He collected the first two hundred and fifty copies from the small private publisher and gave them to friends and acquaintances as Christmas presents. His friend Herbert got one, his friend Hans, the vet and his wife, the spa operator and the building contractor from Grossbeeren. Rainer Fischer was given two copies—one for him and one for his daughter, who worked for an academic publishing house. Scholl seemed to be hoping for a literary breakthrough—or else he wanted to propagate a version of his life he could live with. It was a portrait of a man in full possession of his faculties—yet in real life, the people around him were starting to wonder if Heinrich Scholl might in fact be losing the plot.
He took the remaining books to Berlin to flog at a Christmas market. Heinrich Scholl, once the most successful mayor in East Germany, a co-founder of social democracy in Brandenburg and a conqueror of the world’s highest peaks, wandered from stall to stall with his box of books, hawking his erotic love story. The stall holders shook their heads. No one in Berlin knew the little man. Scholl left his box at the entrance to the market, on the ground.
He didn’t mention the book to his wife, but he didn’t hide it either. He left it in the desk in his study, to which she had access at all times. Once she caught him reading it and asked what it was. Heinrich Scholl said a friend of his had written the book; he was proofreading it.
‘Just imagine, he’s proofreading a sex book now. What a chump!’ she said to her friend Karin. Over the phone to her schoolmate, Joachim Lehmann, she said that her husband was busy with ‘some pornographic stuff’.
Her husband was more and more of a stranger to her.
Heinrich Scholl told her of a contract in China and announced that he would soon be away again for a few months. Brigitte Scholl didn’t seem to mind. She told one of her cleaning ladies that her husband would soon be going abroad—then order would return at last.
Local reporter Jutta Abromeit met Heinrich Scholl shortly before Christmas at a charity event at the town hall. He was completely relaxed, she says. He looked as if he were planning something—something big that he couldn’t talk about.
At the Advent market in a neighbouring village, many people from Ludwigsfelde saw the former mayor and his wife together for the last time. Brigitte Scholl was accompanied by a girlfriend; Heinrich Scholl was selling bratwurst with his friend Herbert. The royal couple of Ludwigsfelde were united—something nobody had seen for a long time.
Brigitte Scholl seemed to be relishing it. When asked by a customer what her husband was doing there, she replied: ‘Heiner’s come back to me.’
When her mother drank herself to death, Brigitte Scholl told everyone she had fallen down the stairs. An accident. When her sister died shortly afterwards, the explanation was again ‘a fall, an accident’, this time in the bathroom. These were variations on reality that Brigitte Scholl could live with—stories she could entrust to the people of Ludwigsfelde.
A few months before her death, she herself fell down the stairs.
She had a bruise above her eye and a deep gash on her forehead. It was a curious injury for a fall downstairs and looked more as if someone had hit her in the face with a sharp object, but Brigitte Scholl insisted it was an accident. She did, however, put about different versions of the incident.
Heinrich Scholl says Gitti told him she had slipped on her way out of the bathroom and crashed into the shoe cupboard. Friends were told she had fallen down the cellar stairs. Customers heard that she’d fallen in the bathroom.
Did she combine the lie about her mother’s death with the one about her sister’s death?
Siegfried Schmidt, a school friend, saw quite a lot of Brigitte in the months leading up to her death, because they organised the class reunion together. On one occasion, she had looked puffy, as if she’d been crying. When he asked what was wrong, she said she’d just been to the dentist. Root canal treatment. The next time he saw her, she had a bruise on her head. She gave him the story about falling downstairs. Siegfried Schmidt said: ‘Let me have a look at your arms and legs then. After a fall downstairs they must be black and blue.’ Brigitte Scholl swiftly changed the subject.
She acted strangely in the days and weeks leading up to her death. Often it was little things that only assumed significance after her death. Brigitte Scholl’s cleaning woman was told in passing about the arrangements she had made for her funeral. Everything was settled, Brigitte said. A grave just for her; she’d even chosen the plot and the funeral music. The cleaning lady was taken aback by this unexpected disclosure. Brigitte Scholl had never confided in her about private matters.
