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Life imprisonment: The defendant in the Cologne regional court in September 2023

Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa

A young woman was murdered in Cologne's old town at Carnival in 1988, and now the verdict has been given: life imprisonment.

"We are convinced that you committed the murder 36 years ago," says the presiding judge Sibylle Grassmann to the defendant in the Cologne regional court.

"You may have suppressed the crime - you haven't forgotten it."

The “Cologne Carnival Murder” remained unsolved for decades.

But then the police reopen the “cold case” and present it on the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY...unsolved”.

The investigators' hope is that someone who knows something will come forward and, for whatever reason, has so far kept it to themselves.

And shortly afterwards, a viewer actually calls and gives a name: his former friend had followed the woman on the night of the crime and then behaved suspiciously, for example by changing his appearance.

This man, a young petty criminal at the time of the crime, is now sitting in the dock and leaning slightly forward, listening to the judge's words.

He is now 57 years old, in poor health and has not had a criminal record for a long time, but that does not diminish his guilt, as Grassmann emphasizes.

DNA evidence supports the verdict

The court is convinced that the man attacked his victim, who was walking from one disco to another, from behind on the night of Carnival Sunday and dragged him to the ground.

According to the verdict, he throttled the 24-year-old with her necklace, then kicked and stomped on her and inflicted serious injuries on her.

He stole her Maya the Bee breast pouch with 100 German marks in it and fled.

A passer-by found the dead woman in the morning behind a snack stand on the edge of the carnival train route.

The chamber assumes that the murder characteristic was based on base motives: the defendant acted primarily for sexual motives and perhaps also hoped for money.

In addition to the former friend's testimony, the court relies primarily on DNA traces that were found on the corpse's clothing.

Of the 14 skin flakes that can still be evaluated today, six can be attributed to the defendant, the others all came from different people.

The defense's theory that the genetic material could have been transferred from jacket to jacket in the disco before the crime was not valid due to the location of the traces: the DNA was found exactly in the places where the murderer had grabbed his victim .

The dead woman's daughter was only 18 months old at the time of the crime.

The verdict was certainly a relief for them, said Grassmann.

"The crime shaped her entire life." The woman was a co-plaintiff in the trial and hid her face behind large sunglasses when the verdict was announced.

The defendant denied the crime in the trial.

According to his defense attorney, he will appeal the verdict.

czl/dpa