To Catch a Killer

by Nele Neuhaus

  “We begged them to wait for Dirk, but the doctors pressured us even more. They wanted us to feel a moral obligation, telling us about patients who could be helped. They were relentless.” Lydia twirled her reading glasses between her fingers and forced herself to continue her story. To make matters worse, Erik, then seventeen, had overheard a conversation between two doctors and understood that they had given up on saving his mother’s life. The measures taken in intensive care were aimed only at keeping her organs functional.

  “The boy went crazy,” Lydia recalled. “He threw a fit, yelling and screaming. We couldn’t calm him down. At some point, they sent us all home. And when my husband and I arrived at the hospital the next morning, we learned that the doctors had taken matters into their own hands. During the night, they had taken out everything from our child that could be taken out, even . . . even her eyes and bones! She had been literally eviscerated.”

  She paused briefly and grimaced. It was clearly proving very hard for her to maintain her composure.

  “The way she looked as she lay in the morgue, nothing but an empty shell; it was horrendous. They had sealed up her empty eye sockets,” she said in a trembling voice. “And she looked as though she’d suffered tremendous pain. We had wished a peaceful death for Kirsten, going to sleep surrounded by family after the life-support systems were turned off, but that was not to be.”

  Dirk Stadler returned the next day from the Far East, and they presented him with the authorization to remove organs, signed by his father-in-law. Joachim Winkler had protested again and again that he never signed such an authorization, merely a power of attorney for the treatment, because at the time she was admitted, Kirsten Stadler was no longer able to make any decisions for herself.

  “But there was his signature in black-and-white,” Lydia continued. “They had deceived us, but in the end, it was our word against theirs. Later they claimed that because of the extreme emotions of the situation in which we found ourselves, my husband probably hadn’t listened properly. That made him terribly bitter, because he couldn’t prove they were wrong.”

  “Is that why your son-in-law sued the UCF?” Cem asked.

  “Yes, that was one of the reasons,” said Lydia. “But we were most concerned about how Kirsten was treated there. She stopped being a human being in the eyes of the doctors when it was clear that she would die. They were like vultures. It was simply revolting the way they dug everything out of her body. It was so . . . so disrespectful!”

  “How was the lawsuit resolved?” asked Cem.

  “Dirk and the clinic later reached an agreement out of court. He received a payment for damages, and the clinic paid his legal fees. For me, that’s the same as an admission of guilt.”

  Pia secretly revised her overhasty judgment about Joachim Winkler. At the same time, she recognized that the man had the perfect motive for the murders. The only question was whether a seventy-year-old would be physically capable of committing those murders.

  “Your son-in-law told us that you and your husband are active in a type of support group,” Pia now said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Lydia Winkler. “After Kristen’s death, we felt like we’d been turned to stone. There was no one we could talk to about our doubts and our guilt feelings. Our granddaughter found the group on the Web. HRMO is an association of relatives who have had similar experiences to ours. Parents whose minor child has been released for organ donation after an accident, spouses, parents of grown children. No one is prepared for a situation in which they have to make a decision of such consequence. To see your loved one no longer as a human being, as a dying person, but merely as . . . as inventory, as a warehouse for replacement parts, that’s the worst thing anyone can experience. Death is bad enough; when it’s handled with such a lack of dignity, then it’s something you can never forget. Even today, ten years later, I still dream about what happened almost every night, and it doesn’t make me feel any better that Kirsten helped some other people to live. Her life was not saved, and as a consequence, Helen was also destroyed.”

  His fourth victim was finally deemed worthy of a special report by the television stations. They reported live from the press conference held by the police. The press was now calling him the “Taunus Sniper.” Who had come up with such a histrionic name? He listened to the broadcast and confirmed his suspicion that the police investigators were clever.

