Klaus Geyer

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Klaus Geyer (born September 11, 1940 in Berlin ; † November 1, 2003 in Hanover ) was a German Lutheran pastor . He has been in the peace movement since the 1980s as the organizer of meetings of the Action Reconciliation in the "House of Helping Hands" in Königslutter-Beienrode ( Helmstedt district ) and was its chairman from 1990 to 1993. He was a long-time author of the magazine Junge Kirche and belonged for some time to their group of editors alongside Dorothee Sölle and Heino Falcke . He killed his wife Veronika Geyer-Iwand in 1997 and was sentenced to eight years in prison on April 16, 1998 for manslaughter .

Act and trial

On July 28, 1997, a hunter found the body of Veronika Geyer-Iwand in a forest near Hötzum . She was the youngest daughter of the theologian Hans Joachim Iwand . By profession she was a religion teacher and mayor of Beienrode on a voluntary basis . Klaus Geyer had three sons and an adopted daughter with her.

In February 1998 the circumstantial trial of Klaus Geyer began at the Braunschweig Regional Court, which was closely followed by the media and the public . The jury found Geyer guilty of beating his wife to death on a field path not far from Braunschweig on July 25, 1997.

The conviction was also based on a forensic biology report in which two ants - one on the corpse's blouse, one on Geyer's rubber boots - were assigned to the same species, a glossy black wooden ant (Lasius fuliginosus), as they were based on the findings of the Görlitz ant expert Bernhard Seifert only occurred at the crime scene in the region concerned. In addition, soil samples on the rubber boots were analyzed and compared with those at the crime scene. The forensic biologist Mark Benecke , who has a doctorate in the clarification of the case by determining the time of Veronika Geyer-Iwand's death from the fly maggots found on the corpse, generated media appearances and publications - for example the mention of the case in Benecke's book "Murder Methods: Investigations by the World's Most Famous Forensic Biologist" - received a lot of attention.

Despite the overwhelming burden of evidence , not all of the circumstances of the crime could be resolved to the last detail. So the murder weapon was never found; How the woman's body got to the place where it was later found remained unclear and even the motive of a marital crisis could not be substantiated by testimony. Geyer always denied the act. He was serving his sentence while developing prostate cancer . In July 2002, Lower Saxony's Minister of Justice Christian Pfeiffer refused to grant a pardon that Geyer made because of his cancer . After serving two-thirds of his prison term, Geyer was released early from prison in November 2002 for good conduct. A year after his release from prison, Geyer died of complications from his cancer.

reception

filming

The murder case generated a lot of media coverage, as a result of which ZDF, for example, produced the feature film “Murder in the Lord's House” (2002, directed by Helmut Christian Görlitz, actors: Rudolf Kowalski , Julia Jäger , Barbara Auer ). Geyer was involved in the creation of the script through interviews with the screenwriter Nicola von Hollander.

Television documentary

The case was discussed in 2002 in the RTL broadcast Lawyers of the Dead and in 2017, 20 years after the death of Veronika Geyer-Iwand, in the documentary series Morddeutschland of the NDR .

drama

The drama “Golgotha” in the book “Golgotha. All Souls ”(Suhrkamp 2000) by Werner Fritsch is also based on the case.

Novels

In the novel “The Book Murderer ” by Detlef Opitz about the bibliomaniac murderer and pastor Johann Georg Tinius (1764–1846) there is a chapter in which the cases of the two evangelical clergy are compared. Opitz refutes that Geyer was the first German theologian to be accused of murder and imprisoned.

The longtime reporter Heinrich Thies reported as a journalist in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung about the trial against Klaus Geyer and visited him in prison. In 2013 he published his novel Passion - a pastor's journey into hell . There he relocated the plot to a heath village near Celle and gave the characters different names, but the parallels to the Geyer case are recognizable.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Pastor Behind Bars , Zeit Online, January 16, 1998
  2. ↑ Patrik Schwarz: The past on the witness stand. The pastor and peace activist Klaus Geyer is suspected of having killed his wife Veronika. The critical theologian protests his innocence. His companions believe him. The trial begins today in Braunschweig . taz article from February 2, 1998 ( archive ).
  3. ↑ http://archiv.rhein-zeitung.de/on/98/04/16/topnews/geyerpor.html
  4. ↑ a b “I did not kill my wife” - Interview with Pastor Geyer , Panorama, September 17, 1998
  5. ↑ a b c Gisela Friedrichsen: Criminal Justice: I have to listen to that, Der Spiegel 17/1998, April 20, 1998
  6. ^ Gisela Friedrichsen : Criminal Justice: How counterfeit money ran around , Der Spiegel 7/1998, February 9, 1998
  7. ↑ a b c In the end, an ant destroyed the beautiful facade , Die Welt , April 17, 1998
  8. ↑ Gabriele Schulte: The end of a spook , Der Tagesspiegel , April 16, 1998
  9. ↑ Mark Benecke: Murder methods: New spectacular criminal cases - told by the world's most famous criminal biologist , Bastei Lübbe, p. 189
  10. ↑ a b The human as rubber boots , FAZ, December 16, 2002
  11. ↑ The exact time of death remains uncertain , Der Tagesspiegel , March 11, 2002
  12. ↑ a b He hits and hits me , Der Spiegel 10/2003, March 1, 2003
  13. ^ A b Heinrich Thies on a manslaughter's journey into hell / Friday reading in Walsrode: "The pastor denied until the very end" , Kreiszeitung, April 3, 2013
  14. ↑ a b c crime thriller about parsonage murder: journalist processes the spectacular “Geyer murder case” in Roman ( memento from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), Evangelical newspaper for the churches in Lower Saxony , 12/2013
  15. ↑ Pardon for former pastor rejected , Kölner Stadtanzeiger, July 2, 2002
  16. ↑ Sentenced: After the release from prison - Ex-Pastor Klaus Geyer on stern TV , stern.de, December 18, 2002
  17. ^ A b Ex-prisoner Pastor Klaus Geyer died , Die Welt , November 4, 2003
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Scheidt: Forensic Medicine on TV: At prime time, the quota is secured with dead: Die Lust am Morbiden JF, November 8, 2002
  19. ↑ The murderer and the ant.
  20. ↑ "Golgotha. All souls ” , werner-fritsch-filmproduktion.de
  21. ↑ Tinius is coming! Scavenger hunt: Detlef Opitz pursues the notorious bibliomaniac , FAZ, November 17, 2005
personal data
SURNAME Geyer, Klaus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German Protestant pastor
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 1, 2003
Place of death Hanover