Around a year after the violent death of a 23-year-old student in Aschau im Chiemgau, the Traunstein regional court has set the dates for the trial against her alleged murderer. According to a statement from the court on Friday, the 2nd Youth Chamber wants to negotiate closely against a young man from Aschau from October 12th over a total of 27 days. The chamber could therefore deliver its verdict on the man, who was 21 at the time of the crime and therefore legally considered an adolescent, on December 22nd.
The public prosecutor’s office accuses the now 22-year-old trainee of having attacked and killed 23-year-old Hanna W. from behind on the night of October 3rd last year. At around half past two in the morning, the young woman was on her way home, less than a kilometer long, through the town to her parents’ house. She had previously celebrated in the “Eiskeller” in Hohenaschau, a well-known club that hundreds of other guests had also visited that evening.
The young man who the public prosecutor believes to be Hanna’s murderer is said to have been jogging through the town at the time. Prosecutors are convinced that he pursued the completely unsuspecting woman for sexual motives, attacked her from behind, pulled her to the ground, strangled her and hit her in the head with an object at least five times while he knelt on her shoulders.
He is then said to have thrown the seriously injured and unconscious woman into the Bärbach, which was then flooding and flowing, where, according to the forensics, she drowned a few minutes later. Hanna W.’s body was found the following afternoon several kilometers downstream in the Prien, into which the Bärbach flows near Hohenaschau.
The act caused great horror in Chiemgau and far beyond. A special commission from the Rosenheim criminal police investigated with great effort over a period of around seven months, questioned hundreds of visitors to the ice cellar that night and viewed countless photos, videos and recordings from surveillance cameras from the club.
Divers searched the creeks several times, and the fire brigade and mountain rescue service also helped in the ultimately successful search for, among other things, the jacket and bag of the woman who was killed. Her cell phone, which was also being searched for with great urgency, was only discovered by chance in the spring by a walker in the Prien. Although it was already overgrown with algae, the forensic scientists were still able to secure data from the cell phone.
The young man now accused had caught the attention of investigators early on. They first publicly looked for the nocturnal jogger as a possible witness, whereupon he himself contacted them and was initially only questioned. Suspicions against him were only later confirmed, so he was arrested around six weeks after the crime.
Even after that, the police searched for the original owner of a wooden wristwatch that had been recovered from the water with great effort, including on the ZDF television program “Aktenzeichen XY”, and finally found him. According to the investigators, he demonstrably had nothing to do with the death of Hanna W.