  “At the moment, we are assuming that the crimes are related,” said the lead investigator, a good-looking man with a striking face and a sonorous baritone voice. He would have fit in well with the cast of one of those American TV series like Criminal Minds or Cold Case. “The motive of the perpetrator is revenge, but his victims are not the actual targets. Their relatives are the real targets.”

  “Congratulations, Mr. von Bodenstein. You’re on the right track.” With a mocking smile, he raised his beer bottle in a toast to the inspector on the screen. Then he took a big swig and bit into his cheese sandwich.

  Finally the police were doing what he’d long expected them to do: They were asking the public for help, looking for witnesses, and presenting an astounding number of facts about the four victims. They had now revealed the precise circumstances of the murders as well as dates, times, and locations. They even showed portions from Google Maps, just as they did on the TV program Germany’s Most Wanted.

  He leaned back and thought it over. His pursuers were coming closer, yet they were fairly clueless, and that was good. They wouldn’t catch him too soon, although the air was growing thinner for him each day, and in the future, he would have to be even more careful. He should have allowed himself more time. Something he hadn’t thought about was the panic that had been stirred up. In the introduction to the show, the TV people had interviewed a restaurant hostess, a retailer, the director of a shopping center, and a bus driver. Everyone feared being the madman’s next victim, so almost no taxis or buses were running, taverns had closed because their patrons were staying home, and packages were stacking up at delivery services because the drivers refused to work. The whole thing had assumed proportions that he hadn’t foreseen, but it left him just as cold as the descriptions they had given of him. He didn’t give a damn if they considered him a lunatic, a maniac, a psychopath, or an ice-cold killer. One day, he would explain his motives, even if he had to wait until a courtroom appearance. He grabbed the remote and turned off the TV. In the sudden silence, he heard the rain drumming against the windowpanes. He would see the whole thing through to the end. He had given his word.

  Joachim Winkler had the perfect motive; there was no doubt about that. The more his wife told them about her husband and his deep despair, the more obvious it was to Pia that he could be their perp. Consumed by self-reproach, pain, and impotent rage, he’d been living under a tormenting, irrational guilt. There was no proof that he had been deceived by the doctors at the clinic when he had signed a putative power of attorney for Kirsten’s treatment. For a know-it-all, self-righteous person like Winkler, this had probably been the bitterest defeat that he could suffer. And he knew all the people who had been involved with his daughter’s death. Lydia Winkler stated that her husband had pursued the suit against the UCF with true obsession. From that point on, his whole life had been shaped by his wish for retaliation.

  “Thank you for your candor,” said Cem kindly and sympathetically, as was his way. “I can imagine how difficult it must be for you to speak about all this.”

  “I hope it will help you make some progress in the case,” replied Lydia Winkler with a sad smile.

  She got up from the sofa. The TV in the next room was turned off, but Joachim Winkler did not reappear.

  “Does your husband happen to own a gun?” asked Pia, following a hunch.

  “Yes, several,” Lydia said with a hesitant nod. “He used to be a good sharpshooter and passionate hunter. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Could we take a look at the weapons?”

  “Of course.”
>
  They followed her through the kitchen into a large double garage, occupied only by an older-model white Mercedes. Next to a workbench and a deep freeze stood a metal gun cabinet. Mrs. Winkler took a key from a drawer in the workbench and opened the cabinet. Five rifles. Four repeating rifles and an air rifle. Pia pulled on latex gloves and took out one weapon after another, looked in the barrels and the magazines, and sniffed them. Mrs. Winkler watched her do this with growing distress.

  “Do you think that my husband had something to do with these murders?” she asked, upset, as Pia put the last rifle back in the cabinet and shook her head. None of these guns had been used recently.

  “We’re not drawing any conclusions,” Cem hastened to say. “But we are duty bound to follow up on every lead.”

  Mrs. Winkler closed the gun cabinet and glared at Pia.

  “My husband has Parkinson’s. Without his pills, he can’t even shave himself.” She pressed a switch, and the garage door rattled open. “I’m sure you can find the way to your car. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” replied Cem. “And once again, many thanks.”

