The old and sick woman should be safe there, instead she was the victim of a brutal crime. A murder and rape trial has started in Munich. The alleged crime scene: a retirement home.
Munich (AP) – The small, only 1.60 meter tall man walks stooped and leans on a walker as he enters the courtroom. A judicial officer carefully shows him the way to the dock.
It is hard to imagine what this frail-looking, 88-year-old man with Alzheimer’s disease is supposed to have done: He is on trial for rape and murder because he is said to have brutally attacked a roommate who was also suffering from dementia in a retirement home in the Miesbach district.
The geriatric nurse, who discovered the blood-smeared man in the woman’s room on July 25, 2020, speaks of a “shock” on a “memorable day,” as the presiding judge says. “Everything was full of blood,” says the nurse as a witness in court. “He was naked, she was naked.” The 85-year-old, bedridden woman was covered with wounds. “It looked like a bite wound,” says the nurse who was working in the home at the time.
He and a colleague then had to carry the seriously injured woman down the stairs because the elevator in the home was not working – allegedly because the bills for the maintenance company had not been paid. The defective elevator was also the reason why the 85-year-old was in her room and not in a common room at the time of the crime in the afternoon. “She hasn’t been mobilized for weeks,” says the carer, who criticizes the conditions in the home and, for example, a lack of induction. “Otherwise this situation would not have happened.” He had started looking for the Alzheimer’s patient because he hadn’t seen him for a while.
According to prosecutors, the old man is said to have raped the bedridden elderly woman so brutally and beaten her so severely that she died a week and a half later in the hospital of pneumonia – caused by inhaled blood. The man is said to have broken several ribs. As a young man, the German is said to have been a good boxer and won championships. This is possibly an explanation for “how it came to this damage despite his age,” says an expert.
The 88-year-old is considered to be incapable of guilt because of his illness. If convicted, he faces no prison sentence, but permanent placement in a closed psychiatric ward.
At the beginning of the trial at the Regional Court of Munich II, he cited a lack of memory through his defense lawyer. “He doesn’t know anything, he has no memories of anything,” says the lawyer. The old man is then released from the duty to take part in the main hearing against him – also for reasons of “procedural economy”, as the presiding judge says.
The geriatric nurse says nothing had previously indicated that the man might be capable of such an act. He was “totally inconspicuous” and always wanted to pay bills because he didn’t want to owe the nurses anything. “Quite inconspicuous and dear.”
The Regional Court of Munich II only dealt with a very similar case at the end of April. For a man with dementia who is said to have abused several women in a special nursing home near Munich, permanent placement in a psychiatric facility was ordered. The court saw it as proven that the man had repeatedly abused his flatmates, who were also ill, in the nursing home, which specializes in dementia. For months he went on against them again and again, and he is said to have raped one of the women four times.
The process had also called patient advocates on the scene. “Sexuality in care facilities is still a taboo subject. Assaults among nursing home residents occur more often than expected and rarely go unnoticed, “said Eugen Brysch, chairman of the German Foundation for Patient Protection, and called for” a culture of looking “- especially because those affected, if they are still able to express themselves , often keep silent out of shame.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210504-99-456575 / 4
