Crossword murder

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One of the partially completed puzzles

The crossword puzzle murder , also known as the crossword puzzle case , was one of the most famous cases in the criminal history of the GDR . He was enlightened through script analysis.

Crime and Enlightenment

Grave site of the victim Lars Bense (1973–1981)

On January 15, 1981, seven-year-old Lars Bense disappeared in Halle-Neustadt on the way to an afternoon performance in the nearby cinema. A search was immediately initiated, which was unsuccessful. Two weeks later, a line attendant found an older suitcase on the Halle – Leipzig railway line , which had apparently been thrown from a moving train. When he opened the suitcase, he discovered the boy's corpse wrapped in a plastic bag, and there were also some old newspapers inside with crossword puzzles filled in . The autopsy revealed that the boy had been sexually abused and beaten to death with a blunt object; the body also had several puncture wounds in the upper body.

Since, according to experts, more murders of the offender were to be expected, the investigating authorities of paramount been Instance , in particular the ruling in the GDR SED , a rapid clarification of the crime demanded. Since it was not possible to determine the owner of the suitcase, which was an older mass-produced hard cardboard product, through its public exhibition, and also the origin of the plastic bag, which was the packaging for a blanket that had been sold a thousand times over could be traced back, the completed crossword puzzles remained the only promising clue. The font features indicated a middle-aged woman as the author. As a result, there was an action that was unique in the history of criminology . A start was made on systematically collecting handwriting samples from all residents of Halle-Neustadt ( referred to as “individual writing services” in the jargon of the People's Police ). Police officers asked for samples of handwriting during house visits, social security files and the registration offices were searched and, in addition, waste paper collections were repeatedly carried out and the newspapers in them were looked through for crossword puzzles in order to be able to better delimit the presumed residential area of ​​the author if the result of the comparison was positive .

Captain Siegfried Schwarz, from 1976 to 1983 head of the murder investigation commission at the district authority of the German People's Police (BDVP) Halle , led the investigation. His deputy, Captain Löser, conducted the immediate investigation. Due to the importance of the case, an expanded murder investigation commission was formed, to which Lieutenant Adolf Döling from the Halle People's Police District Office was seconded. His task was to record the collected writing achievements and to pass them on to the writing experts under the direction of Captain Werner Brettschneider. In the course of the extensive investigation, other crimes (embezzlement, etc.) became known. According to the instructions of the head of the BDVP, General Schröder, Captain Schwarz concentrated exclusively on the murder.

For nine months, despite an intensive examination of the available specimens, no success could be achieved, although attempts had been made in the meantime to obtain further “writing achievements” through a competition in the regional newspaper (the answers to which were found in the crossword puzzles). Since only a quarter of the residents of Halle-Neustadt had recorded a handwriting sample by October, attempts were made to accelerate the investigation with a crossword puzzle that had to be filled out. The submissions were collected and evaluated individually for each apartment block. The local police collected handwriting samples from absent persons, including one resident of Block 398, who was working as a seasonal worker on the Baltic Sea at the time. Her handwriting sample was identical to the crossword puzzles in the suitcase - the decisive clue after nine months of investigative work. In a conversation with the woman and her daughter, there were further indications of the possible perpetrator. Matthias S., the daughter's friend, matched the profile of the alleged perpetrator. On November 17, 1981, he was arrested at his place of work in Friedrichroda and taken to Halle (Saale) .

During the interrogation that was immediately initiated, Matthias S. confessed to the fact. He stated that he approached the boy in front of the cinema on the afternoon of the day in question, lured him into his girlfriend's mother's apartment under an excuse and molested him there. Afraid of being betrayed by the seven-year-old, he first struck the boy with a hammer and then stabbed him several times. He packed the body in his mother's suitcase and boarded a train to Leipzig . While driving, he threw the suitcase out of a train window.

A total of 551,198 written samples were evaluated. It was this immense effort by the investigators that made the case unprecedented in the criminal history of the GDR. The search success itself was only made public in a brief report in the Halle daily newspaper Freiheit .

