The accused speaks of a loving and harmonious marriage. His wife was the only one he had ever loved. Everything seems to change when she becomes a nursing case. The man is now on trial for manslaughter.
He can still remember exactly how things started with his wife back then: It was on a rainy day. “She didn’t have an umbrella with her and I asked her if I could take her home.” More than six decades later, the 85-year-old is in court for killing the woman he fell in love with – after 65 years together, on “that fateful day”.
The Munich II Regional Court tried him for manslaughter. On July 10 of this year, he is said to have strangled his wife, who was no longer able to do many things after a brain hemorrhage, the prosecutor read out in the indictment on Tuesday, “in order to no longer have to look after her and to prevent him from leaving her helpless could”.
“I’ll come to you now, I’ll kill you,” he is said to have said, according to the indictment, before getting up from the sofa. “You stay lying down, what have I done to you?” His wife is said to have said before he is said to have hit her with a so-called “knobkierie”, an African percussion instrument that they had brought with them from three years together in South Africa. until she couldn’t resist anymore.
After that, according to the indictment, he is said to have choked her to death: “After the accused had noticed that the injured party was no longer resisting, he knelt down next to her and cut off her air supply at the neck until the remaining rattling had stopped.” The man is said to have hit his head against the metal edge of a wall and tried to take his own life.
The accused told the court that it was a loving and harmonious marriage until his wife fell ill. Through a statement from his lawyer, he admits the crime. It speaks of a “symbiosis” with his wife, the only woman he ever had in his life.
She was a perfect housewife: “The underwear was ironed, lunch was on the table,” he knew for decades – until it changed after the brain hemorrhage. His wife no longer knew that you need water to boil potatoes, that’s when he noticed for the first time that something was wrong. And even after the diagnosis and a hospital stay, it didn’t get any better.
“When I said bring me some underwear – that was the way it was in our generation – then she brought me women’s underwear,” the man describes the situation in the shared apartment in Weilheim in Upper Bavaria. “I put on unironed shirts for the first time.”
Until then, the two, who have no children and hardly any family, would have complemented each other perfectly – including the classic distribution of roles. “Man and woman one body,” says the defendant’s statement. The connection was so close that it was “hard to imagine ever living without the other”. In the Stadelheim prison work, a hairdresser cut his hair for the first time in decades – until then his wife had always done it.
Only four days after the crime, on June 14, he actually had an appointment at a retirement home to sign a contract for the two of them. The old man says he can’t explain to himself why it happened a few days earlier. He regrets the act every day, he has his lawyer read out and that “I can’t forgive myself for what I did to my wife that day”. “For me it was like being driven by an unknown force.”
The presiding judge does not want to leave this sentence, which suggests that the man wants to pretend to be incompetent, as it is. He appeals to the accused to think twice about it. He must – not only for the court, but above all for himself – deal with what he did there.
The case is not an isolated case: Two years ago, the Würzburg district court sentenced a 92-year-old man to a suspended sentence after he suffocated his wife, who was suffering from severe dementia. The court and the public prosecutor’s office believed him at the time that he did it out of love, to put his wife out of her suffering.