It’s been almost three hours since Christoph Kaufmann made his decision: Marcus R. has to go to prison for 14 years and six months. For three hours now, the slight, pale man in the dock has been listening to the presiding judge, Kaufmann, motionless. The 45-year-old wears a dark blue hoodie, which helped him to hide his face from the cameras before the verdict began at the Cologne Regional Court. And now that the presiding judge justifies his decision in detail, Marcus R. avoids all eyes. He looks into nothing, and he is reminiscent of what former friends said about him at the trial: He was only “conspicuous because of his inconspicuousness and his invisibility”.
Marcus R.’s sentence is only six months below the maximum the law provides for crimes such as the most serious sexual abuse. The man is said to have committed the most severe sexual violence to babies, small children and children with disabilities at least 116 times. The investigators had identified 14 victims in countless videos and photos. And Judge Kaufmann suspects there are more.
Since 1998 he has judged the most terrible cases of child abuse and sexualized violence – but among all these processes “not one process was as dramatic as this one”. Hence the high sentence, hence the preventive detention, which means that Marcus R. is not automatically released after serving the sentence. The psychiatrist’s report clearly showed: He could not control his criminal instincts, he could relapse. Judge Kaufmann looks over the rims of his glasses at the convict, and this time he looks up. “We don’t see you as a monster, Herr R.”, says Kaufmann, “but we can see that you have to be afraid of them.”
“These are scenes like in a torture chamber in some rogue state”
During the justification of the verdict, the judge paints a horror picture – about the “Wermelskirchen” network, in which more than a hundred accomplices are suspected. And in which Marcus R. was the spider. The IT manager (annual income 120,000 gross) had three “modi operandi” to live out his “pedosexual disorder,” his “sadism” and his “highly deviant sexuality” for at least fifteen years – from 2005 to 2019: He pursued in live chats, how other perpetrators tormented their victims, he looked for accomplices with whom he abused children together. And he used his special trick: he offered to babysit unsuspecting parents, inflict unimaginable violence on their newborns and toddlers, film all this – and (according to the police) keep it “CIA-safe in an IT vault”. .
Judge Kaufmann outlines some of these acts. For example, how R. raped a four-week-old girl. How R. handled dildos and creams, how he forced small children to drink his urine. “These are scenes like in a torture chamber in some rogue state,” says Kaufmann, “you wouldn’t expect that from a man in an ironed business shirt!”
Precisely on this conspicuously inconspicuous appearance and at the same time the unrestrained violence of the perpetrator against the defenseless – that is what Judge Kaufmann concentrates on in the last part of his verdict, which is most important to him. “Never impulsive” and always “super adjusted” was R., formerly a model student, his wealthy host parents during the exchange year in the USA even wanted to adopt him. And now, since the beginning of the trial in December, R. has been “a model defendant – he has always written carefully.” Two former lovers described him as “a real mama’s boy”, and he lived at home until he was 36. Then he got married and he built a copy of the glass home in Wermelskirchen – estimated at one million euros. He wanted children of his own, but that didn’t work out. Luckily, the judge believes it would have been “as certain as amen in church” that R. would have abused them too.
Behind this “facade of bourgeois decency” there was the other life. R. then acted out his aggression and inner anger unbridled. The always friendly, successful person was “the total opposite – always energized, insatiably insatiable”. And coldly calculating: In a chat, he advised accomplices to look for victims “who can’t snitch”. The smallest, the weakest, or children with disabilities.
Kaufmann certifies the perpetrator’s uncanny talents: “They lie, they deceive, they manipulate above all those who are closest to them.” Even before the court, Marcus R. “talked around” – about the fact that he loved his victims and therefore drugged them against the pain It was all about protecting yourself from detection.”