Condemned Hosang on her veranda in Rieder:"The old man liked to be in control"
Photo:Milos Djuric / DER SPIEGEL
For twenty years nobody in Rieder had seen Walter Emmerich, the man from the sand-colored single-family house at Bachstrasse 1a. His landlord thought he'd moved in with his sister just a few places away. The women in the village said that "the old man" was now living in Thailand. His health insurer last heard from him in 1995, Walter Emmerich applied for a crutch. For years the pension fund sent his money into an account that was never his.
He had nine children. In the many years that passed, none looked for him.
The only one who thought of him every day was Angelika Hosang.
It was a Wednesday in October 2016 when she brought the investigators to him. They went down the steps into the cellar, tore the cobwebs from the walls, lifted remains of coal aside, smashed the concrete where Angelika Hosang had stepped with her black boot.
Walter Emmerich's bones lay in a hole in the ground, in a buttoned short-sleeved shirt with pink stripes, on the leg bones the thrombosis stockings with dark blue cuffs.
He was wrapped in a perforated curtain, tied with a cable, on top of which lay a long kitchen knife and an ax with a wooden handle.
The investigators carried Walter Emmerich's bones from the cellar, past his living room, out of the sand-colored house in Rieder.
Rieder is located in Saxony-Anhalt, not far from Quedlinburg, a village at the end of potato fields on the northern edge of the Harz Mountains. The place is named after the reed, "the swamp", where it was once built more than a thousand years ago.
When Walter Emmerich came to Rieder in autumn 1989, others went to the West, Emmerich moved to Lindenweg. The village chronicler lived in his new street, diagonally across from the gravedigger, next door to the Hosang family.
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