Aachen (dpa) – “It was very, very bad because he was no longer there,” says the 31-year-old woman in a black pants suit. The witness is the daughter of the killed man, whose fate is also at issue in the Aachen regional court. She was seven years old when the then 43-year-old motorhome dealer from Würselen near Aachen disappeared from one day to the next almost a quarter of a century ago. A 51-year-old man has been in the dock of the regional court for murder since Tuesday.
The German from the Aachen area is said to have murdered the 43-year-old in 1996 together with an accomplice who died later. With this, the duo wanted to come into possession of 5,000 marks, said public prosecutor Boris Petersdorf in the brief reading of the indictment. They are said to have killed the victim cruelly and out of greed. 16 blows to the head alone were counted, one finger and one lower leg were broken. The dead man’s daughter is a joint plaintiff.
The murder case remained unresolved for more than two decades because the dead person, discovered in December 1996 on the edge of a gravel pit on the Lower Rhine north of Krefeld, could not be identified for many years. The investigators checked all possible leads, to no avail. The “Sandkuhle” case ended up in the files as an unsolved “cold case”. Then a new phantom image of the victim helped identify them. It was shown in the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst” in 2019.
A caller answered and said he knew who the dead man was. And he also said he knew who killed the man. The caller was the brother of the alleged accomplice who died in a motorcycle accident in Turkey in 1997. This statement is important to the process. This emerges from the statements of the former head of the Krefeld homicide squad, Gerhard Hoppmann, in court.
The investigator, now retired, considers the information plausible. According to this, there should have been confidants of the violence and its details at an early stage. Why didn’t you get in touch? “They didn’t dare,” he says. The witness should still be heard. The investigators found nothing at the suspected crime scene, the murder victim’s apartment. “It is unlikely that body tracking dogs will find traces after so many years,” says Hoppmann.
The 51-year-old defendant followed the first day of the trial motionless. His hair is tied in a braid, he is wearing a black hooded jacket and jeans. A breathing mask hides the face of the man who has a meager income repairing coffee machines. When the chairman judge Roland Klösgen pointed out that he could give an explanation after each stage of the process, he only said: “Yes, okay, I understood that”.
During a search of his apartment in a neighboring town of Aachen, two pistols and ammunition were discovered in the bedside cabinet. Marijuana was also found.
The court hears many witnesses to shed light on the crime committed almost a quarter of a century ago. According to her own words, the defendant’s partner did not hear any dark hints about his past: “He repaired cars,” she reports. An acquaintance says in view of the murder charge: “We fell from all clouds”. The presiding judge keeps asking questions. “Because I poke a bit in the fog, too,” as he says.
The victim, the trailer dealer, was in heavy debt. The father of two children had not paid the maintenance. His family tried to file a missing person report, but they couldn’t. It was suspected that he had ducked abroad. His VW bus and German shepherd “Rex” disappeared with him.
The investigator said that the remote location to deposit the body was chosen so that the dead could not be identified quickly. The alleged accomplice spent his childhood there. There are around 100 kilometers between the location of the find and the suspected place of killing in the victim’s house.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210419-99-267384 / 6
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