Maria Rohrbach

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Maria Rohrbach-Wior (born July 18, 1929 in Münster ) was the victim of a German miscarriage of justice .

First trial

On April 12, 1957, while playing, two children discovered the lower body of a male corpse floating in the water. Hours earlier, a gardener had found the corresponding upper body in the Aasee upstream . The parts - the head and legs were still missing - belonged to a 40-year-old man who had apparently been killed and then sawed up. As later investigations showed, the body was the house painter Hermann Rohrbach from Münster.

The investigative authorities and the entire Rohrbach environment quickly decided, in a kind of prejudice, that Rohrbach's wife Maria was the perpetrator. At the time of the crime, she had an extramarital relationship with a British occupation soldier, which her husband, 16 years her senior, tolerated. Hermann Rohrbach himself was homosexual and marriage was a community of convenience for both of them.

Despite intensive police interrogation, Maria Rohrbach did not make a confession, but always protested her innocence. Since the investigative authorities firmly assumed that they had caught the murderer with Maria Rohrbach, they based the indictment before the Münster district court on circumstantial evidence .

The missing head of the victim and the poison thallium played a key role in the circumstantial process . The public prosecutor's office assumed that Maria Rohrbach had systematically poisoned her husband with thallium over a long period of time, finally murdered him on April 11, 1957, and then dismembered him. The thallium comes from the rat poison Celiopaste , which the defendant administered to her husband in mallow tea. The thesis of mallow tea was put forward because Celiopaste is provided with an intense deep blue dye for safety reasons and this tea was the only food at the time that naturally had a similar color. In Rohrbach's apartment, however, neither the Celiopaste , which was then only available in drugstores with a signature, nor the mallow blossom tea were found. The Munich chemist Walter Specht , who acted as an expert in this process and received the sum of 3500  DM , found considerable amounts of thallium in analyzes in Hermann Rohrbach's torso and in the chimney pipe of the apartment. From this it was concluded that Maria Rohrbach burned her husband's head after the body was cut up in the home oven.

Numerous exculpatory or at least questioning indications, conclusions and calculations were not taken into account in the investigation, the hearing or the judgment:

  • Expert Specht was not aware that every soot contained thallium. (In the later reasons for the reopening, a thallium-containing sample from Specht's chimney was even cited - not without a certain irony).
  • With the amount of thallium allegedly found in the samples by the expert Specht, the deceased would have had to have ingested a total of two tubes of celiopaste of 250 grams each shortly before his death in order to find the claimed dose throughout the body. One tube would have been lethal.
  • No symptoms were found on the corpse after months of poisoning with thallium.
  • True mallow tea has rarely been available for sale. The star hairs found in the digestive tract of the dead do not indicate mallow and especially mallow blossoms, but are also found in numerous other plants. Other typical mallow residues should have been found.
  • Blood remnants found in the apartment were - clearly recognizable for later experts - scraped from the floorboards of the apartment together with paint residues and sent in for assessment. The heavy metal residues brought into the samples by the paint residues prompted expert Specht to assert that it was alleged "painter's blood", which must therefore come from the dead person who was a painter, and in whose blood the heavy metals had accumulated as a result of his activities .
  • The intestinal contents of the deceased indicated a later time of death than that which the court and the investigative authorities decided. Rohrbach had eaten lentils shortly before the assumed time of death, but no residues were found in the body, although they can usually be found in the digestive organs 24 hours after consumption. However, traces of expensive truffles were found that were not used in the meager household of the Rohrbach family. Hermann Rohrbach was not only murdered later than alleged, but must also later have once again dined out like a princely.
  • The corpse's legs, which were found later, had traces that indicated that they did not get into the water until Maria Rohrbach was already being interrogated as a suspect by the police.
  • In the Rohrbach's small two-room apartment, no evidence and not even evidence of the alleged killing, the alleged division and the alleged storage of the body there was found. A sloping roof was identified by the presiding judge Georg Heukamp in the grounds of the judgment as a possible corpse store, although the criminal police only found it dusty.
  • Three weeks before Hermann Rohrbach, the body of his intimate friend Erich Böhle was also recovered from the sewer without a head. The police assumed an accident with a ship's propeller and after finding Rohrbach no new investigations were initiated, which would have been relevant to both cases.
  • In the grounds of the verdict, statements by another expert were changed, which was to the detriment of the accused.

