Defendants Stephan Ernst (back) and Markus H. (front): "Did you have Markus H. on your radar at all back then?"
Photo: Jan Huebner / imago images / Jan HuebnerDetective Director Daniel Muth is a dynamic man. Stepping firmly, wearing a suit and tie, he marches into room 165 of the Frankfurt am Main Higher Regional Court, a file folder under his arm. His testimony is important. On June 4th last year Muth received a call from the Hessian Ministry of Justice in the morning and was entrusted with the management of the special commission in the murder of Walter Lübcke.
The Kassel district president was shot on the terrace of his house in Wolfhagen-Istha, Hesse, on the night of June 2, 2019; the perpetrator or perpetrators escaped undetected. At the time of the call, Muth was head of the criminal investigation department in East Hesse, based in Fulda, and drove directly to Kassel.
It was only there that Muth found out what no one in the country knew: the CDU politician had by no means been found by his youngest son with a visible bullet hole, so it was not immediately assumed that there was an assassination attempt. The gunshot wound above his right ear was not found until Walter Lübcke's inquest.
"It wasn't clear what had actually happened here"
It was not the only curiosity in this death that attracted a great deal of publicity from the start. The scene of the crime was also not a "classic police crime scene", as Muth put it in court. Because: "The record was cleaned." A firefighter friend of the Lübcke family had cleaned the terrace, on which Walter Lübcke had been sitting in his garden chair, spick and span with "rim cleaner and root brush".
"It wasn't clear what had happened here," said Muth on the witness stand. As head of the special commission "Liemecke", named after a brook near the place of residence of the Lübckes, he took over the organization and coordination of 50 officers, and they ran the full program: Investigators from the Hessian State Criminal Police Office and the riot police, special units and special forces from the Federal Criminal Police Office, one Helicopter squadrons, employees of the fire brigade and the disaster control office supported the operational measures.
What had happened on the politician's terrace that night: a possible suicide? An attempted suicide? An accident? Of third party fault? Muth lists the first hypotheses of the Soko in the court: Organized crime, opponents of wind power or young people who shot at an object and accidentally hit the district president? Not to mention the possibility that a family member might be involved. "Everything was possible," says Muth. The aim was to find out: Who was Walter Lübcke? What did he do before he died? How did he act? Were there any motives for murder?
A single flake of skin on Lübcke's shirt
The investigators were quickly able to rule out the family members as suspects and a suicide. And the firefighter friend, who knows his way around guns and has a gun license, was quickly targeted. Muth had him monitored and finally arrested by a special task force on the way to the North Sea coast. It was suspected that he might want to dispose of a firearm in the sea, says Muth. But the firefighter was able to "conclusively" explain the contradictions that had made him suspicious at the beginning and also the reasons why he had cleaned the terrace so meticulously. The man was released.
Muth recalls a "certain disillusionment" spread among Soko. For him, however, it was "purely mathematically" clear that the perpetrator or perpetrators could have led a political motivation, so the Soko concentrated more on Walter Lübcke's work: With this, his controversial appearance in the community center in Lohfelden near Kassel in autumn 2015 came into play the focus. There the 65-year-old talked about the initial reception facility for refugees in an empty hardware store and had become an enemy of the right-wing scene.
A central question was: Why does a district president who is best known in his region fall victim to such an attack? According to Muth, that spoke in favor of a "regional perpetrator". While the Soko manager was reworking the crime, a colleague called: A DNA trace was found on Walter Lübcke's shirt, including a hit - a single skin flake from Stephan Ernst. "It was the first strong indication," says Muth in court. Stephan Ernst was then arrested by special forces in the early hours of the morning in his house in Kassel. Stephan Ernst, who was last at a police station in 2004, did not initially comment on the allegations.
The grin of Markus H.
Muth evaluated the criminal files of the suspect and determined that Stephan Ernst had "always confessed" to all of the crimes he had committed. It seemed that Ernst "stands by what he does," says Muth. "I thought we'd just try talking to him." On June 23 of last year, three weeks after the murder of Walter Lübcke, Muth sent two officers to the correctional facility. But Stephan Ernst refused to be questioned.
Two days later he buckled. Stephan Ernst made his first confession - without a lawyer at his side, recorded on video. At that time, Stephan Ernst only mentioned co-defendant Markus H. in passing. Unlike Stephan Ernst, H. is charged with complicity in murder. "Did you have Markus H. on your radar at all back then?" Asks Ernst's defender Mustafa Kaplan. "No," replies Muth.
The defendant Markus H. smiles to himself in the courtroom. When photos of a bust of Adolf Hitler that had been seized from his apartment are shown on a canvas, he can't help but grin. Especially not when the Soko boss explains that H. had switched off his cell phone at the time of the crime. There is no location data on his cell phone from the night of the crime, says Muth.
Icon: The mirror