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The defendant with his lawyers in the Dortmund district court
Photo: Bernd Thissen / dpa
More than a quarter of a century after the brutal sex murder of high school student Nicole Denise Schalla, the Dortmund district court sentenced a 56-year-old man to life imprisonment.
The jury saw it as proven that he killed the then 16-year-old.
At the beginning of the trial, the public prosecutor assumed that the man from North Rhine-Westphalia had overpowered the student in 1993 not far from a bus stop near her home in the west of the city.
Schalla's body was eventually discovered in a bush near an elementary school.
The prosecution accused the man of having maliciously killed the youth to satisfy the sexual instinct.
The young person was abused and strangled.
Rain washed away traces
The 56-year-old was arrested in the summer of 2018 after subsequent DNA analyzes of crime scene traces revealed a hit.
The Dortmund prosecutors had to struggle with particular difficulties in the Schalla case: Since the body was lying in the rain, many traces were washed away over several hours.
The investigators tracked the man down with a new type of investigation method that had only recently been used in North Rhine-Westphalia.
A single flake of skin that was secured to the exposed part of the corpse is, with an overwhelming probability, from the defendant.
The man has always denied the act.
The judgment is not yet final, the defense announced a revision according to the broadcaster WDR.
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apr / dpa
