

• A German tourist had seen the burned remains of Helga Casus identity card in a garbage basket at a remote rest area on the coastal road in Thy. Because he also came from Braunschweig , he could still remember the event well when she was searched for missing by the Braunschweig police a few weeks later .

• When Stumpe left the holiday home in Vorupør, the house had been cleaned exceptionally thoroughly. The bedroom had new mattresses and roll mattresses, which surprised the owner. A saleswoman at a bed shop in the Hanstholm shopping center was able to identify Stumpe later.

• A fisherman in the port of Hanstholm had seen Stumpe take a package or sack from the luggage compartment of his car and throw it into the water. The fisherman noted the license plate number , which was crucial for the investigation.

To secure his alibi , Stumpe had addressed a letter from himself to his wife. He put the letter in another envelope and sent it to a post office in Munich . Here officials opened the envelope and forwarded the franked letter. Although the letter was postmarked, the many witnesses could prove that Stumpe was in Denmark at the time of the murder.

Head and hands were probably thrown into the port of Hanstholm, but never found despite investigations.

The forensic doctor who examined the body claimed the perpetrator was someone who was not using a knife for the first time. The suspicion that Stumpe could be responsible for several cases was investigated by the police, but could not be determined with certainty.

Around 100 witnesses from Germany and 40 from Denmark took part in the trial . In 1986 Stumpe was sentenced to life imprisonment by a court in Braunschweig, which is still being carried out in the Celle prison .

The case was dramatized in the Danish TV crime series Rejseholdet in 2002 .

Web links

• Det perfect murder , with pictures (Danish)
• Homicide in Denmark, 1985 (Danish)
• Murder in Vorupør , Danish news program about the case (video)

Coordinates: 56 ° 47 ′ 40.9 ″  N , 8 ° 17 ′ 6.7 ″  E