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“It was overkill”: 20 years in prison in the Salzburg murder trial

“It was overkill”: 20 years in prison in the Salzburg murder trial

The jury found the man 8-0 guilty of stabbing an 81-year-old pensioner in her apartment in the summer of 2020 with a total of 28 stab wounds. The accused, who did not confess, are massively incriminated by DNA traces at the scene of the crime. The judgment is not final.

28 stab wounds

The single former bank clerk was found dead by an acquaintance on August 30, 2020 in her apartment in the Maxglan district of Salzburg. The body was wrapped in a sheet of cloth eight meters long and placed on the carpet. According to the investigation, she may have been murdered two or three days earlier.

“It was overkill,” said prosecutor Elena Haslinger at the opening of the trial on Monday. 25 stitches would have hit the front of the woman’s torso, three the back. The perpetrator was kneeling on her chest. The stitches hit the ventricles, pericardium, arteries and a number of organs. The petite woman must have fought back violently against the attacker, but bled to death.

Numerous DNA traces found

After the crime, the police found numerous DNA traces. However, the investigators only tracked down the suspect after criminal psychologist Thomas Müller narrowed down the circle of potential perpetrators. He suggested not necessarily looking for the perpetrator in the victim’s personal environment, but in the local environment. The public prosecutor’s office then resorted to a rather rare measure: They applied to the court for a DNA series examination, which was finally carried out on all 37 single men from the block of flats with its 96 tiny apartments – including the accused.

A total of 14 DNA rubs from the crime scene matched the man’s buccal swab. More than a year after the crime, traces under the dead man’s fingernails, on the inside knob of the front door, on the sink in the kitchen and on the long sheet of fabric could be assigned to him. As it turned out, the suspect himself lived diagonally below the victim in the block of flats from 2006 to 2021 and then moved to Lower Austria. There he was arrested. “One thing is certain, he was in the apartment. Only he can tell us what he wanted there and what happened there,” said the prosecutor.

The 62-year-old denied the crime

However, the blameless 62-year-old denied any connection with the crime. “I’m innocent. I had nothing to do with the murder,” he explained. He was never in the woman’s apartment and had no contact with the victim. “Someone else must have planted my DNA.” A few days before the crime, he left objects on the ground floor for disposal so that other residents could use them: tools, gloves – and the long sheet of fabric in which the corpse was wrapped. The DNA must then have gotten into the victim’s apartment via the gloves.

However, a forensic pathologist considered it highly unlikely that 14 DNA tracks had been deliberately left behind by a glove. As the prosecutor explained, the accused also meticulously cleaned the victim’s apartment. “It must have taken hours to clean up all the blood,” she said. The victim lost more than three liters of blood, but there were no large bloodstains in the apartment. Only a special investigation revealed the traces.

Schizoid Personality Disorder

This is interesting because the caretaker of the condominium said at the trial on Tuesday that she had heard that the man left his apartment so clean when he moved out that it was as if he had never lived there. In addition, the defendant repeatedly complained about stains in the stairwell. According to a neuropsychiatric expert, the 62-year-old has a schizoid personality disorder, but was responsible for the crime.

Incidentally, no indication of a motive was found in the proceedings. “There is no evidence that the woman and the accused were friends or met more often,” said the prosecutor. The investigators also largely ruled out a robbery, because jewelry, cash and a savings book were found in the apartment. Only the purse with the ATM card and the apartment keys were missing.

Judgments not final

The court rated the brutality of the act as an aggravation, as mitigating the previous blamelessness of the man. However, the verdict is not final: the accused immediately lodged an appeal, and the public prosecutor’s office did not give any explanation.

Source: Nachrichten

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