When her son visited for the last time in late October, Brigitte Scholl had shown him a shoebox containing envelopes of money—five thousand euros altogether. She told Frank that if anything should happen to her, he should take the money for himself; his dad didn’t know about it.
Frank didn’t ask his mother whether she was ill or what had given her the idea that something might happen to her. Ever since his childhood, he had carried out his mother’s instructions without comment. If these were calls for help, they were barely audible—but Brigitte Scholl had never asked anyone for help, and perhaps this was as close as she could come.
On 27 December, her school friend Maria Zucker called in at Rathenau Strasse. Maria’s husband had been seriously ill for a long time and Brigitte Scholl wanted to take her mind off things. She showed her the Christmas tree, offered her coffee and promised to drop in some time in the next few days with fresh moss for winter arrangements in her window boxes. Maria didn’t even sit down; she had to get back to her husband in hospital. But Brigitte Scholl came up with one more thing: a poem that her friend simply had to hear.
‘Heiner, go and fetch the poem about the little candle from upstairs,’ she said to her husband in the Brigitte Scholl tone that brooked no argument. Heinrich Scholl was in his armchair, reading the paper. ‘It can wait,’ Maria demurred. But Brigitte Scholl wouldn’t rest until her husband had got up and gone upstairs. When he returned, he had a slip of paper in his hand and read Maria a poem. It was about a little candle whose clear light brings people joy and warms their hearts. The candle itself grows smaller and smaller until it eventually goes out, but it leaves behind it only joy, not sorrow.
It was one of those calendar quotes that Brigitte Scholl was fond of distributing to friends and acquaintances. Maria wasn’t listening properly and would probably have forgotten all about the poem if it hadn’t been the last time she saw her friend. Two days later, Brigitte Scholl was dead, buried in the woods under a blanket of moss. To this day, Maria wonders whether the poem was supposed to herald her death. The dying candle, Brigitte, the moss. She had wanted to gather her some.
Everyone tries to make sense of a tragedy.
Now, in retrospect, there are other things that seem strange too. One neighbour remembers meeting Brigitte Scholl on the street and being wished a peaceful New Year. Peaceful! She’d never said that before, the neighbour says. A customer wondered why Frau Scholl had told her at her last two beauty appointments where she could order her skin cream. Usually Brigitte Scholl got hold of the cream herself and you bought it from her in the salon. She had suddenly begun to talk of closing her beauty studio and started to try out other salons between Christmas and New Year so as to be able to recommend one to her customers. But her calendar was full of appointments until well into March.
Brigitte Scholl last spoke to her friend Inge on 27 December. It was a long phone call. They told each other how they had spent Christmas. The Scholls had planned to go to Frank’s, but had cancelled because of Ursus. The long journey was too much of a strain on the old dog. Brigitte Scholl said she and Heiner had been to hear the traditional fanfare from the tower of the town hall, and to friends in Potsdam for brunch. At the end of the conversation, she said there was something else she absolutely had to tell her friend, but it would have to wait; Heiner was there. She’d ring again later.
Inge Karther never found out what it was Br
igitte Scholl wanted to tell her. The next time she rang her friend, Frank answered.
He said: ‘Mum’s dead and Dad’s being questioned.’
On 30 December at 2.51 pm, a phone call came in to Ludwigsfelde police station. A man was on the phone. His name was Scholl. He was calling from the woods and said it looked as if his missing wife had been found. The doctor on call and the local police were the first on the scene. They were met by three men in all-weather jackets, sturdy footwear and woolly hats: Heinrich Scholl, his son, Frank, and their family friend, the local vet, Werner Singer.
The Scholls’ son was standing by the road to give directions. Heinrich Scholl and the vet were waiting in the woods. Frank was crying, Heinrich Scholl pale and trembling. The vet led the way to the spot where they had found the ladies’ shoes. Standing by the shoes, you could just make out the two moss-covered mounds in the afternoon dusk. The larger mound was the length of a person; two feet stuck out at the bottom and on one side a hand was visible. The other mound was smaller and rounder. The scene resembled a burial site, a ritual burial site. Fairy graves. When the policemen later had to describe finding Brigitte Scholl and her dog, they used the word ‘funeral-like’.
