Icon: enlarge
Defendant Bekim H. in the Berlin Regional Court (January 2021)
Photo: Olaf Wagner / imago images
The witness describes her boyfriend's call that morning on August 5, 2020: "I think I killed someone," he said.
She replied that she would now buy shoes with her daughter.
"I thought he was joking." He said he would meet with his lawyer, then he would come to her.
About an hour later he stood in front of her, appeared distant and absent.
Only then, says the witness Franziska E., did she understand that this sentence was not a joke, but bitter seriousness.
Bekim H. did not tell her what exactly had happened.
Just that he loves her.
Then he went to the police.
While the 35-year-old speaks in front of the 32nd Large Criminal Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court last Tuesday, Bekim H. sits slumped in the dock and cries.
The 42-year-old has black hair, is petite and looks much younger than he is.
The presiding judge Matthias Schertz asks the witness whether Bekim H. has somehow relativized his statement.
Did he say it was an accident?
Franziska E. shakes her head.
The straps of her bra are torn off, the top torn open
On that day, police found the body of a 15-year-old girl at Rummelsburger Bucht in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
The dead woman is naked, the body covered with grass and twigs.
The student's clothes are scattered around the area.
One of the straps of her bra has been torn off, her top torn on one side.
Her jeans were never found.
The exact course of events is unclear.
The forensic doctor only established the cause of death in court in February: the corpse showed typical signs of death by strangulation.
The expert assumes that the perpetrator initially choked the 15-year-old until she was unconscious and then dragged her face down by the feet to the site.
The nature of the abrasions on her forehead indicated that the student was unconscious at the time, but not yet dead.
He did not find any clear defensive injuries on the corpse, said the forensic doctor, nor any clear evidence of attempted rape.
But a DNA expert reported traces of Bekim H.'s semen on the girl's body.
But how did the 15-year-old die after being dragged unconscious on the floor?
The forensic doctor cannot say whether the perpetrator choked again.
Can death have occurred without further violence?
"It can pass from unconsciousness into brain death," the forensic doctor formulates.
"That exists."
The public prosecutor's office assumes that Bekim H. first tried to rape the girl around 2 a.m. on August 5th and then murdered her.
This Thursday, Bekim H. now comments on the allegations.
He does not speak himself, but has his defense counsel read a statement on his behalf.
After months of silence, shortly before the end of the taking of evidence, Bekim H. portrays the 15-year-old's death as a kind of accident. The girl's mother storms out of the room.
She is a co-plaintiff in the trial, and the statements of the accused are apparently unbearable for her.
On the evening of August 4, 2020, he drove to a park near the Berlin-Ostkreuz S-Bahn station, defender Anto Vukadin argues for his client.
At the time he had already drunk a number of beers.
On the way he got some more beer.
In the park he played table tennis with people he didn't know and heard loud music.
The police eventually disbanded the group because of the corona restrictions.
"I would say I was already drunk in the park," Bekim H. lets his lawyer present.
He still got a gram of speed.
Then he wanted to go home and went to the S-Bahn station.
But his train was already gone.
An ex-girlfriend spoke of rape
The girl approached him at a snack bar.
"She asked if I had anything to draw with." She also appeared very drunk.
He suggested that she consume the speed together.
They went in the direction of Rummelsburger Bucht and sat on his sweater on the floor.
He drew two thick lines of the amphetamine on her cell phone, which she sniffed through her nose.
"The speed was very strong."
They would have started caressing and kissing.
"Then we had sex." He had lightly choked her neck with his hand.
"I understood that as part of the love game," just as he had practiced it with his girlfriend Franziska E. for years.
In court, Franziska E. said that Bekim H. enjoyed choking her during sex.
It also excites him to penetrate her while she sleeps.
An ex-girlfriend had reported very similar experiences and spoke of rape.
Franziska E. said, however, that Bekim H. never became violent, everything was consensual.
She knows that the defendant raped and massively injured a 68-year-old woman in 2001.
Because of a serious personality disorder, Bekim H. was admitted to a forensic psychiatry for 13 years.
He deeply regrets the act today, says his girlfriend.
Bekim H.'s defense attorney reads on.
He submits that the girl did not fight back when Bekim H. choked her.
"On the contrary.
She seemed to like it, ”he claims in his admission.
Then - "suddenly, completely suddenly" - it stopped moving.
"I was completely shocked and assumed that she was dead." He pulled the student into the bushes and covered it with branches.
He ran away in complete panic.
At home he decided to face the police.
He never wanted the girl to die.
"I'm totally upset and shocked," he says.
"I'm terribly sorry for the girl and the family."
The defense attorney then reads out a request for evidence.
The court should hear another forensic doctor.
This will confirm that the student died of an epileptic fit, triggered by the consumption of alcohol and drugs, possibly aided by the choking on the neck.
Two years before her death, the student is said to have actually suffered an epileptic fit.
Icon: enlarge
Shore at the Rummelsberger See: dragged into a bush
Photo: Jens Kalaene / picture alliance
The public prosecutor's office and accessory prosecution demand that the defense’s motion be rejected.
"The forensic doctor has made a detailed statement on the cause of death," says Chief Public Prosecutor Ralph Knispel.
Prosecutor Sven Peitzner added: "She died because she was strangled, not because she had an epileptic seizure."
So Bekim H. portrays the girl's death as a misfortune. But how does that fit with Franziska E.'s statement that he told her that he had killed someone?
At the end of the day of the trial, Judge Schertz reads out a letter that sows doubts as to whether Franziska E. was telling the truth on all points - and which at the same time raises the question of how well Bekim H. can deceive other people.
In court, his girlfriend was asked whether Bekim H. had cheated in the three years of their relationship.
"I don't think so," Franziska E. replied, adding: "There was something special between us." In the letter that the judge is now reading out, it sounds a little different.
Franziska E. wrote it to Bekim H. two weeks before her testimony in court.
It was confiscated before receiving it.
The witness writes that she found numerous messages from Bekim H. to strange women on her son's tablet.
He was single, he wrote.
And that he has "many wives".
"What do you mean by that?" Franziska E. asks him.
She also asks him who Sarah is.
And Maddy.
And Melanie.
In the letter she wants to know from him whether he has only faked his feelings towards her.
“Was it all a lie?
Is everything hypocritical? ”She writes to the defendant:“ Are you lying to me? ”
Icon: The mirror