  Lydia Winkler nodded mutely, her hand on the switch. The garage door instantly closed behind them.

  “She was pissed off,” said Kim as they trudged through the snow along the driveway, which had not been shoveled.

  “I couldn’t care less,” said Pia. “The old man has a motive and is boiling with hatred. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s involved somehow.”

  “He has Parkinson’s,” Cem reminded her.

  “So what? That simply means that he couldn’t do the shooting himself. But he could certainly do the planning and surveillance.”

  They reached the car. Cem took a whisk broom out of the trunk and swept the snow off the windshield and rear window as Pia and Kim got in the car.

  “The perp must be closely associated with Kirsten Stadler,” said Pia after Cem got in and started the engine. “Widower, son, parents. They all have a motive, and maybe even two motives because of Helen’s suicide. We have to check the alibis of all of them.”

  “He’s been there since seven fourteen P.M. and hasn’t left the apartment,” reported one of the two officers who had been staking out the building on Adlerflychtstrasse in the North End, where Erik Stadler lived.

  “Is he alone?” Bodenstein asked.

  “No idea,” replied the uniformed officer. “There are ten apartments in the building, so there’s constant coming and going.”

  “How did he arrive? In a car, on foot?”

  “On foot. He was wearing jogging clothes.”

  “Okay.” Bodenstein looked up at the brightly lit penthouse. “Then let’s go in.”

  They crossed the street and went to the street door. Bodenstein didn’t want to warn Stadler and possibly give him a chance to escape, so he pressed one of the lower buttons and hoped that the nameplates were arranged according to the location of the apartments. A woman who lived on the ground floor opened the door. After she had seen Bodenstein’s ID and the uniformed officer, she merely nodded and then closed her door. They took the elevator to the eighth floor and then walked up a couple of steps to the penthouse. They could hear loud techno music through the closed door to the apartment. Bodenstein rang the bell. The music stopped, footsteps approached, and the door opened. Erik Stadler was wearing only boxer shorts and a white undershirt, which revealed his buff torso. There was an artistic tattoo on Stadler’s left shoulder. He raised his eyebrows when he saw the police.

  “Did the stodgy bastards downstairs complain about the noise again, eh?” he said. Then he recognized Bodenstein. An anxious expression came into his eyes, and his smile suddenly seemed forced. “Is that why the Kripo is here?”

  “Good evening, Mr. Stadler,” replied Bodenstein. “We’re not here because of the music. May we come in?”

  “Yes, please do.” He stepped aside and let them in.

  Like his father, Erik Stadler also seemed to have a penchant for extravagance. Most of the load-bearing walls had been replaced by support columns, so as to create a very spacious room. Floor-to-ceiling windows allowed a view over the roofs of the financial district. At the far end was an open kitchen, and next to it, stairs led up to a gallery. A lovely apartment, and certainly not cheap in this part of Frankfurt.

  “What’s this about?” Erik Stadler wanted to know. He was trying to act relaxed, but he was not. Uneasiness was oozing out of every pore of his body.

  “Where were you today at around one P.M.?” Bodenstein asked him.

  “Right here,” Stadler said. “I was working here at home, as I often do. I can concentrate better here than at the office.”

  “Do you have any witnesses?” In his career, Bodenstein had looked into the faces of many individuals who tried to lie to him. They all thought they could fool him, but very few succeeded.

  “No, why?” Erik Stadler was an amateur liar with a guilty conscience. He was having trouble maintaining eye contact with Bodenstein.

  “Where were you on Wednesday, December nineteenth, around eight in the morning?” Bodenstein asked without answering Stadler’s question. “On Thursday, December twentieth, at seven in the evening, and on Tuesday, December twenty-fifth, around eight in the morning?”

  Stadler pretended not to understand.

