The US criminal Charles Manson received boxes of love letters in jail, the Norwegian Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people, even got marriage proposals from 16-year-olds. Why do some people, often women, seek proximity to violent criminals? On the other hand: doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance? In The allure of evil a woman reads flowery lines by a murderer to her doubting colleague. “Can someone who writes letters like this be a bad person?” She asks.
This Cologne is about hybristophilia crime scene based on the book by Arne Nolting and Jan Martin Scharf, who also directed. About the fact that some women feel attracted to violent criminals. Some are looking for strength, some believe that they are the only one who can save a person. It can go well, it can go terribly wrong. This is how it looks when Schenk (Dietmar Bär) and Ballauf (Klaus J. Behrendt) find a dead woman, stabbed twelve times with a knife, and bandaged around their eyes. She married her husband in prison. Was it him?
A belt over the eyes – Jütte knows that from another murder case in Wuppertal
The case picks up speed when a snail crawls over the keyboard of the deeply relaxed assistant Jütte (Roland Riebeling). Metaphor alarm for the dumb viewer. But then Jütte turns up. A belt over your eyes? He knows that from a murder case in Wuppertal that everyone thought was resolved, but he never did. This woman also had contacts in prison. She too had a child, like the other victim. Jütte broke down then, the heart. Before they called him Turbo-Jütte, in Cologne he is the duty-according-to-regulation-Jütte. Pure self-protection, we now know.
While Schenk (Ferrari from evidence room) and Ballauf (deep glare exchange with colleague) use conventional patterns, it is good not to see Jütte in the usual Buddha number. He is burning for this case and refers his superiors to the second row. In the end, all strands come together, there are greetings from the past, whereby the time levels are confusing because they work with the same music but play in different decades. It doesn’t really help that the old sequences appear mustard-colored and the light is colder in the new ones.
Jütte switches the turbo off again. Schenk brings the Ferrari back, Ballauf continues to look dachshund. The case is resolved, but only fragments remain. Nothing is going to be good here.
ARD, Sunday, 8.15 p.m.