Murder in reverse

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One of the most sensational cases in Swiss criminal justice history became known as the murder in Kehrsatz . It was about the murder of a 24-year-old woman who was most likely killed on July 26 or 27, 1985 and deposited in the freezer of her house in Kehrsatz in the canton of Bern . Her husband, the then 27-year-old BZ, was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 after a trial that many witnesses felt was one-sided , but was acquitted in 1993 in a revision procedure with great media interest. The murder remains unsolved to this day. The subsequent legal case had a direct impact on the Swiss judiciary and the media.

The murder

After their marriage in 1983, the 24-year-old tailor CZ lived with her 27-year-old husband BZ in a single-family house in Kehrsatz, just above that of her adoptive parents. It was known that the in-laws had problems with the trained sanitary draftsman BZ. He also had a secret relationship with a daughter of wealthy parents in the village and wanted to divorce his wife. According to a - albeit controversial - forensic medical report, the woman was beaten to death, stripped, tied up and put into the freezer in the basement with a garbage bag over her head on the night of Friday, July 26th, to Saturday, July 27th, 1985 . There were traces of blood on the washing machine and in the marriage bed.

On August 1st, the Swiss national holiday , the mother of CZ found the body of her daughter, who had been missing for days, in the freezer of the house while BZ was away. He was arrested the same evening at a barbecue party at his beloved's parents' home, while he was carrying his wife's moped ID with him.

The first trial

It was not until the fall of 1987, more than two years after the fact, that BZ was tried before the Bern-Mittelland jury . He had always protested his innocence with great vehemence and persuasiveness. According to his version, his wife was still alive on the morning of July 27th. She had eaten a Hawaiian toast the night before and then went to sleep with him. On Saturday morning she drove to Bern on the moped to do some shopping for the upcoming sailing vacation with her husband. One witness believed she saw her doing it; the moped was found at the train station in Wabern . In Café Feller where she was allegedly hit with her husband, but she had never arrived. However, according to witnesses, her husband was never seen there either. The Zurich lawyer Trix Ebeling also claimed in a book published years later that the Blue Zone , in which BZ wanted to park , did not exist at that time and that at the time he allegedly set the parking disc he was demonstrably at a gas station in Was found.

The prosecution accused BZ of beating his wife to death in her bed on the night of July 27 with a hammer or similar object (the murder weapon was never found), putting a rubbish bag over the body and tied it up in the house's freezer to have. Then he removed the traces of blood. This also coincided with the statements made by the parents of those killed, according to which BZ was seen cleaning the cellar on July 27th, as well as the traces of blood on the mattress of the shared marriage bed and on the washing machine. The prosecution saw the motive for the offense that BZ moved in with his lover, but did not want a divorce for financial reasons. He was also the beneficiary of his wife's life insurance .

Two reports from the Forensic Medical Institute in Bern sparked heated discussions. In the first, nothing was found in the woman's stomach. When a second was commissioned with the question of whether traces of a Hawaiian toast could be detected, residues of pears, proteins and cereals were actually found. The report was later criticized from many sides. Especially the Weltwoche journalist Hanspeter Born , who had taken on the case, publicly expressed the opinion several times after the trial that the report had been deliberately falsified, around the time of death of CZ with certainty on the night of July 26th (in the practical only BZ came into question as a perpetrator).

On December 4, 1987, 29-year-old BZ was found guilty of the murder of his wife and sentenced to life in prison. He was transferred to the Thorberg prison .

In the media, the trial and verdict received only local attention.

After the trial

After the trial, four jurors filed a complaint about the course of the trial at the Bern Court of Cassation, which was rejected on June 22, 1988. The case attracted new attention when the journalist Hanspeter Born published a 16-part series of articles on the murder case in Kehrsatz in 1988/89 in Weltwoche , entitled “A clear case” , in which he seriously doubted the guilt of the convicted person, on alleged or pointed out actual investigative errors by the police and raised serious allegations to the Bern judiciary. This was followed by a book entitled Mord in Kehrsatz and, a year later, Accident in Kehrsatz , in which he accused the victim's parents of killing their daughter themselves, laying false tracks and "staging" the discovery of the body in the freezer. The distribution of this second book was banned after the parents of the killed, and Born was later to admit that he had disregarded journalistic principles. However, he maintained his criticism of the police. This practically exclusively determined against the husband as the apparently only possible perpetrator and excluded all other - at least theoretically conceivable - offense and perpetrator variants from the outset, without clarifying this through appropriate police work.

The case was re-edited in many media outlets, and broad sections of the population took sides with the convicted BZ.Among them was the Thorberg prison director at the time, who granted the man, who was actually average-looking but generally described as charismatic, many privileges. An association «Fairness in Case Z.» advocated a new process.

After a constitutional complaint against the jury's verdict had been rejected by the Federal Court on July 19, 1989, the Bernese Court of Cassation on April 15, 1991, based on the deficiencies in the forensic medical report presented by the condemned's attorneys, approved his appeal and overturned the verdict. BZ was released on April 17, 1991 after 2,086 days in prison. Critics saw the release as a result of immense public pressure.

