Criminalists report: Tanja B. sawed up her partner: “The whole bathroom was taped up with duct tape”
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A woman from near Frankfurt am Main stabbed her boyfriend, a bus driver, 31 times. Then she saws up his corpse in the bathroom and writes a letter of confession. Two investigators report on one of the most spectacular cases of their careers.
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“Hello. I, Tanja B., hereby make a confession that I stabbed my partner Martin F.” Sabine Meyer reads these sentences out loud in a calm voice. The police officer, who has been on duty for 34 years, recalls a case that afternoon that she “has never seen before”. It has been almost exactly three and a half years since Meyer held Tanja B’s letter of confession in her hand for the first time. In Schlüchtern, at the police station, it was Monday morning.
The crime that Tanja B. committed is harrowing. In the summer of 2018, she stabbed her partner Martin F., a bus driver, with 31 stitches. Tanja B. dragged his corpse into the bathroom and cut the body into six parts with a chainsaw. She told the police that she acted in self-defense.
When the key fit, Meyer thought: “Dear God”
Sabine Meyer still has Tanja B’s letter in front of her. “He ate some herb and said I was obsessed, I was the devil. Then he attacked me,” reads the 50-year-old policewoman.
Tanja B. writes that she photographed her injuries. That Martin F. died at her feet, and she then decided to cut him up with a chainsaw. In the bathroom. “I have a criminal record and on probation, nobody believes me anyway,” it says in her letter. In two weeks she wants to present herself, but first she wants to visit her seven children, none of whom live with B.
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The fact that the police took Tanja B’s letter of confession so seriously was mainly due to the keys that were enclosed. “That made us suspicious at the time,” recalls Meyer. Until the end she was joking, “also because of the handwriting, I thought it might be some kind of stupid joke that a couple of children made up”.
When she was with a colleague before the apartment the young woman stood, but the key fit. Meyer got the first bad feeling. “I thought: Dear God.”
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“The whole bathroom was taped up with duct tape”
The apartment in which Tanja B. killed her partner is on the third floor of an apartment building, there is no elevator. The area is quiet, Steinau an der Straße has just under 11,000 inhabitants. “After we unlocked the front door, we ran up the stairs. The apartment door key also worked,” says Meyer. When she reported about going into Tanja B’s domicile at the time, her voice was voiced.
“We opened the door and saw what she said in her letter. The whole bathroom was taped up with duct tape,” says the policewoman. “We later saw that she had attached her partner’s identity card to the outside.” Meyer and her colleague entered B’s apartment, and there were other rooms to the right and left. The policewoman remembers traces of blood that were seen on the living room floor. A bloodbath, as one might have expected, was nowhere to be seen. The otherwise typical smell of corpses was also missing.
The two policewomen didn’t stay long. “We closed the door and thought: It could be a long day,” says Meyer. The cynicism in her voice can be heard clearly. When dealing with cases like this, you have to develop a certain distance, she says. Meyer was still trying to spot flies outside the bathroom window. Vermin can be an indication of decaying bodies. The policewoman didn’t discover anything like that.
Efinger finally opened the bathroom door
At noon, Franz Efinger, at the time the investigative officer of the Gelnhausen regional commissioner, arrived at the scene of the crime. The now 61-year-old was working in the field of violent crime at the time.
“Ms. Meyer brought me up to date. Then there was a work colleague of the victim who shared a message in a Whatsapp group.” The message was sent from Martin F’s cell phone, “in terms of content it was similar to Tanja B’s letter,” says Efinger. When he got to the apartment, he decided to open the bathroom door. “At least a crack so that you could see inside.”
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Efinger and Meyer both remember the strong odor of corpses that poured from the room. They tell of plastic bags, clothes, knives and a hand ax, all full of blood. They say the remains of the dead man were strewn across the floor, wrapped in garbage bags. The public prosecutor’s office, forensic medicine and forensic science were informed, and after two hours everyone was on site.
At the same time, the office in Gelnhausen initiated the search for Tanja B. She had claimed that she still wanted to go to her children. The cell phone location brought the police on a different track. “Both the victim’s phone and B’s cell phone were identified near Dortmund Central Station,” says Efinger. “The colleagues there picked her up very quickly. In a hostel, she had checked in on her name two days earlier.”
The Tanja B. case is unusual because women commit crimes far less often than men. In Germany are according to police crime statistics only a quarter of all suspects are female. In the case of offenses against life (such as murder or manslaughter), the proportion of women suspected is only eight percent.
Tanja B. could not plausibly answer crucial questions
Meyer never met Tanja B. Efinger does. He took her out of custody the day after she was arrested, and she eventually had to be questioned. But how can you imagine a woman who stabbed her partner to death and then sawed it up? “Tanja B. was inconspicuous, medium-sized, blonde hair, a little more corpulent. She looked very composed and wanted to tell her version of the crime, even if no one had asked about it,” says the retired policeman.
The story the young woman told did not match what the officers had found in Steinau. Forensic medicine found out that Martin F. was stabbed 31 times with a kitchen knife. Some stitches were in the victim’s neck. Why should someone stab someone so often, even from behind, if he just wanted to fight back? Tanja B. could not plausibly answer these and other questions.
To this day it is unclear why Tanja B. killed her partner
For the jury chamber of the Hanau regional court, it was clear at the beginning of 2019 that Martin F. was murdered. Tanja B. is said to have found out about poisons and other secret methods of killing before he died. And the forensic examination of his corpse provided evidence that the bus driver was stabbed in his sleep. Not only was there an intent to kill, but also the murder characteristic of treachery. Tanja B. was sentenced to life imprisonment, even if she stuck to her self-defense thesis.
It is still unclear why the then 34-year-old stabbed her partner to death. Efinger suspects that Martin F.’s separation threats could have been behind it. Because Tanja B. was on probation for some fraud. If F. had separated from her, she would have lost her shelter. And thereby also violating their probation requirements.
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