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Defendant Maximilian B., Defense Attorney Alexander Stevens (2021)
Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa
For the investigators who entered the wood-panelled house in Starnberg in January 2020, the case seemed clear at first glance: a 23-year-old man killed his parents and then shot himself in the head.
His mother and father lay dead in their bedroom, they too were shot at close range.
Was there a quarrel in the family?
Had the young man killed in anger and then taken his own life?
It took weeks for investigators to realize that it could have been very different.
And so, for almost a year, two men have been in front of the Munich II Regional Court for murdering the P. family: Maximilian B., 22, and Samuel V., 21.
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Ludwig-Maximilians-University: Serious allegations of plagiarism against Munich forensic pathologists
According to the public prosecutor's office, B. is said to have murdered his buddy Vincent P. and his parents on the night of January 11, 2020 with shots in the head and chest in order to get illegal weapons.
B., who does not have a driver's license, is said to have had his friend V. drive him to the scene of the crime.
And V. waited in front of the house knowing B's intentions.
Did the coroner plagiarize?
It's a tough process with dozens of witnesses and inconsistencies.
Especially since Maximilian B. surprisingly made a confession in March that raises more questions than answers.
Especially since Samuel V. denies having known of B's murder plan.
The plagiarism scandal involving forensic pathologist Matthias Graw, which was uncovered by SPIEGEL at the beginning of June, is now causing the legal investigation to falter.
Samuel V's defense attorneys, Alexander Stevens and Alexander Betz, now doubt all forensic reports in which Graw was involved - and have requested that an external expert for forensic medicine obtain a method-critical report.
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Defendant Samuel V. at the start of the trial in August 2021
Photo: Sven Hoppe / dpa
Graw is head of the institute for forensic medicine at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich and successor to the renowned pathologist Wolfgang Eisenmenger.
In his 1987 doctoral thesis, he is suspected of having copied whole passages and a number of tables from a 1982 congress volume published in Bucharest without citing the source;
In addition, he may not have carried out a laboratory experiment described in the work.
Copy-paste principle
Stevens and Betz accuse the 62-year-old of having “copyed it, used text modules or used the copy-paste principle” in his expert statements and reports on the Starnberg triple murder.
"Anyone who has submitted a total forgery as a dissertation is not working with the necessary care," says Stevens.
That's a very sweeping conclusion.
Wolfgang Eisenmenger, who trusts the enlightenment by the University of Hamburg with regard to Graw's reputation, sees no reason to doubt the "honesty" of his successor.
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For Stevens and Betz, Graw's expertise is about a crucial point in the murder trial: in a preliminary autopsy report, three coroners came to the conclusion that the son Vincent P. shot himself in the right temple.
The 23-year-old was a gun enthusiast and trained as a gunsmith.
When he was found, he was holding an empty Glock Model 19 Gen4, cal. 9x19 in his right hand.
Traces of gunshot were found on his hands.
»Incompetence of Munich forensic medicine«
However, Graw's institute believes that Vincent P. was killed by the accused Maximilian B.
His statements in the confession are plausible to reconcile with all traces.
Graw bases this result on the computed tomography (CT) evaluation for shot distance that his institute carried out.
The defenders believe that chemical or spectrographic evidence of the smoke elements and their density is necessary for an exact determination.
“However, this was not done,” says Stevens.
"This incompetence of the Munich forensic medicine matches the plagiarism of their boss."
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Crime scene in Starnberg in January 2020: The house of the P. family, it has since been demolished.
Photo: Lino Mirgeler / dpa
If the competent chamber follows the doubts about Graw's work, they could trigger a chain reaction: his report is in turn based on that of a weapons expert from the State Criminal Police Office.
This was not consulted by forensic medicine for the autopsy of the corpses, but was only able to carry out his calculations on the basis of the CT.
Graw denies the allegations
These showed that the shot at Vincent P. was fired from a distance of at least 30 and at most 60 centimetres.
"Taking into account the shot distance, shot angle and the combination of weapons and ammunition used, the documented finding situation cannot be explained by self-inflicted headshot wounds," the engineer noted in his report.
In the process it was discussed whether Vincent P's body, which had already been autopsied, should be exhumed.
Both the prosecution and the judges do not consider this.
The defense does not expect any knowledge from this either, but sticks to it: »Professor Graw is not only responsible for the autopsy report, but also for the reports on blood and DNA traces.
We as a defense have to question that.«
The head of the institute, Graw, has his lawyer inform him that he does not have to assess the defense's application and firmly rejects allegations of plagiarism.
In addition to his first statement, it has now been confirmed for him that the allegedly plagiarized treatise was neither available to him when he wrote his dissertation more than 35 years ago, nor was he otherwise aware of it.
Existing parallels in the above-mentioned elaboration and his dissertation in the test setup and results would not lead to the conclusion of plagiarism, the plagiarism experts would have ignored existing deviations - consciously or not.
In the next few days of the hearing, the chamber intends to decide on the application by defense attorneys Stevens and Betz.
Whatever the decision, there is no end in sight to the process.
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