Crime scene: Not child's play
| Episode of the series Tatort | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Not child's play |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Production company |
SDR |
| length | 81 minutes |
| classification | Episode 108 ( List ) |
| First broadcast | January 13, 1980 on ARD |
| Rod | |
| Director | Theo Mezger |
| script | Peter Scheibler |
| production | Werner Sommer |
| music | Jonas C. Haefeli |
| camera | Justus Pankau |
| cut | Hans Trollst |
| occupation | |
| |
The 108th episode of the Tatort television series is no child's play . The episode produced by Süddeutscher Rundfunk was broadcast for the first time on January 13, 1980 in the first program of ARD . For Chief Detective Eugen Lutz ( Werner Schumacher ) it is the tenth case. It's about the disappearance and death of a ten-year-old girl from a difficult family background.
action
Ten-year-old Stefanie Wolf lives with her father Rainer and her stepmother Roswitha, the relationship between Roswitha and Stefanie is bad because Stefanie has not got over the death of her birth mother and sees the stepmother as an intruder into the family. Her father, who tries to pamper his daughter, manages to always wrap her around her finger and play the couple against each other. One day Stefanie has disappeared, when Stefanie reappears, Rainer slips his hand and he hits his daughter. Shortly afterwards Stefanie disappeared again, Roswitha believes that Stefanie only wants to play herself in the foreground again, but this time she has disappeared. In the absence of other work, Lutz and Wagner take over the investigation into the missing person. Due to the intervention of a driver who hears Stefanie's description on the radio, the homeless Manfred Aulich, who is carrying Stefanie's school bag, is arrested. He claims to Lutz and Wagner that he has never seen the girl and that he found the school bag in a rubbish dump. While Lutz and Wagner are searching the dump, Stefanie's body is found in another location due to an anonymous phone call from a woman. The child, who was suffocated with a plastic bag, was only marginally covered with little effort. The location of the body is not the crime scene. Lutz brings the conspicuously composed stepmother Roswitha the sad news that identifies the corpse.
The main suspect Aulich actually stayed outside Heilbronn, as he also stated to the officials and is therefore excluded as a perpetrator. Lutz asks the Wolf couple, Rainer states that Stefanie had no secrets from them. Lutz learns that the rubbish on which the satchel was found comes from the neighborhood around Stefanie's parents' house. Lutz asks Roswitha again, who says that Rainer and Stefanie did not see each other that morning and left the house separately. She says she is not Stefanie's birth mother and suggests that she has a dark past. Meanwhile, Wagner is investigating the Bagel and Fächler garbage collectors who collect bulky waste in the area around Stefanie's parents' house. The two men state that they did not notice a school satchel and that they never saw the girl, although they knew the girl from a prank she had previously played. When Wagner is about to leave, Bagel accuses Fächler of killing Stefanie, and an argument ensues in which Wagner intervenes. Lutz and Wagner then interrogate Fächler, who, according to his colleague Bagel, had been late for work on the morning of the crime and had demonstrably known the girl. Fächler is provisionally arrested because he has no alibi. When Lutz and Wagner visit Roswitha and tell her about their suspicions against Fächler, Roswitha looks surprised and thinks Fächler is innocent. Lutz asks her about the quarrel between Roswitha and the stepdaughter, who admits the problems and takes her husband under protection, who hadn't told me about the problems.
Lutz confronts the Wolf couple with an essay by Stefanie, in which she indicated that she longed for security that only her dead mother could fulfill. Shortly afterwards, the officers learned that Fächler's fingerprints were scattered on her satchel, he claims that the satchel fell out of a garbage bag at his feet while he was working and that he had rummaged around in it. The evidence against Fächler is insufficient and he is released against conditions. Lutz visits the Wolfs again and informs them of the release of Fächler. On this occasion Lutz notices a painkiller that Roswitha is taking. Lutz asks Dr. Jerg looked for the drug and initiated an investigation that showed that Stefanie had an overdose of this drug in her body that would otherwise not have been proven, this overdose led to death that cannot be distinguished from normal asphyxiation. Lutz instructs Wagner to examine Roswitha Wolf's life while he visits her again and on this occasion secretly removes fibers from a blanket in her trunk. He asks her about her previous conviction that Wagner had determined, she had embezzled and sold large quantities of morphine as a nurse and had served a prison sentence for it. Her husband knew about the criminal record, but married her anyway because he needed a mother for his child.
The analysis of the fibers taken by Lutz clearly shows that the child must have been lying on the blanket in the trunk. Meanwhile, Roswitha claims to her husband that Stefanie announced her suicide with the essay, that she administered an overdose of the pain reliever herself, that Roswitha found her and removed the body because she was afraid of his allegations about her carelessness in storing the drug have. The next morning, Lutz and Wagner arrest Roswitha Wolf on an urgent suspicion of murder. She seems resigned and says that she doesn't want to say anything more because her life is botched anyway. Lutz receives a search warrant and goes to Wolf's house, where he meets Stefanie's playmate in her room, the neighbor boy Olaf. He had got in through the kitchen window to get Stefanie's "poison" from her room to redeem his decrepit guinea pig. Lutz and Olaf search Stefanie's room and finally find a hiding place where Stefanie's hoarded pills and her diary are. Lutz learns from this that Stefanie deliberately wanted to make herself sick with the drug so that her father would only take care of her and that she could have divided her father and stepmother. The girl's overdose was just an accident. After Roswitha had found Stefanie's body and removed it, she had thrown Stefanie's satchel in the bulky waste that she had left behind when the body was taken away.
Audience and background
When it was first broadcast, this episode attracted 19.05 million viewers, corresponding to a market share of 53%. The episode was shot in Heilbronn.
criticism
The critics of the TV magazine TV Spielfilm rate this crime scene as mediocre and comment: "A game with many stereotypes".
Web links
- No child's play in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- No child's play in the online film database
- Summary of the plot of No Child's Game on the ARD website
- No child's play with the crime scene fund
- No child's play at Tatort-Fans.de
- Chief Detective Eugen Lutz data on the investigator
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tatort: No child's play Data for the 108th Tatort at tatort-fundus.de
- ↑ Tatort: No child's play short review on tvspielfilm.de, accessed on June 23, 2015.
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previous episode December 16, 1979: Maria im Elend |
Crime scene follow |
Next episode February 10, 1980: The yellow petticoat |
On the open road (1971) | Password ferry (1972) | Stuttgart Blossoms (1973) | Dangerous Bedbugs (1974) | Beautiful Belinda (1975) | Eyewitness (1976) | Sky blue with silver stripes (1977) | Red - Red - Dead (1978) | Two Knots (1979) | No Child's Play (1980) | Secondary business (1981) | Blind Rage (1982) | Murder Is Not Business (1983) | Undercover Investigation (1984) | Bad Tricks (1985) | One Saw the Killer (1986)