Tobias L. had just returned from his lunch break when the first of many messages that day arrived in his Instagram mailbox.

The message included his first and last name, a photo of him on a film set showing him with a sniper rifle, and: "suspected assassin."

At first, the twenty-five-year-old thought it was all a joke.

Until he found out that there was actually a killing spree in Heidelberg - and he was falsely accused online of being the perpetrator.

Johanna Christian

Editor in the “Germany and the World” department.

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"When I noticed that my cell phone was just vibrating from all the messages, I quickly uploaded a clarification to my Instagram stories," says the amateur actor from Baden-Württemberg in an interview with the FAZ Tobias L. called the police, Thousands of people viewed his statement on Instagram in the meantime.

"My heart was pounding and my head was pounding: It's terrible that people make bad jokes on other people's blood and drag me into it."

Tobias L. thinks he can guess who might be behind it.

Because the trained media designer had previously been the victim of hate mail because of his internet presence, albeit to a lesser extent.

"Not that bad, just annoying," he says, and nothing to call the police about.

"So typical comments: 'Go kill yourself' or 'Wicker'." It could have been former friends who would have spread the false news.

An indication of this is that one of Tobias L.'s friends on social media was named as an alleged accomplice in the assassination.

A mixture of curiosity, excitement and fear

But regardless of the originators of the false news about Tobias L., after the killing spree in Heidelberg on Monday, many people were apparently looking for the assassin on the Internet.

Many who had never met Tobias L. but thought they had found this assassin in him.

Regine Frener knows how to explain her enthusiasm for criminal cases.

"It's a mixture of curiosity and excitement, but also the fear of becoming a victim of such a crime that has a captivating effect on us," says the media psychologist, who conducts research at the University of Hohenheim.

This is one of the reasons why true crime podcasts and fictional crime scenarios are so popular on television.

"There can also be a competitive thought behind it, like in the case of "Tatort": Who finds the perpetrator first?"

For many people, however, belief in a just world also plays a role.

"People want such cases to be cleared up, otherwise they are dissatisfied," says Frener.

"They want to join in the excitement and, even if outsiders are only able to do so in the rarest of cases, contribute to the solution." quiet could deal with the case.

In contrast to criminal offenses such as tax evasion, a killing spree at a university is also more tangible for people and therefore more interesting.

The more you can identify with the people in question, the more likely you are to be emotionally involved in the case.

"This investigative urge itself is not a bad thing, on the contrary: it is a healthy character trait and shows curiosity about society," says Frener.

Likes and comments as a reward

In the US there are entire Internet communities that deal with solving crimes and tracking down missing persons;

they are particularly interested in unsolved cases.

"Websleuths" is the name of one of these websites, which has existed for more than 20 years and on which the operator Tricia Griffiths regularly invites you to hours of live videos about criminal cases.

The more than 185,000 users registered there exchange documents, theories and alleged pieces of evidence in almost 3,000 different threads.