The second process

The revision process took place on April 14, 1993 with enormous public interest. Most of the media, including the tabloid Blick , took the defendant's side, and the population seemed divided on the question of guilt or innocence.

This time 76 witnesses were heard, five reports were consulted and, among other things, the allegations that Hanspeter Born had made in his book were taken up. In addition, the court was confronted with a series of mostly anonymous threats, letters and tips, in which the parents of the murdered were often guilty of being guilty, but which, on closer inspection, lacked any substance. In the testimonies and reports, both incriminating and exonerating the accused came to light, some things remained unclear and nebulous - not least because of the elapsed time. It was similarly ambiguous with many circumstantial evidence. For example, it was controversial how the victim's moped ID, which had been seized from the defendant, or the remains of the cords used for tying up found in the house of the dead should be assessed, which at first glance seemed to burden the defendant, but also raised the question of why he - if he was the culprit - these incriminating utensils, as well as the murder weapon, the victim's clothing or the contents of the freezer, had not made it disappear.

Although all in all no really new knowledge could be gained, BZ was acquitted by the jury on May 29, 1993 after 42 hours of judgment. The court found that although the parents' perpetration was ruled out and the perpetration of a third party unlikely, there were “well-founded, irresistible” doubts about the defendant's guilt. He was awarded 412,000 francs in compensation. In the grounds of the verdict it was stated that the accused would be "burdened considerably more than once" by a series of circumstantial evidence, but not as clearly as would have been necessary for a guilty verdict. In particular, it was not possible to answer the questions about the weapon, the crime scene, the time of the crime, the course of events and the motive for the crime without any doubt. "Everyone knew everything, but nobody the truth," said the court president. And: "The state has to prove the guilt of the accused, not the accused his innocence."

In most media reports, the verdict was welcomed, but in some cases it was interpreted as an "2nd class acquittal". In Der Spiegel , Gisela Friedrichsen criticized the behavior of the BZ supporters, who had put pressure on the proceedings in the manner of a “conspiratorial community”. Hanspeter Born in the Weltwoche clashed with the grounds for the verdict, which had overstated the suspicions that remained against BZ. He also found it strange that the court had not investigated newly discovered traces of DNA that did not come from the defendant on the remains of the cords used to tie the corpse and had not compared them with the DNA of other “crime scene authorized persons”.

The third trial prevented

After the revision process, the Zurich attorney Trix Ebeling bought BZ's '84 VW Golf . She noticed that the wheel nut wrench had been replaced and did not match the original equipment. A forensic medical examination showed that a typical model wheel nut wrench was extremely likely as a murder weapon. A request for a third procedure was made by the public prosecutor Heinz W. Mathys in 1996, where he was massively criticized, especially from the viewpoint . However, the Bernese Court of Cassation considered the new evidence to be inadequate and the application was rejected. The attempt to reopen the process via an ancillary procedure also failed. It was about the testimony of a witness in the second trial who claimed that a saddler from Kehrsatz had told her shortly after the body was found in August 1985 that BZ had asked him on July 27 “how to get blood stains out of a mattress remove », which was denied by both the saddler and BZ. In 1998 the case was legally shelved .

Effects

The murder in Kehrsatz brought Switzerland's investigative advances and judicial restructuring. The use of jury courts, which were subsequently abolished in the canton of Bern, was heavily criticized. On the other hand, the immense influence of the media on the judiciary and the interference in investigative work were criticized. But the judiciary itself came under attack. The head of the Forensic Medical Institute (GMI) Bern had to resign. A new program has been developed to determine the weapon used in the crime so that the wheel nut wrench can be placed virtually on the wound years after the crime.

After his release, BZ married his former lover and went into business for himself. CZ's parents have now passed away, as has Trix Ebeling.

The documentary Mord in Kehrsatz about the case, broadcast on Swiss television in 2006 , made it clear that even more than 20 years after the crime, opinions about BZ's guilt and innocence diverged widely; a criminal law professor called the judgment a "legal borderline case".

literature

  • Hanspeter Born : Murder in Kehrsatz. How a family tragedy turned into a judicial scandal . Weltwoche-ABC, Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-85504-119-9 .
  • Hanspeter Born: Accident in Kehrsatz. A hypothesis . Weltwoche-ABC, Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-85504-125-3 .
  • Peter Maurer among others: The galloping garbage bag. Poetry and truths in the case of Z. Fischer, Münsingen 1993, ISBN 3-85681-303-9 .
  • Trix Ebeling Stanek: The end of the days of doubt . Bollmann, Zurich 1993, ISBN 3-9520544-3-7 .

Novel adaptation

Movies

  • 1991 days of doubt.
  • 1994 A clear case.
  • 2006 Murder in Kehrsatz. In: Unsolved criminal cases. SRF 1 .
  • 2017 The corpse in the freezer - who killed Christine Z.? In: The most spectacular criminal cases - Crime on the trail , cable one .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gisela Friedrichsen : A sworn community . In: Der Spiegel . No.  23 , 1993, pp. 86-91 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Zurich attorney Trix Ebeling Stanek has died. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from March 17, 2015.