Cruel act near the Swiss border
Pensioner douses ex-husband with petrol and sets him on fire
The district court of Konstanz had sentenced a woman from the Lake Constance area to eleven years in prison. She is said to have killed her husband in a brutal manner. The case is now being reopened.
Published: 12 minutes ago
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The accused at the first trial in 2020 before the Constance Regional Court.
It can hardly be more brutal: In January 2020, a then 84-year-old attacked her ex-husband, who was nine years younger, with a meat tenderizer. Then she doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. He alerted the emergency services with a dramatic emergency call, but died before they arrived.
The district court of Constance later determined how badly the ex-couple had suffered from the living situation: the two lived together in a house in the Lake Constance district even after the separation. As a result, the man became depressed and increasingly insisted that his ex-wife should move out. But she didn’t want to go.
She was even worse than him. She weighed just 31 kilos at the time of the crime, was severely visually impaired, also had a lung disease, was hard of hearing and had slight dementia, as the “Südkurier” writes. In addition, she received a pension of only 300 euros.
The Federal Court of Justice intervened
In August of the same year, the court sentenced the woman to eleven years in prison. But she filed an appeal, and the Federal Court of Justice granted it: the district court found that the murder characteristic “killing by means of means dangerous to the public” was not given, it was of the opinion.
The criminal court had also not sufficiently explained whether the woman was “considerably restricted in her ability to control” due to existential fears and because of her dementia in a psychosocial stressful situation.
The case will now be reopened on Wednesday. The third major criminal chamber of the Constance Regional Court travels to Schwäbisch Gmünd, where the elderly woman is being held in the penal institution – to spare her the strains of traveling. There you hear in the district court.
The now 86-year-old is capable of negotiating, the responsible judge and press spokeswoman Mirja Poenig tells the “Südkurier” on request. (twa)