In the retrial against Manfred Genditzki, who was originally convicted of murder, the Munich I Regional Court has now set the date for the new main hearing. As the spokesman for the Munich Higher Regional Court, Laurent Lafleur, announced, the trial before the 1st Major Criminal Chamber, chaired by Elisabeth Ehrl, is scheduled to begin on April 28th. The court has scheduled 20 days of hearings until July 7th.
Genditzki was sentenced to life imprisonment in January 2012 because the court found him guilty of drowning 87-year-old Lieselotte Kortüm after an argument in her bathtub. In August 2022, he was released from prison after more than 13 years because, based on new reports, the court had come to the conclusion that there was no longer any urgent suspicion against him. The verdict against him was overturned and a new main hearing ordered.
Manfred Genditzki, who is now 62, was the caretaker in the residential complex in Rottach-Egern where the single pensioner Lieselotte Kortüm lived. On the evening of October 28, 2008, Kortüm was found dead in the water-filled bathtub in her apartment. After two bruises were discovered under her scalp during the autopsy, the public prosecutor’s office assumed a violent crime and brought charges against the caretaker Genditzki, who had looked after the old lady for years. The court ruled that Kortüm’s death was the result of a domestic accident. It was based essentially on the expert opinion of the Munich coroner Wolfgang Keil, who considered it extremely unlikely that the woman could have fallen into the position in which she was found and who ruled out that the two hematomas could have been caused by a fall into the bathtub could have occurred.
These two assumptions, which were essential for the conviction, were invalidated by the new expert opinions presented by Genditzki’s defense attorney Regina Rick. A computer simulation carried out by the Stuttgart professor Syn Schmitt proves that both the position of the corpse in the bathtub and the two bruises can easily be explained by a fall into the bathtub. In addition, a thermodynamic report on the temperature of the water in the bathtub enabled the time of death to be narrowed down so that Manfred Genditzki can no longer be considered the perpetrator. After an extensive hearing of the experts, the 1st Greater Criminal Chamber declared the application for retrial to be justified and ordered Genditzki’s release. The Munich I public prosecutor had opposed the resumption of the proceedings to the last.
Since then, Manfred Genditzki has been living with his family in Rottach-Egern. “I just want my normal life back,” he said in an interview. “I want to go about my work, spend the weekend with my wife, my children and my grandson. That’s all I want.”
But before he can do that, he has to face a new trial, which the court wants to be very lengthy. The Criminal Court, chaired by Elisabeth Ehrl, apparently has no intention of making short work of acquitting Manfred Genditzki on the principle “in case of doubt for the accused”, which, according to the results of the new reports, would certainly be possible. The estimated length of the hearing indicates that the chamber will reopen the case from scratch and hear many witnesses from the first trial again.