Helmut Frodl

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Helmut Frodl (born November 6, 1957 in Vienna ) is a former Austrian director , film producer and presenter who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1993 for a jointly committed and insidious murder. Because of the long and skillful planning and the cold-blooded execution of the act, this crime went down in criminal history. While in custody, Frodl received a master's degree in theology and was released in 2009.

Television career

Helmut Frodl began his career as a child star in the ORF , founded in 1979, the youth program Okay and moderated it himself. Later, he traveled for the lifestyle series Jolly Joker around the world and turned contributions to the ORF before he as a moderator of the youth program without muzzle famous has been. From then until 1992 he worked as a freelance director and film producer and lived in Vienna-Hietzing . By bribing an official who was later convicted and dismissed from civil service, he gained advantages over his competitors, for example when awarding commercials.

Köberl murder case

Because the 46-year-old film producer and recording studio owner Fritz Köberl found out and threatened to report Frodl for corruption, he planned to kill Köberl together with his tax advisor friend Gabor Pesti (born December 7, 1947 ). After months of planning, they rented an apartment in the Budapest workers' district of Csepel and hired the 30-year-old Serbian Biljana Novakova to lure him there; Novakova was deliberately chosen because she looked like Köberl's ex-partner.

After Köberl had actually fallen in love with the woman, she lured him to the apartment in Budapest on May 22, 1992 under the pretext of introducing him to her “Uncle Benes”. Arrived there, the cleverly disguised Frodl pretended to be a neighbor and opened the door to Köberl while Pesti played “Uncle Benes”. Pesti administered food and drinks to Köberl with sleeping pills, whereupon he lost consciousness. Frodl then entered the apartment, killed Köberl with four head shots and dismembered the body into 17 parts, which they packed in plastic bags and disposed of in various garbage cans.

Shortly afterwards the relatives of the victim received letters and a fax in which the perpetrators pretended to be Köberl and told of a honeymoon , which is why he would not come home for a long time and his finances are managed by a general manager . In order to substantiate the claim of the honeymoon, Frodl flew to London in order to send another card from there to the relatives of Köberl. Afterwards, Frodl disguised himself as Fritz Köberl, entered the Austrian embassy in London, identified himself as his victim and signed a power of attorney for “his” property in front of witnesses in favor of the tax advisor Gabor Pesti.

Enlightenment and conviction

Days later, a homeless man, looking for recyclable items, opened one of the garbage bags, discovered a hand in it and alerted the police, who were then able to secure all 17 items. A coroner managed to make a plaster cast of the dead man's head, the photo of which was then published in the newspapers.

The fact that Köberl was not available for a long time and suddenly handled his assets so carelessly struck some friends as strange, who then reported Köberl as missing. A Hungarian woman living in Austria happened to read a newspaper from Hungary with the photo of the reconstructed face of the found corpse and a newspaper from Austria with the missing person report from Köberl; She noticed the similarity of the two photos and went to the police, who finally established through fingerprints that the person murdered in Hungary was Fritz Köberl. The Hungarian criminal police also managed to investigate the apartment in Csepel, where blood and body parts were still found. Two Austrian detectives, who were on vacation and were financially supported by friends of Köberl, investigated on their own and traveled to London, where they seized the disguise utensils in a hotel room allegedly rented by Köberl. They were also able to prove to Pesti, who was appointed as a general representative, that they had rented an apartment in Csepel and had a connection to Frodl. A friend of Köberl had previously made the officials aware of Frodl, as he was known as the arch enemy of Köberl and Köberl himself had said that if something should happen to him, Frodl should be dealt with.

Three weeks after the crime, Frodl and Pesti were arrested in Vienna. During the interrogations, Frodl told of the victim's involvement in secret service circles and blamed the crime on an agent he did not know, which he even wrote in the novel “Out of Control. In the network of agents ”wrote down. However, the act could be proven beyond doubt. On December 22, 1993 Frodl was sentenced to life imprisonment and Pesti to 20 years. After an appeal hearing was obtained by the public prosecutor, Pesti was also sentenced to life imprisonment.

Imprisonment and release

In prison, the two perpetrators showed themselves to be model inmates and never attracted negative attention. Frodl worked in the institution library and led the theater group "Disturbance". In addition, he also tried his hand at writing books and plays. In the 1995 summer semester he began studying theology as an associate student. After passing the university entrance examination in 1998 at the University of Salzburg , he was given the status of a full student. On June 4, 2007, made possible by several free sessions, he completed a theology course at the Catholic-Theological Private University Linz with excellent success and was awarded a master's degree in theology. Frodl wrote his diploma thesis in the subject “ Christian Social Studies ” on the subject of “Work in Transition. New aspects of the working society with impulses from the ecumenical social word of the churches in Austria ”. To date, he is the only Austrian who completed a degree while in prison.

On June 12, 2009, Helmut Frodl was released from the Garsten prison. As a condition, he had to look for an apartment, pursue a job subject to social security contributions and continue the psychotherapy that he had already started in prison. The court also ordered probation (ended 2011) and a ten-year probationary period. The basis for the decision to release were, among other things, several positive reports that were drawn up over the past 17 years as well as his stable, private environment. In 2009 he married his long-time girlfriend Claudia; they live on the outskirts of Vienna. He completed his doctoral thesis in 2011 with distinction at the KTU in Linz.

His accomplice Gabor Pesti was released early in the summer of 2008 due to cancer and good management and is working again as an independent tax advisor in Vienna.

Exclusion from the right to vote

Persons who were legally sentenced to a term of imprisonment lasting more than a year were generally excluded from the right to vote for the National Council in accordance with Section 22 of the NRWO and lost their civil rights . Frodl, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, was also excluded. On October 18, 2002, Frodl lodged an objection against the local electoral roll, as he was not listed there as a voter, and asserted that § 22 NRWO was unconstitutional. His request was rejected by all instances up to the Constitutional Court , which is why Frodl appealed to the European Court of Human Rights . On April 8, 2010, the ECHR ruled in favor of the complainant and ruled that the general exclusion from the right to vote violates Article 3 of the Additional Protocol to the ECHR (right to free elections). With the Electoral Law Amendment Act of 2011, this changed legal situation was taken into account. Since then, people have only been excluded from the right to vote if the exclusion is made as an individual decision by a court.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Judgment of April 8, 2010, FRODL v Austria, Appl. 20201/04, effective October 4, 2011, newsletter Menschenrechte 2/2010, ÖJZ 2010, 734 ff.
  2. ↑ Electoral Law Amendment Act 2011 - adopted changes Help.gv.at, accessed on June 23, 2017
  3. ↑ Decree of September 28, 2011 on the 2011 Electoral Rights Amendment Act and the Act on the Amendment of the Criminal Records Act 1968 BMJ 90022S / 2 / IV / 11
  4. ↑ Theresa Adamek: Universal suffrage - an illusion? Analytical presentation of the exclusion of the right to vote, in particular prisoners, with special consideration of the 2011 amendment to the right to vote Univ.-Diss. Vienna, Exposé 2012
personal data
SURNAME Frodl, Helmut
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian ORF employee and murderer
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna