In the retrial of the so-called bathtub murder in Rottach-Egern, the public prosecutor’s office demands that the accused Manfred Genditzki be acquitted. He had been in prison for around 13 years for the alleged crime. The state treasury is obliged to compensate Genditzki for this, said public prosecutor Michael Schönauer on Monday before the Munich I district court. He “can’t find the right words”.
“Did an act take place at all?” – That is the crucial question, said Schönauer. And this question cannot be answered unequivocally with yes. According to a biomechanical report, it is possible that the elderly woman who is said to have murdered Genditzki simply fell into the tub, hit her head and drowned.
The now 62-year-old Genditzki, who worked as a caretaker in the residential complex of the dead, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Munich II Regional Court in 2010. According to the conviction of the jury, he had hit the elderly woman in October 2008 in her apartment in Rottach-Egern, Upper Bavaria, after a dispute and then drowned in the bathtub. He has always denied the allegations that the day of his arrest was the “day of his personal turning point” for Gendiktzki, said his lawyer Klaus Wittmann in his closing speech. The judgment became final after two revisions. After years of fighting Genditzki, the case was finally reopened – which is extremely rare.
In the new procedure, experts had now been heard who exonerated the man who had been imprisoned for years from the point of view of his defense and now also of the public prosecutor. The process was “above all an expert process,” said public prosecutor Schönauer. And these could have drawn on knowledge that did not exist in the previous two processes. Science has come a long way since then. “We expect an acquittal,” Genditzki’s defense attorney Regina Rick said at the beginning of the trial. The verdict could come this Friday (July 7th).