In addition to the inadequate circumstantial evidence, the presiding judge Heukamp had already yelled at the defendant during the trial: “I'm not going to let you fool me” and insinuated that the defendant was silent in order to “not burden herself with contradictions”, and so on the presumption of innocence excluded from the outset for the accused.

On April 18, 1958, Maria Rohrbach was sentenced to life in prison by the jury court for murder . The execution of the sentence took place in the women's prison in Anrath .

Retrial

In the unusually hot and dry summer of 1959, the murdered man's skull - which was believed to have been burned - emerged in a parched pool (a former bomb crater).

A retrial began on May 3, 1961. In the course of this procedure, significant errors in the implementation of the expert report by the chemist Walter Specht, including those by Heinrich Kaiser , were discovered. Hair-raising methodological deficiencies were demonstrated especially when performing the analysis to prove the alleged thallium poisoning. On June 30, 1961, Maria Rohrbach was finally acquitted by a jury court in the Münster district court for lack of evidence. In these proceedings it was only established that Maria Rohrbach could not have killed her husband with rat poison.

According to the responsible district court director Kösters, it was not possible for the court to acquit Rohrbach “for proven innocence”, so that “a considerable suspicion remains in her”. For this reason she did not receive any compensation for the four years and two months that she had served , as this, according to Kösters, "can only be granted to completely innocent people".

Consequences of the "Rohrbach processes"

Hermann Rohrbach's murderer was not identified.

Life of Maria Rohrbach after the acquittal

After the acquittal in the retrial, Maria Rohrbach got a new identity and first moved to England. She later came back to Germany and lived in a small town in southern Germany. Rohrbach then moved to Krefeld and worked there as a waitress. On September 28, 1963 she married the commercial clerk Karl St. The marriage resulted in a daughter. This connection failed as early as 1964, and after serious marital disputes, her second husband filed a criminal complaint against his wife. That year, because of the allegations made by St., Maria Rohrbach almost got a third murder trial. St. accused Maria Rohrbach of attempting to murder him. She also confessed to the murder of her first husband. This statement was rated as an "unreliable statement" by the public prosecutor in Münster.

Others

Following the acquittal, the then Bavarian Justice Minister Albrecht Haas instructed his attorneys general to review legally concluded proceedings in which the verdict was based on reports from Specht and his employee Katte.

The presiding judge of the first Rohrbach trial, Georg Heukamp, ​​was transferred from the chairmanship of his criminal chamber to deal with commercial law from the summer of 1961.

The trials surrounding Maria Rohrbach were filmed in several television documentaries (ARD and ZDF). They also served as a template for a double episode of the GDR television series: "Criminal Cases Without Example" entitled "Anatomy of a Judicial Murder" (August 26, 1967)

In the " Tatort " episode " Mörderspiele " set in Münster in 2004, explicit reference is made to the Rohrbach case.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Note: In the literature, the fall is always Celio paste written while it correctly Zelio Paste® is
  2. ↑ a b c Searched and found (see cover picture) . In: Der Spiegel . No. 26 , 1961, pp. 28-37 ( online ).
  3. ^ Kehrer: Murder in Münster . ( google.de ).
  4. ↑ a b Public Prosecutor in Münster starts new investigations in the Maria case.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , December 7, 1964@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.abendblatt.de  
  5. ↑ Maria Rohrbach already has a different name.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , July 3, 1961@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.abendblatt.de  
  6. ^ No new trial against Maria Rohrbach.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , December 8, 1964@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.abendblatt.de  
  7. ^ Another investigation in the Rohrbach case.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , December 7, 1964@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.abendblatt.de  
  8. ↑ Der Spiegel reported ... In: No. 29/1961. Der Spiegel, July 12, 1961, accessed on February 13, 2017 .
  9. ↑ G. Wolf: Revealing Accents. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , January 5, 2005
  10. ^ The Rohrbach case.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Hamburger Abendblatt , August 19, 1966@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.abendblatt.de  
  11. ↑ Summary of the plot of murder games on the ARD website
personal data
SURNAME Rohrbach, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rohrbach-Wior, Maria (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German woman, victim of a judicial scandal
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Muenster