Johanna Bohnacker murder case

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The Johanna Bohnacker murder case describes the kidnapping and killing of eight-year-old Johanna Bohnacker in Germany in September 1999.

The girl did not come home from playing on September 2, 1999. She was last seen near the Ranstadt-Bobenhausen sports field in Wetterau . It was not until April 1, 2000, that her bound and skeletonized body was discovered in a wooded area near Alsfeld about 100 kilometers away .

In October 2017, more than 18 years after the crime, a suspect was arrested. The main hearing took place at the regional court in Giessen since April 20, 2018. On November 19, 2018, the defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Disappearance and first search

Johanna Bohnacker was last seen alive on September 2, 1999 at around 5:20 p.m. near the sports field in Ranstadt-Bobenhausen in Hesse ( 50 ° 22 ′ 4.5 ″  N , 9 ° 1 ′ 44.4 ″  E ). Around 6 p.m., a witness had seen her abandoned bike there. Shortly before 8 p.m., her father reported missing persons to the police in Büdingen. A witness noticed a VW Jetta II with an official registration number of the Hochtaunus district in the area of ​​the alleged kidnapping site . This led to a review of 590 owners of such a vehicle, which yielded no results.

Dead body

On April 1, 2000, strollers discovered the skeletonized corpse of a child in a wooded area near Alsfeld-Lingelbach , near the Berfa service station on federal motorway 5 . ( 50 ° 45 ′ 36 ″  N , 9 ° 21 ′ 32.4 ″  E ) Before being confirmed by a DNA analysis, items of clothing from the place where the corpse was found provided the certainty that it was the missing Johanna Bohnacker.

Search for the murderer

Partial thumb print

A partial fingerprint was secured from the adhesive tape found on the corpse, which could not be assigned to any of the prints already stored in the automated fingerprint identification system. However, it had enough individual features to be able to unequivocally identify the tracer with a suitable comparison imprint.

The fingerprints of numerous men in the region were checked on two occasions:

  • In 2002, 448 men from Ranstadt-Bobenhausen and the surrounding area gave finger and hand prints. The people checked were the male residents of the village and the neighboring district of Bellmuth , men with a different connection to these places, as well as participants and spectators at a football game that had taken place near the place of her disappearance on the day Johanna Bohnacker disappeared ;
  • It was not until 2003 that investigators learned that a retiree had kept meticulous records of the users of a nearby construction waste dump since 1994. The handwritten records with 2073 entries, which contained the date of delivery, the names and places of residence of the users and the license plates of their vehicles, were compared with the data of persons who had already been checked. As a result, in April 2005, 390 more men were invited to hand in palm and fingerprints. With this measure, electronic recording systems for fingerprints were used for the first time in Germany in a serial examination.

Public manhunt

Ten years after the kidnapping, the police placed a large-format poster on the side of the road near the kidnapping site with a portrait of Johanna Bohnacker and the words "Where are the murderers / wanted since 02.09.99". The declared aim of this action was to put the perpetrator (s) under psychological pressure and to persuade possible accomplices or witnesses to provide information to the police. At that time, the investigators believed it was possible that the act was committed by several people. In a perpetrator profile of the LKA Hessen it was assumed that the murderer probably came from close by and the child had known him.

In September 2014, 15 years after the crime, the murder case was presented unsolved in an episode of the television series Aktenzeichen XY ... The broadcast, in which a phantom picture of a suspect was published, produced 65 references, which, however, did not lead to a successful search.

reward

An unusually high reward of 25,000 euros was offered for information that led to the perpetrator being caught.

New investigations in 2016

As part of the routine review of unresolved old cases, the investigation files were digitized and re-evaluated in 2016. The task was assigned to three detectives from the Wetterau Police Department in Friedberg who had not yet been involved in the case. Among the people reassessed by the “AG Johanna” in 2017, for whom information was already available, there was also a single unemployed person who was 23 years old at the time of the crime and who had become suspicious of traffic and drug offenses in the past.

In August 2016, this person was observed by passers-by playing a sexually motivated bondage game with a 14-year-old in a corn field. The murder investigators in the Johanna Bohnacker case learned of the criminal proceedings that were then initiated on suspicion of having violated the young people's sexual self-determination . Because he used tape to tie up and there were other matches, a search warrant was issued on the suspect's home. There, more than 17 million files on hundreds of data carriers and hundreds of video cassettes, some of which contained child and youth pornographic content, as well as adhesive tapes , were found by chance .

As a result, the Central Hesse police headquarters set up a thirty-person special commission “Johanna 2017”. The suspect was observed , new witnesses were questioned and forensic reports were drawn up. It was discovered that the partial fingerprint that had been seized matched the suspect's left thumbprint. His fingerprints had already been checked in 2002, but at that time the match was not noticed due to image errors on the edge of the fingerprint taken.

Further evidence of the perpetrator is the correspondence of acrylic fibers in the adhesive tape on Johanna Bohnacker's corpse with fibers from the suspect's apartment and the fact that he was driving a VW Jetta II at the time of the crime. He had already been checked after the girl's disappearance, but the investigators did not appear suspicious at the time.

