The jury faces a multi-day circumstantial trial. As reported, there is neither a corpse nor is it known how Elisabeth G. is said to have died. Despite this, the public prosecutor spoke of a “closed chain of evidence” at the beginning of the proceedings. The defendant pleaded “not guilty”.
He doesn’t know where his wife is and what happened to her, said the 65-year-old: “I can’t say anything specific about it, I’ve given it a lot of thought.” “Is she still alive?” asked the presiding judge. – “As long as I don’t know if she’s dead, I don’t know. I know 100 percent that nobody knows if she’s dead.”
“Extremely unusual charge”
There is “not the slightest doubt” that the defendant “killed his wife in an unknown way and left it in an unknown place,” prosecutor Julia Kalmar said in her opening statement, which lasted more than an hour. Defense attorney Thomas Reissmann, on the other hand, spoke of an “extremely unusual charge because it is manipulative”. The indictment is based on “poor, wrong investigations” and has “very important flaws”.
Missing since December 2005
Since December 6, 2005, there has been no trace of the architect, who originally comes from the Kirchdorf an der Krems district. She had filed for divorce three months before her disappearance after relationship problems, had moved out of the marital home and had looked for other accommodation. A few hours before the then 31-year-old disappeared from the scene, she had visited the accused to pick up things. According to the prosecution, a dispute may have arisen. In any case, the prosecutor was convinced that her husband must have killed her between 4:02 p.m. – at which time the woman had ended a phone call with her father – and 5:43 p.m. – at this time the accused made an ATM withdrawal.
What is certain is that the architect has not been seen alive since that meeting. After the birth of her child, she is said to have suffered from breastfeeding psychosis and had suicidal thoughts, but her family and friends ruled out that she could have done something to herself. She would never have left her then two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and had planned a cross-country skiing holiday over Christmas, it said.
SMS traffic fictitious?
At the beginning of the proceedings, the prosecutor said that the accused used the cell phone of the woman who had already been killed at the time to pretend that she was still alive. He put this into operation and used it to fake SMS traffic with his own device in the hours that followed. However, the woman’s cell phone was logged into the transmission range of the man’s apartment at that time, the prosecutor emphasized.
Bought foil and concrete
The prosecutor also pointed out that the now 65-year-old had bought 50 linear meters of construction foil, 60 kilograms of dry concrete and bitumen paint in a hardware store on December 7, 2005 – the day after the alleged murder. With regard to the concrete, the accused said in his interrogation of the accused – this was interrupted in the meantime to enable the DNA expert Christina Stein to provide an expert opinion – that he wanted to “use it at some point” to concrete the transition to the terrace: “There is somehow the water flowed down.” He wanted to “pack” his rowing boat with the foil.
On December 9, 2005, the accused had borrowed a bus from an acquaintance, telling him that he had to “take something away”. When asked about this, the defendant told the jury that he had taken away old radiators that had been dismantled. He put the bus back two hours later.
Only a few days in custody
A large-scale search operation was carried out in the week after the woman’s disappearance. The banks of the Old Danube were combed with sniffer dogs. The missing person’s husband was subsequently suspected of having had something to do with the woman’s disappearance. He was also briefly taken into custody on suspicion of murder, but the suspicion was not confirmed, and the man was released after a few days. 15 months later things got moving again, with probes and cadaver dogs, a private property was searched – but Elisabeth G. remained as if swallowed up by the earth. In June 2007, the investigations were finally stopped and the manhunt for the architect was removed from the police system.
Cold Case group determined
The case appeared to be on the files as an unsolved mystery before the Federal Criminal Police Office’s cold case group began investigating again and unearthed new evidence. This led to the ex-husband being arrested again 15 years after Elisabeth G. disappeared. Defense attorney Reissmann stated that he had been “wrongly” in custody as a murder suspect for around a year and a half.
Trail of blood in the apartment
From the point of view of the public prosecutor’s office, the accused is primarily incriminated by a DNA report. Body detection dogs had struck in the man’s apartment, and using luminol, a trace of blood with a diameter of 12.5 centimeters was made visible on the wooden floor in the accused’s kitchen/living room. According to the DNA expert Stein, it was a mixed trace that showed features of Elisabeth G. and the accused. In addition, the prosecution authority claims that over the years the accused has given strikingly contradictory information about the last encounter with his ex-wife, especially in the official death declaration proceedings. The fact that she – as he claims – was still training in a rowing club on the Old Danube on the evening of December 6th cannot be true because there was no entry in the rowing club’s logbook and colleagues in the club had not confirmed this either .
“We don’t know if she’s dead”
“We don’t know if she’s dead or alive,” the defense attorney said. “We don’t know if she died of a violent crime.” The fact that Elisabeth G. took her own life was “a possibility that exists”. Riessmann commented on the blood stain: “It could have just been a splash, from wherever.” There is simply “no motive” why his client should have killed his wife, because he himself had sought an amicable divorce. Only then did the woman “slam the divorce suit in his face”.
The prosecutor, on the other hand, saw very well reasons that could have persuaded the now 65-year-old to commit the bloody crime. In this context, she mentioned a mental injury caused by the separation and, in connection with it, “great fear of losing contact with his daughter”, with whom Elisabeth G. had moved into a new apartment.
What happened on December 6, 2005?
The defendant told the jury that afternoon that Elisabeth had come to him on the afternoon of December 6, 2005, together with their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, to collect things that were left in the apartment. After that she went to rowing training, left her daughter with him, then came back at 7.30 p.m. and was angry because an unknown person who had promised to take her things away had left her hanging.
The next day – according to the prosecution, the woman was already dead by this time – she appeared around 8 a.m.: “She seemed to me exhausted, optically.” More or less without a word, he handed her the box with the things over the fence – two stools, a suction cup and other utensils – and she got on the passenger side of a dark station wagon. He hasn’t seen her since then.
In custody for a year and a half
His father-in-law suspected him “from the first day that Elisabeth went missing that I had murdered her,” the 65-year-old said on record. When asked how his daughter would have reacted to her mother’s sudden disappearance, the man replied: “Surprisingly, she very, very rarely asked. For the first time in kindergarten. I told her, to be honest, I don’t know where your mom is . Maybe she found someone else.”
It was his plan to inform his daughter, whom he had raised, about her mother’s disappearance when she came of age. The daughter is now 18 years old. The accused has been in custody for around a year and a half. “She obviously hasn’t had any problems not having a mother,” the defendant concluded on the matter.
Doctored after a motorcycle crash?
He tried to refute the evidence presented by the prosecutor. There are three mobile phone transmission masts in the immediate vicinity of his address, which would cover a “broad area”. He could not judge where his wife was when she communicated with him via SMS. Regarding the blood stain in his kitchen, the 65-year-old commented that Elisabeth “lost her balance with her enduro machine at some point beforehand” and “fell over while stationary”. She injured her hand: “She bled, I doctored her.” Blood must have dripped onto the floor.
The hearing will continue next Wednesday with the first testimonies. A total of 39 witnesses are invited. Three more days of negotiations are scheduled. The verdict is due on May 19th.
Source: Nachrichten