More and more emergency services arrived: the criminal investigation department, the fire brigade, forensics. A large area was cordoned off and floodlights were set up. When the state police forensic experts from Potsdam started work, it was already dark. On the police video, five figures in white suits and blue shoes can be seen removing pads of moss, twigs and leaves from a mound and packing them in plastic bags. Handful after handful of moss and leaves. They work slowly until the uniform musty grey of the moss begins to give way to other colours: the dark blue of a jacket, the yellow of a rubber glove, the white of a woman’s skin.
At first, everything seemed to point to a sex crime. The dead woman was lying on her back, her head in a plastic bag, her trousers pulled down, her knickers hanging around her left leg. A condom and a Viagra pill were found in Brigitte Scholl’s pocket. At the autopsy, however, the forensic experts discovered that the rape had been faked. There was no evidence of sexual intercourse, but there was bruising on the chin, wrists and upper arms, and strangle marks on the neck. They concluded that Brigitte Scholl had been punched in the face and fallen backwards. Then the killer had knelt down, put a shoelace round her neck and pulled it tight. Finally he had placed the plastic bag over her head, pulled down her trousers and knickers and deposited the Viagra pill and the condom in her pocket.
The shoelace round Brigitte Scholl’s neck had been knotted twice at the front. During her death throes, the killer must have been looking his victim right in the eye.
The dog had been killed in the same way. Strangled. It is the hardest way to kill an animal. A dog has a stronger neck than a human. The killer had twisted a stick into the shoelace, like a tommy bar. Over the dog’s muzzle was a fruit-gum bag, tied up with a length of washing line. Brigitte Scholl had liked fruit gums. No evidence of resistance or struggle was found. In fact hardly any evidence was found at all: no footprints, no fibres, no signs of dragging. The police assumed that the victim had been caught unawares while walking her dog in the woods. The yellow rubber glove on Brigitte Scholl’s hand was to protect her from the caterpillars of the oak processionary moth, which is common in the forests of Brandenburg and can trigger dangerous skin reactions.
Ricarda Hoss* was the first detective to arrive at the crime scene. She asked Heinrich Scholl to sit in her squad car and answer a few routine questions. But Heinrich Scholl didn’t need questions to make him talk. The detective still clearly recalls how the stranger in the woods told her about his semi-detached house in Ludwigsfelde where he lived with his wife—although until recently he had rented a small flat in Berlin. A psychologist at Lake Tegern had advised him to take this step, because he had been seriously ill. Fifty per cent of his illness had to do with his stressful job as mayor; thirty-five per cent with his wife. His wife was very domineering. She hadn’t let him hang up his pictures; it had made him happy to nail a picture on the wall of his own flat at last. He had once planted early bloomers in the garden and his wife dug them all up again.
Ricarda Hoss had been working for the criminal investigation department for twenty years and during that time had questioned many relatives of murder victims. She expected Heinrich Scholl to tell her about the hell he’d gone through since his wife’s disappearance. Instead, he talked about his early bloomers and how his wife had oppressed him. It had almost the ring of a confession.
When the detective asked him how he had spent the day, he fell quiet. The dead woman’s husband seemed suddenly tired; he put his hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. Questioning was suspended.
The operation in the woods went on for over five hours. There were still figures walking about in white plastic suits when Heinrich and Frank Scholl and the vet were given permission to leave. The vet’s pick-up truck was parked on Siethener Strasse, where they had left it that afternoon when they set off to look for Brigitte Scholl. They drove back through town. It was dark and quiet in Ludwigsfelde. The second-to-last day of the year. They had planned to celebrate New Year’s Eve together. Brigitte Scholl had invited the vet and the psychologist with their wives. Three couples, like in the old days. They were going to sit by the fire, listen to music, maybe dance. Brigitte Scholl had been looking forward to the evening.
Karin Singer, the vet’s wife, was standing at her front door with a tear-stained face. She took Frank and Heinrich Scholl in her arms, led them into the house, poured tea and handed round little sandwiches she had prepared in the hours of waiting.
