At the end of the hearing, a panel of lay judges found that the evidence was not sufficient “to establish with the certainty required for criminal proceedings that the defendant was defenseless,” as the presiding judge stated in her reasoning. The decision is not legally binding.
- Read also: Sex with a 16-year-old who then died of drugs? “I can only laugh at the accusations”
The prosecution had accused the man of taking a 16-year-old girl who was under the influence of drugs to his accommodation in December 2023 and taking advantage of her condition to have sexual intercourse with her several times. The girl was found dead in the apartment in Rudolfsheim-Fünfhaus on December 10. The man claimed that he was “innocent”. “I can only laugh at the allegations,” he said at the beginning of his interrogation.
“An incredibly tragic story”
It was “an incredibly tragic story,” the judge explained in her reasoning. And she said to the defendant: “What you did is morally reprehensible.” Despite this, the man’s statements could not be refuted and the extent of the 16-year-old’s impairment could not be determined. The mother and friends and acquaintances of the deceased, who had followed the trial, did not hear these statements. They left the courtroom indignantly while the verdict was being announced, loudly expressing their displeasure and shouting insults.
The 55-year-old did not get off completely unscathed. Because he had fished illegally in a body of water on June 13, 2023, he was sentenced to two months’ probation for interfering with another person’s fishing rights, which he accepted. This is significant because the man, who had been in custody for six and a half months, is unlikely to have any prospect of compensation for his detention. The 55-year-old was released immediately after the trial. The public prosecutor has not yet made any statement.
Girls “not defenseless”
The defendant claimed during his questioning that consensual sex had taken place once, and that the girl was “not defenseless.” She had “actively participated” and was “not overly impaired.” He “can still hear her today.” The defendant largely refuted the statements he made immediately after his arrest: “There was no second sex.” The police “did not let him finish.”
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As the investigation revealed, the 16-year-old had died as a result of her drug use. The autopsy revealed traces of morphine, cocaine, methamphetamine and other substances in her body. It could not be proven that the defendant was causally responsible or partly responsible for the girl’s death. The public prosecutor’s office acknowledged that he had not given her any drugs.
As forensic doctor Nikolaus Klupp explained in the trial, the 16-year-old died of a lack of oxygen as a result of combined drug poisoning. Death occurred on December 10 between 6:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m., said the medical expert. According to chemical expert Günter Paul Gmeiner, the girl had taken cocaine a few hours before her death. As far as substances containing morphine were concerned, Gmeiner could not completely rule out that the 16-year-old had consumed them an hour before her death. As for the incriminated acts attributed to the 55-year-old, Gmeiner said that a forensic chemical analysis could not determine “whether she was defenseless.”
Drugs for grief and pain
“She was already addicted,” admitted the mother of the teenager who died in her testimony. The 42-year-old suspected that the decisive factor was a death in the family. Her daughter had “let out her grief and pain” by consuming substances. The 16-year-old lived in a supervised shared apartment from Monday to Friday: “She spent the weekends at home, which worked well.”
On December 5th – a Tuesday – she found out that her daughter was missing. She called the girl, the mother recalled: “I tried to persuade her to come home. She didn’t want to.” As the mother explained to the court, the girl was supposed to be admitted to a hospital following a previous suicide attempt (“It was a cry for help”) on the recommendation of a public health doctor. This did not happen.
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The mother stated that she last received a text message from her daughter on December 9th at 6:30 p.m. “I’m with a friend,” the girl said. She assumed that the 16-year-old was “with a guy,” the mother said, looking at the 55-year-old defendant. After her questioning, the mother remained in the courtroom and watched the rest of the trial as a spectator.
7 previous convictions
The defendant, who has seven previous convictions in Austria for property crimes and bodily harm and who served a long prison sentence for joint murder in Germany in the 1990s, met the girl at the Westbahnhof train station after he saw her buying drugs. She told him that she had been taking hard drugs since she was 12, the defendant said. She explained to him that she was 19 or 21. But he “realized from the context that she was 17,” he admitted.
The 55-year-old refuted his original statement that the girl had been in his accommodation several times. She had only been with him on December 9. He did not want to reveal to the jury how the sex came about: “This is something that has embarrassed me for seven months. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I have never raped anyone in my life.” When the judge asked about this, the man replied: “You are asking me questions to confuse me. You are shouting at me. I am helpless.”
Lifeless next to the accused
On the morning of December 10, the girl was found lying lifeless next to him: “When you are confronted with death, it makes a huge difference. It is shocking.” He denied his original statement that he had tried to be intimate with the young girl that morning, believing that she was asleep. He had “no idea” why he had told the police that. The judge’s question about how he had determined that the 16-year-old was dead remained unanswered. “That is too personal for me. I don’t want to talk about it.”
As the psychiatric expert Sigrun Rossmanith explained, the defendant has a personality disorder. The man is “conspicuous”, but it is not a serious and lasting disorder, so there is no reason to exclude guilt.
This article was updated on 27. 6. 2024, 15:58
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