There is a phrase: “When you wait too long for justice, you start handing it out.” And it fits this story perfectly…
It happened in 1980 in Germany. Marianne Bachmeier and her seven-year-old daughter Anna lived in the city of Lübeck. Marianne was raising her daughter alone and therefore spent a lot of time working – running a bar.
That is why the girl was often left alone. On May 5, 1980, Anna quarreled with her mother and decided not to go to school, but to go to her friend. On that day, she was invited to visit her neighbor, the butcher Klaus Grabowski. He interested the girl with an offer to play with his cat and her kittens. Anna agreed and was never seen alive again.
Grabowski had already served time in prison for abusing two underage girls, with one of the conditions of his release being chemical castration, to which he agreed. And even earlier, he had attempted to kill a six-year-old girl and, for reasons that are completely unknown, had only received a suspended sentence for that.
Anna was soon found on the bank of a local canal. She was dead. An autopsy determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation.
It also became clear that she had been abused before her death… Grabowski was soon detained. No, he was not investigated. For some reason, he simply confessed to his fiancée what he had done, but she somehow felt no sympathy for the scoundrel and immediately called the police.
Grabowski confessed to the murder but denied abusing the child. Instead, the killer said that the seven-year-old girl tried to… seduce him, and if he refused, she threatened to complain to her mother that he was harassing her, and demanded hush money.
It should be noted that the investigation rightly did not believe this and considered the abuse a fact. With a broken heart, Marianne followed the news about her daughter's murderer and learned about his testimony from the newspapers. At the same time, the defendant's previous crimes came to light, for which he received unjustifiably light sentences. She was furious.
The trial began in March 1981. Marianne attended two hearings. With horror and anger, she listened to the arguments of the defendant's lawyers - according to them, after the chemical castration that Grabowki underwent after the sexual crimes, he suffered from a hormonal imbalance and this made him irritable.
The defense argued that Grabowski was in a state of "serious emotional distress" and therefore cannot be held responsible for his actions. And he needs treatment. The defendant himself mocked Marianne, repeatedly saying that her seven-year-old daughter had seduced him.
On March 6, 1981, the third day of the trial, Marianne Bachmeier smuggled a .22-caliber Beretta pistol into the courtroom. As soon as the trial began, she took the gun out of her purse and emptied the magazine into her daughter's killer—seven of the eight bullets hit their targets. Grabowski died at the scene.
Marianne was completely calm and had no intention of running away. Judge Günther Kröger, who took Marianne aside and spoke with her for a while, said she said the following: "I wanted to shoot him, looking him in the eye, but I shot him in the back. I hope he's dead."
She later admitted that she wanted to silence the criminal by any means necessary and "prevent him from saying unpleasant things about my daughter."
The trial against Marianne Bachmeier herself began on November 2, 1982. She was initially charged with first-degree murder, for which she faced life imprisonment.
However, on March 2, 1983, Marianne was charged with manslaughter and illegal possession of a firearm. She was sentenced to six years in prison, but was released three years later in 1985. At the time, she was 35 years old.
Marianne sold her story to the German weekly Stern for 250,000 German marks to pay the legal costs. That same year she married a teacher. After a while she left Germany and went with her new husband to Africa, where her husband taught German at a local school.
After her divorce in 1990, she moved to Sicily and worked in the city of Palermo in a hospice as a nursing assistant. According to the examinations, she was very kind to the sick. In 1996, Marianne died at the age of 46 from cancer. She was buried in the same grave as her daughter Anna…
As an afterword. Years later, there are many signs that Marianne had been planning her revenge for a long time, although at the trial the defense argued that her crime was not planned.
Shortly before her death in 1996, she herself said on the ARD talk show "Fliege" that all her actions were carefully planned and that she began shooting training immediately after her daughter's death. And that she never regretted her actions.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment