crime
Defendant also confesses to killing Ayleen in court
The accused at the beginning of the trial in Gießen. photo
© Boris Roessler/dpa
Almost a year ago, the student Ayleen was killed – presumably by a 30-year-old man who has had to answer in court in Gießen since Tuesday. He admits the act he claims to have committed during the argument.
In the trial of the violent death of 14-year-old schoolgirl Ayleen from Baden-Württemberg, the accused confessed to killing the girl before the Gießen district court. The 30-year-old is charged with murder, attempted rape resulting in death and coercion, among other things. Investigators assume a sexual motive for the crime. However, there was no mention of this in the man’s statement, which one of his defense lawyers read at the start of the trial. Rather, the accused stated that he had committed the act during an argument with the girl.
Perpetrators and victims get to know each other on the Internet
The 30-year-old and the student are said to have met about three months before the crime via a messenger service and an online game. According to the indictment, they are said to have written more than 7,000 mostly highly sexualized messages, and the man repeatedly demanded nude pictures and masturbation photos from the girl. The girl partly complied with the demands, but she refused real meetings with the accused. The 30-year-old put the student under increasing pressure and also threatened to inform her parents about the pictures or to kill family members. The 14-year-old was unable to break out of this “vicious circle”, said senior public prosecutor Thomas Hauburger.
On July 21 last year, the man is said to have finally driven his car to Gottenheim near Freiburg, where the girl lived, took her with him and brought her to a forest area around 300 kilometers away near Langgöns in the Gießen district. There he is said to have pushed Ayleen onto a bench and attempted to rape her. Finally he strangled her and then took the dead person by car to Teufelsee near Echzell in Wetteraukreis, where he dumped the body. The body was found after an extensive search in the lake.
The accused himself stated in his statement that the 14-year-old had “searched for his closeness” on the journey to Hesse. Later there was an argument, the girl provoked and insulted him, then he killed her. Chief Public Prosecutor Hauburger said that the course of events described in the statement “can in no way be reconciled with the results of the investigation”. The German had already admitted to killing the girl during an interrogation last year.
He was under management supervision until the beginning of 2022
The man from the Lahn-Dill district had been in a psychiatric ward for several years as a teenager because of an attempted sexual offense. By early 2022, he was under managerial supervision as a recidivist sex offender. With the end of this measure, the man was also removed from the program of the Central Office for the Monitoring of Sex Offenders at Risk of Recidivism (ZÜRS), the aim of which is to protect the population from such offenders when they are released from prison or prison.
In his statement, the man, who appeared in court in a red T-shirt and dark gray pants, also went into his childhood and youth. At times he lived in a home, he and his siblings had experienced abuse, and his brother had committed suicide. He himself repeatedly committed crimes and occasionally skipped school, later he was denied school attendance, and to this day he has not been able to graduate from secondary school.
In another case, the man is also accused of driving without a license and because he is said to have procured child pornographic content. In June 2022, he is said to have asked a 13-year-old girl via chat to send him nude photos – combined with questions about her age and physique. The 30-year-old initially did not comment on these allegations in his statement.
His defense attorney said he wanted to achieve “the best possible result” for his client. There are allegations that could lead to life imprisonment, the assumption of particular guilt and preventive detention. “If any of these elements could be brought down, that would already be a success in this process.”