After the Federal Court of Justice received a first judgment from the Darmstadt Regional Court, the trial against a 54-year-old is now being reopened in front of another chamber.
After the alleged killing of his former lover, a 54-year-old man has been tried again at the Darmstadt district court since Wednesday. At the end of August 2018, the man had already been sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for manslaughter. The 11th criminal division of the regional court saw it as proven that the accused, who last lived in Breuberg in the Odenwald, strangled a 47-year-old woman in August 2017. The Federal Court of Justice (BGH) in Karlsruhe, however, had received the judgment on the revision of a co-plaintiff and ordered that the case be renegotiated. According to the BGH, a conviction for murder can also be considered in this case. The sister of the killed was the co-plaintiff who had successfully appealed. At the time, she and her lawyer had assessed the crime as jealousy.
The second case against the man is now taking place in front of the 16th criminal chamber of the Darmstadt regional court under the chairmanship of judge Marc Euler.
The Darmstadt public prosecutor again charged the man with manslaughter and not with murder. Attorney General Robert Hartmann, who is also the spokesman for the prosecution, read the indictment on Wednesday morning at the start of the trial. He accused the accused of missing the 47-year-old, with whom he is said to have had a relationship, on the morning of August 20, 2017, in front of her apartment in Frankfurt. He is said to have brought her to a rest area near Weibersbrunn-Rohrbrunn with his car.
In the meantime, the accused is said to have rendered his future victim unresponsive by administering a drug that counteracts psychotic symptoms. When he was disturbed by a walker, he and the woman drove 45 kilometers further to a parking lot near Rodgau, where there had been sexual intercourse.
The defendant then killed the woman out of jealousy by violent violence against the neck and head area. The 54-year-old is said to have deposited the woman’s body on a forest path in a bird sanctuary near Münster in the Darmstadt-Dieburg district and covered it with plant parts. After the fact, the defendant then went to France, where he was arrested less than a week later in Houssen near Colmar and delivered at the instigation of the Frankfurt public prosecutor, who was initially entrusted with the investigation. Due to the local jurisdiction, the public prosecutor’s office in Darmstadt later took over the investigation.
The defendant’s lawyer announced a statement from his client for the next meeting, who did not provide any personal or material information at the start of the trial. The court has scheduled eight additional trial dates by early July.
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