The four of them sat in the living room where Brigitte Scholl had sat so often. Everything was just the same as the day before when she had rung for the last time to talk about New Year’s Eve. The Christmas tree lights were on; there was ski jumping on TV. You could imagine the phone ringing at any moment and it would be Brigitte Scholl telling her friend what to bring to the party.
The telephone remained silent; nobody touched the sandwiches or made conversation. Karin Singer asked the odd question:
‘Was it really Gitti?’
‘What happened?’
‘Where was the dog?’
‘What do the police say?’
Frank sobbed. Heinrich Scholl stared into space. They didn’t look at each other; they didn’t speak to each other. Only two sentences stuck in Karin Singer’s head:
Heinrich Scholl: ‘Now I’ve got this on my plate too.’
Frank Scholl: ‘Well, if that’s your only worry…’
Frank spent the next week in Ludwigsfelde. He had decided to keep his father company until it was clear what had happened to his mother. His father, however, didn’t seem to care whether he had company or not. On the first night, Heinrich Scholl moved back into the bedroom his wife had banished him from. When Frank asked him a question, he would say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Nothing else. Sometimes he would step outside the door for a smoke. In the evenings, he lit candles and drank red wine. Most of the time he sat at the table going through documents.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ his son asked.
‘The tax return,’ Heinrich Scholl replied.
They had always had a good relationship. When Frank was little, Heinrich Scholl had made things with him. When Frank went to school, Heinrich Scholl was on the parents’ committee and helped him with his homework. During Frank’s apprenticeship, he persuaded him to study for his school-leaving exams at evening school, and waited at a crossroads every day to hand him his supper. When Frank wanted to emigrate to the West, he drove him to the reception centre. When Frank moved into his first flat, he helped him do it up.
Heinrich Scholl was always there when Frank needed him. When Frank turned forty, he had thanked his father for all the support he had given him over the years. Heinrich Scholl says he cried, he was so touched.
Now Frank thought his father was acting strangely. His wife was dead, but he car
ried on living his life as if she had only gone on holiday for a couple of weeks. The news that Brigitte Scholl had already made arrangements for her funeral and wanted to be buried alone, without him, he received with apparent indifference. His mind seemed to be on other things. He told Frank that the thermal spa in Ludwigsfelde was being expanded and that he was to help. He also spoke of the new project in China.
‘What do you want in China at your age?’ his son asked.
Heinrich Scholl told a friend about transformers that could be used to operate street lamps on the Crimean Peninsula. Great place to live, too, the Black Sea, he said; a German pension was worth something down there.
He informed his publisher that he’d like a second edition of his book; there were various spelling mistakes, and besides, the name of Henry’s mistress hadn’t been changed consistently: in some places it still said ‘Tanja’ rather than ‘Lydia’. For a while they discussed whether or not ‘Tanja’ sounded Russian. Then, shortly before hanging up, Heinrich Scholl mentioned that his wife was dead.
On 31 December, at half past nine on the dot, Joachim Lehmann and his wife stood on the doorstep of the house in Rathenau Strasse in evening dress, bearing sparkling wine, doughnuts and small presents. They had come to celebrate New Year with Gitti and Heiner and the vet and his wife, as arranged. The Lehmanns lived in a nearby village; the news of Gitti’s death hadn’t yet reached them, and Heinrich Scholl hadn’t cancelled. The house was dark when they rang the bell. Frank came to the door and said: ‘Nothing doing here.’
Journalists had found out that the dead woman in the woods was the former mayor’s wife, but not how she had died. The police issued no information, so as not to influence the investigations. Every day a new, creepier rumour about the murder swept through the small town. First the Russian mafia were behind it, then the Thai mafia; a few days later it was the Polish cigarette mafia. Frank’s biological father got in touch with his son and asked whether it was true that Gitti had been killed with a shotgun. One of the Scholls’ cleaners had seen a jogger the day before the murder who struck her as suspicious, because he wasn’t sweating. An Asian, she said. An Asian who didn’t sweat. Other people in Ludwigsfelde reported that the victim had been so badly disfigured by fireworks that it had taken DNA tests to identify her. An anonymous caller warned police that the murderer was already looking for his next victim.
The Scholl Case Page 12