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Defendant in the Potsdam Regional Court
Photo: Carsten Koall / picture alliance / dpa / dpa-Pool
The presiding judge Theodor Horstkötter speaks in a friendly, cautious manner.
He asks the defendant whether she would like to provide any information about her person.
Ines R. has tied her dyed blonde hair lightly, her eyes look tearful.
"Do you want to?" Asks the judge.
The 52-year-old hesitates.
She looks at her defense attorney.
When he nods, she nods too.
Then she begins to tell, in a firm voice, for an hour and a half.
Ines R. has to answer for murder and attempted murder before the jury chamber of the Potsdam district court. On the evening of April 28, 2021, the nurse is said to have killed four people in a Potsdam residential facility for people with physical and mental impairments. A fifth victim survived seriously injured. Due to an emotionally unstable personality disorder, the public prosecutor's office assumes that the defendants are significantly less liable to guilt.
Ines R. begins to tell us that she was an unloved child.
Not wanted by the mother, the father rarely present.
There were beatings at home: the mother beat up the sister, the sister the accused.
"Terrible fear" was her constant companion.
"I couldn't stand the sound of the trees, actually the whole environment." She didn't know how to make friends.
"I perceived myself to be different." Her feeling of "not being normal" increased more and more, she says.
After school she wanted to be a nurse
"When I was eleven I wanted to die, I just didn't want to be there anymore." When she was 14, she cut her wrists. She was sent to a psychiatric hospital. “By force,” she says, she was injected with medication. She speaks of a traumatic experience. When she was 18, she had "severe depression." "If you do it, then this time correctly," said my mother. She swallowed pills, came back to the clinic. Her sister died two years later, "a deep turning point in my life."
She was a good student, she says.
Learning distracted her from her problems and fears.
If she brought home good grades and worked well in other ways, her mother was satisfied.
After school she wanted to become a nurse, instead she worked as an assistant in the nursing home, then she trained as a nurse.
Ines R. began to look after severely handicapped children and adolescents.
Their first son was born in 1994.
An illness at the age of two resulted in a disability.
After much hesitation, she gave him to the home where she worked as a nurse.
"I drove to work and then home in tears because I really couldn't stand it." She switched to the adult area.
Her husband hardly appears in her story
In 2007 she was admitted to a clinic because of burnout.
Four years later, in 2011, she was now 42, the next burnout.
The clinic advised her to look for a new job.
“But I didn't want to and couldn't.
My job is my calling. «She always enjoyed going to work.
"I could never imagine any other profession."
In 2015, her second son was diagnosed with a brain tumor.
She got pain all over her body.
Her boss offered her to switch permanently from nursing to housekeeping.
Ines R. says she earned several hundred euros less, so she refused.
The loan for the house has to be paid off, she is the main breadwinner of her family.
Her husband hardly appears in her story.
She was last in a clinic in 2018.
After a seven-week break, she continued to work.
"I made myself go to work because I couldn't stand myself at home," she says.
"I can't get on with myself at all." She needs the work to continue living.
Even if the workload is "extreme".
Her colleagues told her that she was "like a mom" to the residents.
“I couldn't set boundaries.
I've done everything for her. "
"I always had everything under control"
"Have you ever had the feeling that you are out of control?" Asks the prosecutor.
"No," says Ines R. "Never?" "No." It worked, says the defendant.
"I always had everything under control." She does not talk about April 28 of this year that day.
more on the subject
Board member on homicides in his facility for the disabled: "The question is: Could we have prevented it?" An interview by Alexander Preker
Inclusion activist Raúl Krauthausen: "Disabled people need the same rights as non-disabled people" An interview by Birte Bredow
According to the indictment, she should have started the killing shortly after 8 p.m. that day.
She tried to strangle a first resident of the home.
When she thought he was dead, she went into the next room and tried to strangle this woman too.
It failed.
She went to her bag in the lounge and took out a knife, the prosecutor said.
She told a colleague who was present that she was going to get cigarettes.
Instead, she is said to have gone back to the residents with the knife and killed the man, the woman and two other people.
A fifth victim survived seriously injured.
The women and men killed were between 31 and 56 years old and severely disabled.
They didn't stand a chance.