justice
Convicted kidnapper of Ursula Herrmann should be released
A reproduction shows the box in which the ten-year-old kidnapping victim Ursula Herrmann suffocated in 1981 (archive photo). photo
© Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa
A girl is kidnapped. The cruel perpetrator locks the child in a box and buries it. The student dies. More than 40 years later, the man convicted of the crime is freed.
The convicted kidnapper of the girl, Ursula Herrmann, who has been in prison for 15 years, is to be released. He had been convicted of extortion kidnapping resulting in death. As the Lübeck Regional Court announced after a hearing, the remainder of his life sentence is to be suspended on probation. The man will remain in prison until the decision is final, a court spokesman said.
According to his defense attorney, it will probably take about a week. The public prosecutor’s office has that long to lodge a complaint, lawyer Walter Rubach told the German Press Agency. The “Bild” newspaper had previously reported on the date. But a complaint is unlikely, said Rubach. That is why his client will probably be able to leave prison on June 7th.
The Ursula Herrmann case is one of the most spectacular crimes in the history of the Federal Republic. The girl was abducted from Ammersee in Bavaria in 1981 and buried in a box. The ten-year-old suffocated in it.
Finally, in May 2008, the alleged perpetrator was arrested in Schleswig-Holstein and taken into custody. In March 2010, the district court of Augsburg sentenced him. He was serving his sentence in Lübeck because of his move to northern Germany. The man has maintained his innocence to this day.
According to the Criminal Code, life imprisonment can be suspended after 15 years if the perpetrator was not guilty of anything during the period of imprisonment. In the 15 years of imprisonment, the pre-trial detention is included in the calculation.
It took almost 27 years for the crime to be considered solved
On September 15, 1981, Ursula was cycling through a forest near her home town of Eching am Ammersee when a perpetrator tore her off her bike. He locked the girl in a box, which he buried. The child died in it after a short time because the ventilation system was not working. A ransom of two million Deutschmarks was demanded from the parents, even though Ursula was long dead.
Weeks later, the buried box containing the body was discovered. But securing evidence at the scene of the crime turned into a fiasco, and the investigating senior public prosecutor later spoke of a “scene destruction squad”. It ultimately took almost 27 years before the violent crime was considered solved.
To this day, the traces in the case are checked again and again. Most recently, the University of Zurich prepared an expert opinion on the tape recorder that was seized from the convict and is said to have been used for the extortion calls. According to the expertise, the audio device should not be considered as a crime tool.