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Defendant in court in Bonn
Photo: Oliver Berg / dpa
In the case of Claudia Otto, the daughter of an innkeeper from Lohmar in the Rhein-Sieg district, who was murdered 36 years ago, the Bonn Regional Court acquitted the defendant on Tuesday. Previously, both the prosecution and the defense had pleaded for this acquittal on Monday.
The court's only evidence was a trace of DNA taken from the young woman's body in 1987 with adhesive film. However, a new report by Munich forensic medicine had exonerated the accused. She hadn't been able to find any traces of his DNA on the body.
Sample not sufficiently examined in the laboratory
An earlier DNA report by the institute had pointed to a genetic fingerprint of the accused. However, the court ordered a new analysis because the sample had apparently not been properly examined in the laboratory.
Claudia Otto had been strangled to death in 1987 in her apartment above her parents' restaurant in Lohmar. The public prosecutor's office assumed a robbery-murder. Decades after the crime, new DNA analysis methods had brought movement into the "cold case".
The defendant is a convicted double murderer who has been imprisoned for more than half of his life. He had confessed to having killed the child of an entrepreneurial family and his grandmother in the Sauerland region in 1988 in connection with a planned kidnapping. He had denied the killing of Claudia Otto, although he had been a regular guest at the inn at the time of the crime.
lmd/dpa