After nearly 60 years of marriage, Heinrich E. attacks according to the indictment on a Monday morning to the locksmith hammer and strikes. Several times the hammerhead hits the skull of Es Frau Anneliese. Then Heinrich E. takes the kitchen knife, the blade twelve centimeters long, pierces six times, pierces a lung of his wife and also hits her heart. Anneliese E., 88 years old, bleeds to death in the kitchen of the joint terraced house in Rösrath, a suburb of Cologne.
Thus the public prosecutor's office describes the reproaches against Heinrich E., who had selected even the emergency call. There was no alternative, he is said to have said a few weeks later in the detention of his daughter.
In a wheelchair Heinrich E. is pushed into room two of the Cologne district court. The thinning hair burnt white, the body emaciated and drawn by leukemia, the thin legs tightly closed. The 89-year-old former high school teacher, once a teacher of Latin, Greek and chemistry, wears a black suit and a white shirt.
A marriage without love, a community of convenience
The Chamber should clarify the question of why Heinrich E. should have killed his wife after so many years of marriage. The prosecution accuses him of murdering his wife on 4 June for lesser reasons. Heinrich E. was said to have been driven by raging jealousy. He had believed that his Anneliese, with whom he had raised three daughters, had wanted to spend her retirement with another man. E. is silent on the allegations. He has no memory of the crime, says his defender.
After reading the indictment, the daughter is heard as a witness. For her statement, Susanne E. sits next to her deaf and dumb father. Then she gives a deep insight into a marriage that was largely without love and that only worked as a purpose community. "Bottom line: tragic."
Susanne E., who appears as a co-plaintiff in the process, describes her father as empathielos, as a man who has often humiliated and devalued his wife and children. "You had to work in this home," she says. At the same time he was educated, liked to occupy himself with poems and aphorisms, researched the family tree intensively and spent a lot of time in nature. He was also popular as a teacher. Again and again, former students came to his home to ask for advice.
"That was the worst moment of my life"
Heinrich The biggest problem was the jealousy, says Susanne E., the eldest daughter. Again and again he has beaten and pushed his wife. Everywhere he had rival suspected. But there was never an affair, the father had no cause for jealousy. He had imagined all this.
Once before, the situation was threateningly escalating. That was in a Cologne library in September 1977. She knew that so well because she had kept a diary as a child, the daughter reported. The father had snapped out, beating his wife until his daughter stood guard in front of her and took the punches. "That was the worst moment of my life," recalls the 56-year-old. Even then, the police had been turned on.
"Why did not the parents divorce?" Asks Judge Sabine Kretzschmar. A separation has always been an issue, replies the daughter. But nobody wanted to implement that. The mother, once also a respected teacher in the village, feared for her reputation. She once said that fleeing was no solution. "No matter where I go with you, he will find us and kill me", Susanne E. recalls the mother's words.
In the end, however, shortly before the act, after a cruise of several weeks through the Mediterranean, at the urging of one of her daughters, she decided to leave her husband. Her sister had secretly reserved a place in a retirement home, says Susanne E. A day before the violent death of the mother, it should have been a phone call. "Maybe he got something there."
Heinrich E. threatens a life sentence. The process will continue on the 6th of December.