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Christiane K .: convicted of fivefold murder
Photo: Oliver Berg / dpa
The fivefold murder trial in Solingen ended with the maximum sentence: The Wuppertal district court sentenced Christiane K. to life imprisonment and determined the particular gravity of her guilt.
The court is convinced that she killed five of her six children.
The 28-year-old had drugged her in Solingen (North Rhine-Westphalia) and then drowned or suffocated in the bathtub.
"It's a tragedy," said the presiding judge Jochen Kötter in his judgment.
The explanation for the "unbelievable event" is difficult to understand.
It was a mixture of "anger, despair, humiliation and revenge" that drove the mother to do this.
On the morning of September 3 of last year, she is said to have found that "her life plan had burst".
"She was deeply shocked by the photo"
The impetus was a photo that showed her husband kissing his new girlfriend.
When K. saw this picture in the chat, "the misfortune took its course," said the judge.
"She was deeply shocked by the photo."
Before that, she had been able to persuade her husband to return again and again, made him jealous and always had success with her "manipulative" manner.
In this case, however, she found that he was slipping away from her.
“You're losing control.
She can't stand that, ”said Judge Kötter.
According to the court, K. then wrote to her mother: "I really can't anymore".
The chat logs are considered crucial evidence.
"You can tell that something is building up," said the judge.
After breakfast, K. ran water into the bathtub.
Before that, she would have given her children high amounts of drugs, some of which were life-threatening, so that her resistance might have been weakened.
Then she insidiously killed one child after the other by pushing each one underwater.
"You don't like to imagine it," said the judge.
One can only hope that the children were so numb that they no longer noticed much of it.
The court does not believe the defendants' version
When the police found the children, the children had damp hair and were lying in their beds "as if they were sleeping."
Christiane K. had denied the crime and claimed that a stranger had broken into her apartment, tied her up, forced her to write the chat messages and killed her children.
The court did not believe this version, it was simply "nonsense," said Judge Kötter.
"It's a made-up scenario, it just couldn't have been like that."
The judge also addressed the role of the perpetrator's past.
In her childhood she was noticed again and again.
Kötter spoke of breakdowns in school, hyperventilating and fear of persecution.
The chamber assumes that the mother of six has become a victim of sexual abuse up to and including rape.
Whether she was also abused by her father, who has been convicted of child pornography, could not have been clarified.
Difficult childhood, early motherhood
K. did not want to say where the "abysmal hatred" against her father came from.
"We didn't get any insight into what really happened there," says Judge Kötter.
But that does not change anything in the housewife's full responsibility.
The appraisers could not have determined that she had suffered a disruption that reduced her guilt.
K. became pregnant as a schoolgirl and so, according to the court, escaped bullying and disregard at school.
The extended family, who lived isolated from everyone else like on an island, has become their concept of life, which also worked for a while, says Kötter.
The children developed well, the household was run impeccably, even perfectionistically.
After the murder of her children, K. tried to commit suicide, but survived.
Her eldest son was physically unharmed.
You have to worry a lot about him, says the judge.
The defense announced that they would proceed against the verdict.
bbr / dpa
