Ludwig Tessnow

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Ludwig Tessnow (born February 15, 1872 , † 1939 Groß Piasnitz ) was a German serial killer who killed at least 4 children. His case went down in criminal history with the first scientific report on blood types.

The murders

Double murder near Lechtingen

Memorial for the children murdered in Lechtingen

On the morning of September 9, 1898, two seven-year-old girls left their parents' homes near Lechtingen, north of Osnabrück (now part of the municipality of Wallenhorst ) to go to school. Their stripped, dismembered and gutted bodies were found at noon in a forest near the school route. The police arrested the joiner Tessnow , who was in the area, and was able to assign a button that was found at the scene to his suit. He stubbornly denied the crime, stating that the noticeable stains on his clothing were wood stain , not blood . Since, according to the doctrine of the time, only a “ mentally disturbed ” could commit such a cruel act, but Tessnow showed no signs of mental illness , he was finally released from prison for lack of evidence.

Double murder in Göhren

On the evening of July 1, 1901, the two five- and seven-year-old sons of the carter Graweert disappeared in the Baltic resort of Göhren on Rügen . After an all night search, their bodies were found on the morning of July 2nd. They had been mutilated in the same cruel way as the two children in Lechtingen a few years earlier. The younger man's skull was shattered, his neck was severed down to the spine and his torso was opened with a cut through his entire abdomen , the loops of intestine were hanging out, the heart was missing. The older man's skull was also knocked in. The body was severed in the middle, the pelvic section with the legs was only found later.

Imprisonment

Since a fruit seller had observed how Tessnow , who lived in neighboring Baabe , spoke to the two boys on the day of the murder, suspicion quickly fell on him and he was arrested on the evening of July 2nd. His clothes were covered with numerous stains, which he explained again with carpenter's stain. During his pre-trial detention, the Lechtingen murder case became known and the suspicion was reinforced. During the investigation, another incident came to light: two weeks earlier, several sheep were killed, dismembered and distributed in a pasture . A farmer saw the perpetrator running away and recognized Tessnow at a confrontation .

The examining magistrate commissioned Paul Uhlenhuth , who has been an assistant at the Hygiene Institute at the University of Greifswald since 1899 and a former employee of Robert Koch , to examine the clothes. Shortly before, Uhlenhuth was the first to develop a method that allowed the detection of human and animal blood: the blood precipitin test . He found numerous blood stains on Sunday clothes and was able to differentiate them into human and sheep blood. The discoloration on a stone that was found as a possible tool at the crime scene also turned out to be blood.

Condemnation

In the spring of 1902 Tessnow was brought to trial in Greifswald, in which Uhlenhuth's report was followed. The sentence was on the death penalty . During the announcement of the execution date, Tessnow suffered a possibly fake epileptic seizure , which prompted a psychiatric examination of the convict. Despite the contrary opinion, judged by four psychiatrists as sane , Tessnow was convicted again; The appeal hearing at the Imperial Court in Leipzig on March 14, 1904 also confirmed the judgment.

In the same year Tessnow was allegedly beheaded in the yard of the Greifswald prison . A defense lawyer claimed, however, that after a few years the sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment - evidence of the execution or commutation was not initially found in the judicial files. In 2016, investigations into the files of the Stralsund State Healing Institution revealed that Tessnow was transferred to the psychiatric clinic , where he was held until 1939. Classified as "unhealed", he was transferred to Neustadt in West Prussia and shot in the neck as an early victim of the Nazi euthanasia program during the Piaśnica massacre .

After an initial scientific contradiction, the Uhlenhuth Precipitin Reaction Process was officially introduced in Prussia on September 8, 1903, as a court-proof evidence process. The test could later be extended to other body serums such as semen or saliva .

literature

  • Ingo Wirth: Dead people on record - famous cases of forensic medicine , Bechtermünz Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-8289-0029-1
  • Christiane Gref: The Blood Lie - Ludwig Tessnow: Biografischer Kriminalroman , Gmeiner-Verlag, 2016, ISBN 3-8392-1940-X

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jasmin Lörchner: As researchers began to convict murderers. In: Spiegel Online . February 4, 2020, accessed February 5, 2020 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Tessnow, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sex murderer
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1872
DATE OF DEATH 1939
Place of death Near Wielka Piaśnica