Decisions or Rulings - "Cold Case": Murder Conviction in the Cornfield
A woman's body was found by a dog near the Rhine dike in a cornfield on August 21, 1992. The case went unsolved for a while until investigators looked into old files. They found a match in the DNA database and tracked it down to a man who had been in prison for 29 years for child murder. This man had killed an 11-year-old student in Bad Liebenzell, Baden-Württemberg three years before the murder in the cornfield in 1995.
During the trial, he denied committing both crimes. Because the murder in Meerbusch happened three years before the one in Bad Liebenzell, the Düsseldorf Regional Court gave him a combined sentence and couldn't increase it further since it was already the maximum punishment.
The trial centered around the significance of old DNA evidence. Defense lawyer Maximilian Klefenz said that DNA on fingernails is common in 90% of people, just from everyday contact. He also claimed that there could've been contamination during evidence collection. But there were no reliable solutions to clean instruments. The prosecution maintained that the high-quality DNA trace couldn't have come from a random contamination.
And here's the note: Notification from the BGH. [BGH stands for Bundesgerichtshof, the German Federal Court of Justice].
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- The guilty verdict for the child murderer, initially convicted in Baden-Württemberg, was upheld in a series of judgments by the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) in Karlsruhe.
- Despite the man's denial, the North Rhine-Westphalia Regional Court, specifically in Düsseldorf, delivered a combined sentence for both murders due to the old DNA evidence.
- The cold case from 1992, involving a woman's tragic fate in a cornfield near the Rhine dike, finally led to a conviction with the matching DNA evidence found in the database.
- The initial DNA evidence, found on the victim from the Meerbusch murder in 1992, played a crucial role in tying the man to the second crime three years later in Bad Liebenzell, Baden-Württemberg.
- Despite the defense's argument that DNA on fingernails is common and could lead to contamination, the prosecution successfully proved that the high-quality trace from the corpse could not have been a random occurrence.
- Contamination might have occurred during evidence collection in the controversial Cold Case, but no reliable solutions for cleaning instruments were available.
- DNA technology's advancements helped bring a notorious child murderer to justice, drawing attention to the timely need for addressing such crimes and providing a sense of closure to the grieving families.
Source: www.stern.de
