Sometimes a sentence has great impact.

Even if it comes across as harmless.

“I'm Marcel's guardian,” says a man who is sitting next to a room in the regional court in Wuppertal on Thursday morning.

That has force: Marcel is the oldest of six children of Christiane K., who is accused in the hall. Marcel is the child who was allowed to live.

His guardian is from the youth welfare office.

An elderly lady is sitting next to him.

She says: “I am nobody” and looks sadly into the distance.

Johanna Dürrholz

Editor in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin

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On this day, the judges in the Wuppertal district court speak their verdict on Christiane K., who killed Marcel's five younger siblings and then threw herself in front of an S-Bahn - and survived. Everything in the district court seems like a bad dream: Christiane K. walks slowly and insecurely, she is so inconspicuous that only the clicking of the many cameras in the courtroom indicates that she has entered him. A few seconds later she has reached her seat and takes off the surgical mask. The presiding judge sentenced her to life imprisonment.

K. is found guilty of fivefold murder, the court also determines the particular gravity of the guilt.

Not once does K. look at the judge while the verdict is being pronounced, she looks straight ahead, now and then down, her mouth tightly closed.

She is pale and a little swollen, as if she hadn't slept well the previous night.

An incomprehensible act

What follows the pronouncement of the verdict is an attempt by the judges, squeezed into one and a half hours, to make an incomprehensible act tangible. On September 3, 2020, the judges found, Christiane K. killed five of her six children. She proceeded in a structured manner: After a WhatsApp dispute with her husband, who had taken a photo with his new girlfriend as his profile picture that day, Christiane K. gave her five children who were present a strong cocktail of various drugs to drink. The family was having breakfast. The judge describes the mix that the older of the five children got as “poisoning”, which could have been “life-threatening”. K. knew about the drugs that they had a sedating and numbing effect.

K. ran a bath, added the little heater, put toys in the tub and drowned or suffocated her children one after the other in the bath water.

Here, too, she proceeded according to plan: She started with the youngest and weakest child, one-year-old Melina, who she presumably suffocated with a pillow in the tub.

One after the other, she killed Leonie (2), Sophie (3), Timo (6) and Luca (8).

The bodies had traces that indicated that the children were struggling.

Then Christiane K. wrapped her naked, dead children in towels and put them to bed.

She proceeded with a "certain empathy", says the presiding judge.

The four children she had with her husband Pascal K. were all in one room.