As of: January 23, 2024, 5:10 p.m
By: Isabel Winklbauer
Comments
Press
Split
Philip O. is led into the courtroom for the first day of the trial.
© Peter Kneffel/dpa
She wanted security and a good life, he wanted a classic family.
The Munich I Regional Court is clarifying whether a Nigerian man from Budapest killed his partner because he could no longer tolerate her work as a prostitute.
How does the body of a 25-year-old Hungarian prostitute end up in Berg am Starnberg?
Two months after the discovery in January 2022, the police in Budapest arrested the partner of the dead Luca V. as a suspect.
But he has so far denied the crime.
The trial against him has now begun at the Munich I Regional Court: Philip O., a 27-year-old Nigerian, is charged with manslaughter.
He is said to have abused and strangled Luca in a Munich hotel, then burned and buried her body near the St. Anna Chapel in Berg.
The motive was probably a wounded sense of honor and jealousy - of her life as a prostitute.
The couple had two children and he wanted a classic family life.
Philip O. announced at the beginning that he would like to talk about the matter.
But how he believed his companion died was no longer the subject of the trial on the first day.
Instead, the defendant spoke in detail about his life and the couple's fateful relationship.
Accordingly, after a childhood and youth that was marked by his father's violence and discrimination because of his skin color, he found love and the chance to start a family in Luca V. - having children at the age of 20 was his dream.
But then the shock: Luca didn't go to Denmark regularly to help her friend; she earned money as a love service provider. "She confessed that to me when we drank vodka together."
After her death, Budapest resident Luca V. was only identified by her breast implants.
© Police
From then on, the relationship was constantly under high tension, apart from a quiet phase when the two children (6 and 8) were born.
O. had gotten into the habit of drinking a bottle of vodka every day, cried often, and repeatedly demanded that Luca give up her business.
But he himself went to prostitutes.
“I didn’t know how to cope with the situation,” he says.
"I didn't want a separation, but I also didn't want Luca to ruin her life and our relationship."
His girlfriend, on the other hand, was afraid of being left without an income with two children if O. became so unhappy that he actually left her - he admitted this when asked by the presiding judge Elisabeth Ehrl.
During the Corona crisis, O.'s main income, renting out rooms, also disappeared.
He lived on welfare and a job as a delivery man.
“But not from Luca’s money,” as he assures us.
As always in the dispute over the shared lifestyle, O. drove his girlfriend through Germany in November 2022, where she was working at the time, half helping, half raging.
According to the prosecution, in Munich he drove her from the hotel in the south of Munich to her suitors in a hotel in Haidhausen and back.
Until one of their arguments ended with him brutally kicking her and ultimately strangling her.
O. is said to have taken the body to Berg by car, doused it with petrol, set it on fire and buried it.
A total of 19 days of trial are scheduled, and a verdict is due to be handed down on April 24th.