  “On the twenty-fifth? That was Christmas.” He scratched his head, tugged on his earlobe and his nose, and crossed his arms. “I was out running early that morning. I exercise a lot, to balance out all the hours I spend sitting at a computer.”

  “Where were you running, and between what times exactly? Did anyone see you? Did you speak to anyone?”

  “I can’t remember. I run every day. Why is this important?”

  Bodenstein didn’t let Stadler’s questions throw him off the track. He noticed the sweat on the man’s forehead, the nervous fidgeting of his hands, the evasive gaze. Nobody remained calm when being questioned by the criminal police. Bodenstein knew that. But Stadler’s nervousness exceeded the norm.

  “You’re a biathlete?” he asked. “Unusual for someone from this neighborhood.”

  “During my stint in the army, I was in the alpine division,” replied Stadler, and this time he was telling the truth. “That’s how I got into the biathlon. Nowadays, I seldom have time for skiing.”

  “But you do have time for other unusual extreme sports.”

  “Now and then. What are you getting at?”

  “Are you a good shot?”

  “Yes. In the past, I was pretty good, at least. But that was several years ago.”

  Bodenstein mentioned the names of the sniper’s victims, but Stadler apparently knew only Ingeborg Rohleder, the mother of his former neighbor, and Professor Rudolf. He claimed he’d never heard the names Maximilian Gehrke or Hürmet Schwarzer.

  “Mr. Stadler, you don’t seem to have sufficient alibis for the times I asked you about,” Bodenstein said. “I must advise you that you are under suspicion of having committed four murders. Because of that, I need to ask you to come with us to police headquarters.”

  “You can’t be serious!” Stadler protested. “I’m no murderer!”

  “Then tell me what you were doing during the times when the murders were committed.”

  “I . . . I can’t.” Stadler again ran his hands over his hair. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to do that down at the station,” Bodenstein said. “Please get dressed and pack a few things. My colleague will accompany you.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Temporarily detained,” replied Bodenstein, and read him his rights.

  “You’re making a big mistake. I have nothing to do with this,” Stadler declared.

  “I hope so, for your sake.” Bodenstein turned away. “Please hurry.”

  Ten minutes later, they took the elevator down to the ground floor. A woman approached them in the foyer. She had short black hair and was wearing sports garb under a light-co
lored trench coat.

  “Erik!” she exclaimed when she recognized the man walking between the two police officers. “What . . . What’s going on?”

  “Lis, I . . . ,” Stadler began, and wanted to stop, but the officers hurried him along.

  “What’s going on?” The woman dropped her sports bag. “I want to speak to my boyfriend. Why are you taking him away? Where are you taking him?”

  Bodenstein barred her way.

  “To Hofheim,” he said. “We have to speak with him.”

  “Yes, but . . . what . . . ?” She broke off, staring at him wide-eyed. “But you’re . . . I saw you before on the TV, didn’t I?”

  He nodded and saw the horror in her eyes as she put two and two together and understood. Her shoulders slumped. She turned away, sat down on the stairs, and began to cry.

  It was eleven o’clock when they got home. Bodenstein had treated everyone at the office to another round of pizzas, so neither of them was hungry. Kim had already disappeared into her room with a yawn. That gave Pia a chance to Skype with Christoph, who had Wi-Fi on board the cruise ship. For a few minutes, she could forget the whole unpleasant day and laugh with him as he comically described the other guests.

  “You look exhausted,” he told her.

  “I had a tough day. We now have a fourth dead body, and we’re still pretty much fishing in the dark. For some reason, the case isn’t making any progress. Sometimes I wish I could just beam myself over to you.”

  “Me, too.” He smiled sympathetically, then turned serious. “I’m glad you’re not staying alone at Birkenhof.”

  “Yeah, I’m happy to have Kim with me,” Pia admitted.

  It was comforting to talk to Christoph. Even though there were thousands of kilometers between them, she felt that he was very close.