The accused is silent in court, but the results allow the court only one conclusion. In order to cover up a burglary and attempted theft from an elderly senior citizen, a nurse kills the woman.

The Frankfurt Regional Court has sentenced a geriatric nurse to life imprisonment for the murder of a 100-year-old senior. In their judgment, after seven months of trial, the judges considered it proven that the 42-year-old suffocated her victim in his bed with a pillow in January last year to cover up a previous trespassing and attempted theft. “This is the overall view of all the evidence,” said the presiding judge.

The German woman, who had gained access to the apartment with a duplicate key, had not commented on the accusation of murder. The circumstantial trial began in April and occupied the jury for 17 days.

As a result, there is only one conclusion, said the presiding judge: “They were in the apartment and pressed the pillow on the victim’s face until it was dead.” Other constellations make no sense – neither motives nor traces have been found. But the accused lived in financially precarious circumstances before the crime. During her several weeks working as a carer for the elderly woman living on the banks of the Main in Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen, she photographed various items worth stealing in her apartment and gained knowledge of where the cash was kept.

After the fact, she manipulated the locations of her mobile phone. In addition, she behaved suspiciously during her first police interrogation by not asking about the identity of the victim when she was confronted with a homicide in general, the verdict said.

The deceased was the daughter of the biophysicist and Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg honorary citizen Friedrich Dessauer (1881-1963), who had worked as a translator, editor and author. The verdict is not yet legally binding. The defense had requested acquittal.