In the course of the new investigation, it was also checked whether he is a possible perpetrator for further murders or kidnappings. There were no indications of this. However, it became known that the suspect had pounced on a seven-year-old student on August 4, 2011 in Friedrichsdorf in the Hochtaunus district. He was under the influence of drugs and was admitted to a psychiatric clinic after his arrest. Since there was apparently no attempt at kidnapping, the incident was not linked to the Johanna Bohnacker murder case. A possible sexual motivation of the perpetrator was also not recognized, it was only determined because of bodily harm.

Arrest of the suspect

The suspect was arrested on October 25, 2017. Before the judge he confessed to the majority of the offenses accused of him; an arrest warrant for murder and particularly serious sexual assault was issued. According to the public prosecutor's office, the defendant admitted Johanna Bohnacker's kidnapping and the underlying sexual motivation. However, he does not claim to have caused the girl's death willfully, he described it as an accident.

Criminal trial

In February 2018, the public prosecutor at the Giessen Regional Court brought charges of murder and serious sexual abuse of children , according to which the defendant had kidnapped Johanna Bohnacker on the day of the crime, anesthetized her with chloroform , sexually abused her and gagged her with several layers of adhesive tape wrapped around her head. According to the public prosecutor's office, he intentionally caused the victim to suffocate. In addition, he is accused of owning more than 150 image and video files of child and youth pornographic content. On April 20, 2018 began before the District Court casting the trial were scheduled for the first 13 days of the trial until August 2018th

Johanna Bohnacker's mother appeared as a joint plaintiff in the proceedings , the father died in 2016.

The defendant was represented by two defense lawyers, including the Bonn attorney Uwe Krechel . He admitted to the media that his client kidnapped Johanna Bohnacker, drugged her with ether , hit her on the nose, taped her mouth up and locked her in the trunk of his vehicle. When he opened the trunk again after a while, the girl was dead. Krechel pointed out that there was no objective evidence for a murder.

The defendant was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder. The judges also determined that the guilt was particularly serious . After the Federal Court of Justice rejected the appeal on October 2, 2019, the judgment is final.

Media coverage

The case has met with considerable media coverage over the next 18 years. In addition to the disappearance of the child and the finding of the corpse, the police search measures were the reason for the report. This case has repeatedly been linked to further murders or cases of unexplained disappearances of girls nationwide. The clarification of other murder cases in turn gave rise to speculation that the respective perpetrator could also be responsible for this murder, for example in the case of the double murderer Marc Hoffmann .

In 2002, Johanna Bohnacker's parents wrote an open letter to their daughter's murderer, appealing to him to reveal the circumstances surrounding their daughter's death.

In 2012, the Hessischer Rundfunk broadcast a radio feature by court reporter Heike Borufka entitled Der Mordfall Johanna Bohnacker , which was awarded the Regino Prize for outstanding judicial reporting.

In September 2014, the case was presented extensively on television at file number XY ... unsolved .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Jens Joachim: The body of little Johanna was found five years ago today , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Rhein-Main , March 31, 2005, accessed on April 21, 2005.
  2. ↑ a b New mass test to clarify the Johanna murder case , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Rhein-Main , March 22, 2005, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  3. ↑ a b c d child murder. Police take the fingerprints of 390 men , Spiegel Online , April 11, 2005, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  4. ↑ Wolfram Ahlers: Pressure on the murderer and his accomplices , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Rhein-Main , September 1, 2009, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  5. ↑ a b "Aktenzeichen XY": 65 references to girl murder , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Rhein-Main , September 25, 2014, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Julia Jüttner: Murder trial on the Johanna Bohnacker case, public prosecutor Hauburger and the "Spur 11" , Spiegel Online , April 16, 2018, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  7. ↑ a b c d Sebastian Eder: The Success of AG Johanna 2017 , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 26, 2017, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  8. ↑ a b c Crimes in Hesse. Public prosecutor's office brings charges in the murder case Johanna , Spiegel Online , February 15, 2018, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  9. ^ Johanna murder case. This is how the police tracked down the alleged perpetrator after 18 years , Spiegel Online , October 26, 2017, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  10. ↑ Alleged Johanna murderer allegedly attacked another child , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Rhein-Main , November 6, 2017, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  11. ↑ Katharina Iskandar: Lessons from the Johanna case , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Rhein-Main , November 7, 2017, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  12. ↑ After more than 18 years. Arrest in the murder case Johanna , Spiegel Online , October 25, 2017, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  13. ↑ Alleged Johanna murderer in court - 7 questions and answers , hessenschau.de , April 19, 2018, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  14. ^ "Johanna case" before court , Gießener Zeitung , April 16, 2018, accessed on April 21, 2018.
  15. ↑ Klaus Pradella: 19 years after the fact, life imprisonment for the murder of Johanna Bohnacker . In: hessenschau.de, November 19, 2018.
  16. ↑ Life imprisonment: Federal Court of Justice confirms judgment against Johanna's murderer - Hessenschau.de
  17. ↑ Richard and Gabriele Bohnacker: To the perpetrator! Retrieved November 10, 2018 . Richard and Gabriele Bohnacker: To the perpetrator! (jpg) Retrieved November 10, 2018 .