The witness has difficulty speaking.

The presiding judge asked her to describe what she saw driving past on the A 661 on March 19, 2022.

The witness starts, breaks off, is silent.

The chairman talks to her, tells her that you can see how upset she is.

She says she has trouble sleeping and hears the screams of the woman in the car in her nightmares.

The man in the dock listens without looking.

Half an hour earlier he cried himself when he spoke of the "worst news of my life".

The news that the woman in the car is dead.

"I loved her very much."

Anna Sophia Lang

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Prosecutors say he murdered her.

The two were married, but five months before the crime she separated from him.

After the wedding, there were often arguments.

Her husband is said to have insulted her for trivial things.

According to the prosecutor, he was registered with the Tinder dating app and wrote to other women.

He did not accept that she separated, but ambushed her and tried to establish contact.

But she refused.

At least seven stitches

On the day of the crime, according to the indictment, he bought two knives and a kind of hammer with a hook.

Then he is said to have lurked at the apartment until the woman came out and got into the car.

On the A 661 he slowed them down and forced them to stop.

He stabbed her at least seven times through the driver's door and smashed the window, according to the accusation, after a driver had already stopped.

"She's sleeping," he is said to have said as an explanation.

The woman, who, according to prosecutors, managed to shift into gear twice, died in hospital.

The extremely fragile defendant tells a different story in a barely audible voice.

She makes him look more like a savior trying to save the woman's life than a perpetrator.

He bought knives and tools as gifts and because he wanted to remodel his father's house.

He claims to have accidentally discovered his wife's car on the A 661.

Something was wrong with their brake lights, he says.

That's why he drove up behind when she braked.

She stopped herself on the hard shoulder and yelled why he was chasing her.

When he wanted to call the police with her cell phone because of the rear-end collision, she scratched him and called him an idiot.

"That gave me a punch deep in the stomach." Then she put it in gear and crashed into his car twice.

"That's when I lost control." Once or twice, he says,

He talks for minutes about how he wanted to calm the bleeding woman and get help.

When he is finished, the presiding judge names the two questions that arise for him from the statement: Why did he have the knife – not packed – in his jacket pocket?

And how do "one or two" stitches fit the injury pattern that the doctors found?

The process continues.