Darmstadt Regional Court - "Jutta" case ends with murder verdict after decades
Following the murder of a 15-year-old girl in Lindenfels in southern Hesse, which remained unsolved for decades, a 62-year-old man has been sentenced to life imprisonment. Due to the overall picture of all the evidence and circumstantial evidence, it was proven that the man committed the crime in June 1986, the presiding judge explained on Friday at the regional court in Darmstadt: "One clue fits into the next".
In June 1986, the German had pushed the teenager into the woods on her way home from a swimming pool near her parents' house, threatened her with a knife, raped her and then stabbed her to death. It was not until a year and a half later that a walker found Jutta's skeletonized body in the forest. The then 24-year-old man had "buried the body with a spade" to cover it up, the presiding judge explained.
Gene traces on this spade revealed a match with the DNA of the convicted sex offender almost 35 years after the crime. So-called cold case units from the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) and police had previously re-examined evidence using new forensic technology.
In March 2023, the investigators reportedly went public with the case - in the ZDF television program "Aktenzeichen XY... unsolved", an LKA investigator announced that there were new leads in the case. As it turned out during the trial, the convicted man had already been in the investigators' sights for a long time. According to public prosecutor Eva Heid, undercover investigators had been in contact with him for over a year and a half at the time.
According to the presiding judge, one of the undercover police officers watched the TV show with the suspect. The suspect had appeared nervous. He then provided further incriminating evidence that weighed against him in the trial. He initially denied having been in Lindenfels at the time of the crime, but later claimed to have thrown away a cigarette there as an explanation for a possible DNA find. According to the judge, he had also mentioned knowledge of the perpetrator in the conversations with the undercover investigators.
There was "not a second" of doubt in these proceedings "that the convicted man could not be the perpetrator", said Angela Gräf-Bösch, lawyer for the joint plaintiff, after the verdict. She represented relatives of the victim. Prosecutor Heid said: "It's not just individual pieces of evidence." The evidence had led to the assumption that the convicted man was the perpetrator. The defense had demanded an acquittal because, in their view, the evidence could have been assessed differently.
The defendant had remained silent during the trial and had denied to witnesses that he had anything to do with the crime. The man, who grew up in southern Hesse, had moved to northern Germany in mid-1987.
Following the verdict of the district court, the 62-year-old will remain in a so-called "Maßregelvollzug" in Schleswig-Holstein. He has been housed in a closed psychiatric clinic there since 2012 due to another sentence. According to the public prosecutor's office, the criminal division in Kiel will decide whether he should be transferred to a regular prison.
The man had only been charged with murder because all other criminal offenses in the case were time-barred. According to German law, murder cannot be time-barred. The verdict is not yet final.
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- He also wanted to kill his cousin
- The convicted man's DNA matched the gene traces found on the spade used to bury the victim's body, a key piece of evidence in the Cold Case.
- The police in Germany, specifically the LKA, re-examined evidence using new forensic technology, leading to the breakthrough in the decades-old Murder case.
- The police had long been keeping an eye on the convicted man in connection with the criminality surrounding the murder, as revealed by undercover investigators.
- The man's reluctance to admit being in Lindenfels during the time of the Murder and his mention of knowledge of the perpetrator in conversations with undercover officers were incriminating factors in the trial.
- The defendant maintained his innocence throughout the trial, denying any involvement in the crime that had remained a Cold Case for decades.
- If found guilty of additional crimes in the Darmstadt Regional Court, the man could face an extended Prison sentence beyond his current "Maßregelvollzug" in Schleswig-Holstein.
- The conviction in the "Jutta" case serves as a reminder of the importance of DNA analyses in solving Cold Cases and bringing Criminality to justice.
- Despite the Murder verdict, the official Judgments from the Darmstadt Regional Court are yet to be finalized, leaving room for potential appeals or further proceedings.
Source: www.stern.de
