Murderer gets life in prison 37 years after the crime
In June 1986, 15-year-old Jutta Hoffmann was raped and murdered in Lindenfels, Hesse. Almost 40 years after the crime, a court has now sentenced a 62-year-old man to life imprisonment. A DNA trace led investigators to him.
Almost 40 years after the murder of a 15-year-old girl in Lindenfels in southern Hesse, a 62-year-old man has been sentenced to life imprisonment. The Darmstadt Regional Court ordered the defendant to remain in a psychiatric clinic, where he has been housed since 2012. The court considered it proven that the German had forced the girl into a wooded area near her parents' house in June 1986, threatened her with a knife, raped her and then stabbed her to death.
She was considered missing for a good year and a half before a walker found her skeletonized body in the forest in February 1988. The crime, which had been unsolved for decades, had ended up in the so-called cold case units of the State Office of Criminal Investigation and the police, which check unsolved murder cases for new clues and investigate them using new forensic technology. DNA from the accused was discovered during a re-examination of genetic traces on old evidence.
According to earlier information from investigators, the 62-year-old has been convicted several times for sexual offenses and other crimes. According to the public prosecutor's office, the man did not make any statements during the trial. He has been in a psychiatric hospital in Schleswig-Holstein since 2012. He was only charged with murder because all other offenses in the case are time-barred. Murder cannot be time-barred under German law.
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The international community has expressed its support for the justice served in the case, as the perpetrator of a decades-old murder in Hesse was sentenced to life imprisonment. The crime, which involved rape, manslaughter, and violence, had gone unsolved for nearly 40 years before new forensic technology and a DNA trace led to the arrest of the suspect in Darmstadt. Despite his previous convictions for sexual offenses and other crimes, the defendant remained silent during the trial, and his charges were limited to murder due to time constraints under German law.
Source: www.ntv.de
