The case of a 19-year-old from Franconian Switzerland sounds like something out of a particularly outrageous script. In the spring of 2021, she is said to have met a man indiscriminately via a dating portal – and lured him into an ambush out of alleged admiration for an American serial killer in order to kill him. The woman has had to answer to the juvenile chamber of the Bamberg district court for a week and a half for murder. And contrary to what was initially expected, the verdict could already come this Wednesday.
According to the indictment, the 19-year-old made an appointment for sex with a 39-year-old from Nuremberg on the morning of May 1, 2021 – the time had come on the evening of the same day. The site is apparently considered a portal for men who are not quite young and who want to meet significantly younger sexual partners. By the day of the crime, the 19-year-old had made more than 200 contacts.
The later victim, the 39-year-old, lived as a security guard in Nuremberg, not far from the 19-year-old’s home in the Forchheim district. And he had a car. The public prosecutor assumes that the almost 20-year-old man picked up the young woman in a small community near Ebermannstadt, together they wanted to go to a remote hut. But it didn’t come to that.
On a dirt road west of federal highway 470, the 19-year-old is said to have caused the man to stop; and then everything should have happened very quickly. According to the public prosecutor, the 19-year-old stabbed the 39-year-old “completely out of the blue” in the neck with a camping knife. He died after severe blood loss.
Before that, however, the man probably managed to take the knife off his attacker after a scramble. The 39-year-old fled in the direction of the main road, where he managed to attract the attention of motorists; after that he lost consciousness. The prosecution praises the rescue chain between the alarm and admission to the intensive care unit as “exemplary”. Nevertheless, the man succumbed to his serious injury 19 days later in the University Hospital of Erlangen.
This Wednesday, the public prosecutor’s office and the defense will present their pleas, whether a verdict will also be issued is an open question. But even if the trial were to come to an end, many questions would still remain unanswered: on the first day of the trial, the accused announced that she would not provide any information. Evidence, however, weighs heavily on the young woman, including a secured voice message. Was the 39-year-old a victim just because he – compared to dozens of other 19-year-old chat partners – was able to set off towards Forchheim the fastest? The prosecutor takes it that way.
In the process, a psychiatric expert on the 19-year-old – who had already noticed mental problems several times before 2021 – said loudly Frankenpost an “emotionally unstable personality disorder”. The young woman apparently tried to fill the great emptiness in her, in her case this was probably admiration for an American serial killer, whom she wanted to emulate. Said serial killer, Ricardo R., was found guilty by a US court in 1989 of thirteen counts of murder and eleven counts of rape. At the time, observers of the trial registered several admirers of the Californian, including women. He died of natural causes in 2013. At the beginning of the trial at the Bamberg Youth Chamber, letters from the 19-year-old were read from prison, in which she asked a family member for pictures of the US killer.
During the proceedings, a detective testified that she was supposed to monitor the 19-year-old in a clinic on the night of the crime. She got involved in a conversation and said she would be sorry if she went to jail. On the said dating platform, she wrote to other men who should have a similar experience to the 39-year-old. According to North Bavarian Courier the police officer is said to have commented on this in the courtroom with the words: “She said it as if she wanted to have a barbecue in the evening. As if it were the most normal thing in the world to kill someone.” The 19-year-old is said to have even regretted that her victim – at that time, i.e. the evening of the crime – was still alive.
As a reason, the 19-year-old is said to have indicated that she had been treated badly all her life or had had bad experiences. In fact, her boyfriend had separated from her before the crime, and the young woman is said to have suffered badly. Whether the statement of the officer can be used for the verdict, however, is open. According to courier the defense attorney for the 19-year-old objected because, in his opinion, the quoted exchange of words in the Bamberg clinic was not a conversation, but rather a disguised interrogation.