First the accused allegedly kills his father, then his sister and finally his mother. The man is now to receive a life sentence for the crimes, which caused horror far beyond the town of Rövershagen.
The public prosecutor's office has demanded life imprisonment for a 27-year-old man from Rövershagen near Rostock for the triple murder of his parents and sister. In the process before the Rostock Regional Court, the authority also requested that the particular severity of the guilt be determined and that preventive detention be examined later.
The accused wanted to get rid of the father because he stood in the way of a lifestyle as he imagined it, the public prosecutor said. He killed his sister and mother because he hoped he could cover up the first murder. The accused had lived alone in Baden-Württemberg for two years before returning home in 2021, heavily in debt.
He wanted to live again without the controls, but had to “crawl to the back” of the allegedly tyrannical father and could no longer endure it, the 27-year-old said in a first police interview. The trial showed that the father was strict but by no means tyrannical, the prosecutor argued.
The prosecution saw it as proven that the trained bricklayer had insidiously killed his 52-year-old father, who was unsuspectingly sleeping on the living room couch, on February 7, 2022 in his parents' house in Rövershagen with arrows from a crossbow and a jagged garden machete. A few hours later, the accused lured his 25-year-old sister to Rövershagen.
Under the pretext of having a surprise for her, he put masked ski goggles and earmuffs on her and had her kneel down in the hallway on the pond liner he had laid out there. After a short wait, he also shot her three arrows in the head with his crossbow and stabbed her with the secateurs.
Four days later, according to prosecutors, he killed his 48-year-old mother in the same manner as his sister when she was returning home from a week's work away from home. A good two weeks after the crime, he brought the bodies in coffins he had made himself with a rented van to a field twelve kilometers away, where he buried them almost three meters deep with a small rented excavator.
By the end of March 2022, the accused managed to block inquiries from relatives and work colleagues of the parents and mislead them with false information. After the police began to investigate the disappeared due to a missing persons report, he gradually got caught up in contradictions. On March 30, 2022, he allowed himself to be arrested at his workplace without resistance. That same day, he showed investigators where he had buried the dead.
The defense requested an acquittal "for procedural reasons". The first interrogation protocols and numerous pieces of evidence could not be used in court because the investigators had made too many mistakes "total". For example, after his arrest, he was not correctly informed about how to engage a public defender.
He was also not immediately brought before a magistrate. Should a conviction nevertheless result, from the point of view of the defense the court may neither determine the particular gravity of the guilt nor require preventive detention. The court wants to announce the verdict on March 13th.
