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Nobody had thought her capable of doing such a thing.
Not your partner, not your lawyer and not even the judicial officers, who at least in spectacular cases at the entrance should pay attention to whether someone might want to go to court armed.
Apparently there had been clues.
"So she really did it," stammered Christian B., her friend, stunned immediately after the crime - several witnesses, including journalists, heard it.
Friday, March 6th, 1981, a few minutes after ten o'clock in the morning.
Two sergeants had just brought the defendant Klaus Grabowski from pre-trial detention to the hall of the Lübeck jury court.
It should be the third day of the trial against the 35-year-old.
The trained butcher sat down on his chair and looked at the still empty judges' table;
he turned his back to the auditorium.
He didn't see his own murderess coming.
The scene of the crime: Klaus Grabowski died in the dock of the Lübeck jury court
Source: picture alliance / dpa
Because at that moment a chic, dark-haired young woman in a black cloth coat stepped forward.
About three meters separated them from the defendant's bench, which was separated by a barrier and consisted of several folding tables with chairs.
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An eyewitness reported what happened next: “I will never forget this moment,” wrote court reporter Barbara Kotte: “She calmly pulled a pistol from the pocket of her wide black coat, aimed and fired six times.
The whole magazine is empty.
Then she let the pistol slide to the floor almost casually. ”The weapon slid a few meters across the smooth floor of the courtroom.
The woman was indifferent to be arrested.
It was Marianne Bachmeier (1950–1996), Anna's mother, whose violent death was the subject of the trial.
Klaus Grabowski was accused of strangling the seven-year-old girl with red tights the year before.
Whether he had sexually abused the girl beforehand had not yet been clarified on the first two days of the trial.
Grabowski's body was carried out of the Lübeck court on March 6, 1981
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
The interrogation of the coroner Otto Pribilla was on the agenda for March 6, 1981 - but now the director of the Institute for Forensic Medicine at the Medical University of Lübeck could only determine the death of the accused.
All six 5.6 millimeter bullets had hit him in the back;
Grabowski was dead instantly.
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At this point in time, it was proven that Anna Bachmeier had come to Grabowski's apartment in Lübeck on May 5, 1980.
She knew him and wanted to play with his cats.
Anna spent a lot of time without her parents' supervision, because Marianne Bachmeier was an innkeeper and was busy in her own restaurant.
Having a little girl alone in his apartment - that was extremely dangerous in every respect for a man who had already had two previous convictions for the sexual abuse of children, in 1970 and 1975. The second time the competent court forcibly dismissed him as a sex offender at risk of relapse into the state psychiatric hospital in Neustadt.
He seized the only chance he would ever get back into freedom: he had himself neutered and was then released as harmless.
At the beginning of her own criminal trial in 1982, Marianne Bachmeier was escorted to her place by a group of photographers
Source: picture-alliance / dpa
Of course physical and psychological complaints were the result.
Grabowski entrusted his needs to a young urologist from Lübeck.
He alleged to him that he had been neutered for exhibitionism.
The urologist made no further inquiries.
Before the Lübeck court he said as a witness: “As a medical professional, I was of the opinion that castration of a man at such a young age was unjustifiable.
I just had to help the man. "
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He did that - with artificially produced male hormones in high doses.
They replace the natural production of male hormones.
But the treatment not only gave Klaus Grabowski back his sex drive, but apparently also his dangerousness.
He had testified to the police: “I gave Anna one mark for Coke.
She blackmailed me: give me more - otherwise I'll tell my mother that you caressed me. ”Was that the truth?
Or a - even particularly perfidious - protective claim?
In any case, Grabowski strangled little Anna from behind, brought her corpse out of Lübeck in a box on a bicycle and buried the body.
The charge was murder, because the public prosecutor's office did not accept Grabowski's alleged blackmail by the child.
Whether the accused was at all fully guilty should be discussed on the third day of the hearing.
The director of the criminal psychiatry department of the Psychiatric University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf, Werner FJ Krause, had declared Grabowski to be fully culpable in his written report.
However, after the first two days of the main hearing, he indicated that he was inclined to a different conclusion.
Last but not least, it was controversial about the importance of the hormone treatment.
Marianne Bachmeier announced on the second day of the trial that she might want to file a criminal complaint against the Lübeck urologist.
But that didn't happen - with the death of the accused, the criminal proceedings for Anna's murder were automatically ended.
Marianne Bachmeier was taken into custody.
Her case dominated the news and public debate for days.
Within a week almost 100,000 DM were collected in a donation account that was quickly set up for their defense;
A star defender even traveled from Munich to Lübeck - allegedly on behalf of two unknown older women - to talk to Bachmeier.
But she refused a meeting.
Marianne Bachmeier on entering prison in 1983
Source: picture-alliance / rtn - radio t
The fatal shooting at Grabowski was clearly a matter of vigilante justice - but was the act to be regarded as murder?
Or as manslaughter in a case that is less serious given the circumstances?
Did the motive of revenge have to exacerbate the punishment - or on the contrary, mitigate punishment?
Germany argued over and over again in the months after the crime.
The public prosecutor initially charged Bachmeier with murder, but dropped this accusation in the course of the proceedings.
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Almost exactly two years after the crime, on March 2, 1983, Marianne Bachmeier was sentenced to six years imprisonment for manslaughter and illicit gun possession;
the responsible minister of justice rejected a request for grace.
She was released on parole after half of her sentence.
She left Germany soon after and did not return until she was diagnosed with cancer.
She died in 1996 - previously she had admitted on a talk show that she planned to shoot Grabowski, that is, to have committed a murder.
But according to the rule of law “ne bis in idem” (“not twice for the same thing”) there was no possibility of a new charge.
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