The culprit

The trial against Matthias S. was opened in the summer of 1982. The indictment was homicide and sexual abuse. During the trial, he testified that he had repeatedly had killing fantasies since a traumatic childhood experience, and that a disturbed sexuality became apparent. The Halle District Court followed the prosecutor's request and sentenced him to life imprisonment with simultaneous deprivation of his civil rights . Since the murderer was only 18 years old at the time of the offense and thus the application of juvenile criminal law would have been possible in the Federal Republic, the Federal German public prosecutor applied for the reopening of the proceedings in 1991 . The new judgment of 20 May 1992 was for murder, although again maximum sentence, which is now, however, only another ten years youth custody , followed by instruction in the forensic unit moved to it. According to the chief public prosecutor , the briefing took place in order to rule out further murders with some certainty.

The offender was housed in the State Hospital for Forensic Psychiatry Uchtspringe until 1996 and then lived for three years in a project for assisted living . In 1999 he was finally released and, according to press reports, moved to Thuringia. In fact, he lived with his wife and their son from a previous relationship in Magdeburg . There he died on January 15, 2013, 32 years after his crime, at the age of 50 after a serious illness and was buried on February 2, 2013 in Magdeburg's Westfriedhof .

Fates of relatives

Although the investigators tried to keep a low profile on the perpetrator and to leave his name unmentioned, the identity of the murderer quickly got around. In order to keep his parents out of the public eye, they were given a new apartment in another city, and they also got new jobs. The perpetrator's father was unable to process his son's crime; he died by suicide a few years later. The victim's father was an alcoholic before the murder. He died on January 15, 1994, the 13th anniversary of the crime.

Post-history

The case and the investigation were described in the book The Crossword Puzzle Murder and Other Criminal Cases from the GDR by Hans Girod . The case also served as a template for an episode of the crime series Polizeiruf 110 in 1988 with the title The Crossword Puzzle Case . In addition, Kai Meyer wrote the book The Crossword Puzzle Murderer in 1993 , in which he reconstructed the case in detail.

In February 2013, was the prosecution Hall investigation for murder brought against the former girlfriend of the offender. The reason for this was given by individual accounts in the novel, The Crossword Murder, which she wrote . The real story , which differ from statements made during their interrogation at the time. Therefore, the prosecution examined a possible complicity or aid . However, the head of the editorial department at Sutton Verlag stated: “The story is pure fiction and not a confession.” In addition, the book should also be preceded by the note that it is a novel and that the plot is based on actual events, “by the way but freely invented ”. The investigations were then also discontinued in April 2014 due to a lack of evidence, as the then girlfriend of the perpetrator stated that these descriptions were pure inventions because of the tension and that this could not be refuted, especially since the perpetrator died.

meaning

The case is considered to be the criminal case with the world's most comprehensive evaluation of written samples (551,198). If someone refused to volunteer a handwriting sample, it was sometimes obtained conspiratorially. Due to the particular urgency of the matter, the investigations were largely supported by the employees of the district administration and district office in Halle of the Ministry for State Security .

Such a comprehensive police procedure would not have been possible under the rule of law in the Federal Republic of Germany . However, in Operation Mikado in 2006, all 22 million German credit cards were covertly examined for a certain amount.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Television in the GDR : KT department . Broadcast by Birgit Haupt et al., 1985.
  2. ↑ Spiegel Online : New investigation into the crossword puzzle murder: "It happened exactly like that" . February 8, 2013, accessed August 7, 2016.
  3. ^ Magdeburger Volksstimme : Crossword puzzle murderer died in Magdeburg . February 11, 2013, accessed August 7, 2016.
  4. ↑ Spiegel Online : Crimes in the GDR: Crossword puzzle murder is reopened after 32 years. February 8, 2013, accessed August 7, 2016.
  5. ^ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : Public prosecutor determined again in the crossword puzzle murder. February 8, 2013, accessed August 7, 2016.
  6. ↑ Berliner Zeitung : Crossword puzzle murder: investigation against ex-girlfriend stopped. April 14, 2014, accessed August 7, 2016.
  7. Jump up ↑ The First : The Crossword Puzzle. (Review of a film by Gunther Scholz ). Broadcast date of the film: June 8, 2000, review of the film accessed on August 7, 2016.