The Scholl Case

by Anja Reich-Osang

  Brigitte Scholl’s customers also received a call. It was their former mayor telling them that, owing to his wife’s death, he had to cancel all their appointments. It had been Frank’s idea. He wanted to prevent unsuspecting elderly ladies from turning up at the house in Rathenau Strasse at eight in the morning for their beauty appointments. Frank read out the phone numbers. His father made the calls. Most of the customers were so shocked they didn’t even offer their condolences.

  It was one of the last joint endeavours of father and son.

  On New Year’s Day they drove to Potsdam together to have lunch in a restaurant. On their way back, they passed the woods where Brigitte Scholl had been murdered. Heinrich Scholl suggested stopping. Frank didn’t want to. Heinrich Scholl got out alone and walked into the woods. His son saw him bend down. Later he drove back to the spot alone to see whether his father had hidden anything there. He found nothing. Frank called the criminal investigations department and said his father was acting suspiciously.

  The police were not surprised. The call for witnesses had drawn responses from people who had seen Scholl at the edge of the woods with his wife and the dog on 29 December, although when questioned by the police, he had said he hadn’t accompanied her on her walk that day, but had been busy with surveying work at the spa. Neither the construction firm nor the swimming pool operators could confirm having asked him to carry out surveying work. Heinrich Scholl had only been seen at the spa until twelve o’clock and had turned up to his one o’clock lunch with his business friend in Berlin over an hour late. For the time of the murder, between twelve and one o’clock, he had no alibi.

  Brigitte Scholl’s Mercedes was found in a side street near the station; the key was in a heap of leaves. Two witnesses had seen a man driving through town in her car. Neither of them had recognised the former mayor, but the police assumed nevertheless that it could only have been Heinrich Scholl: he had strangled his wife, abandoned the car near the station and driven to Berlin in his Nissan, which he had left parked outside the spa. Later that afternoon, he had played the concerned husband for neighbours, friends and acquaintances; the next day he had organised the search for his wife and led his son and the vet unawares to the crime scene. Heinrich Scholl had wanted to be there when his wife’s body was found, so as to leave footprints and DNA.

  The motive, too, soon seemed clear: the wrecked marriage. The police knew about the Thai mistress; Heinrich Scholl’s text messages to her had been found on his phone. A witness told them of Scholl’s autobiographical sex novel.

  Two weeks after the crime, an application was submitted to the public prosecutor’s office in Potsdam for permission to issue a warrant for Heinrich Scholl’s arrest.

  Scholl knew nothing of this, but he sensed that he was being circled. He had been questioned repeatedly by the police; on one occasion the questioning had gone on for six hours and had felt like an interrogation. He told acquaintances he was the police’s main suspect. When Heike Schramm took him lunch one day, she found him sitting in the dark with the funeral guest list, ‘small and terribly sad, like a little gnome’, she says. When Joachim Lehmann went to visit, Scholl was sitting in the kitchen by candlelight. He offered his guest lukewarm tea and seemed depressed and abstracted. It was only when he got onto the subject of his book—his love story—that Heinrich Scholl came to life again. He gave Joachim Lehmann a copy and told him how he had designed the cover with real rose petals.

  His old friend Hans Streck drove to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin with Scholl. It was Heinrich Scholl’s idea; he wanted to get out of Ludwigsfelde. He wandered through the rooms like a tourist, admiring the layout of the museum and the beauty of Nefertiti. Later, over dinner in a restaurant, he began to cry and was almost impossible to pacify. Hans Streck had known his friend since he was twelve. He had never seen him cry before.

  A few days later, Heinrich Scholl had a car accident. He was on his way to Dresden to look up an old friend he and Gitti had once spent holidays with on the Baltic. It wasn’t clear why he wanted to see this friend rather than anyone else; it seemed to be another of the traumatised widower’s strange whims. Near Cottbus, Heinrich Scholl drove into a truck. His Nissan was a write-off; he escaped with bruising. He swore it had been an accident: the truck had switched lanes without indicating. But the truck driver told the police he had indicated, and when Brigitte Scholl’s friend Inge later asked Heinrich Scholl how he was coping by himself, he said: ‘I’m sorry. I regret it. Almost brought it off on the motorway.’

  The funeral went smoothly. There was no scandal, no argument, nobody broke down. Everything was as Brigitte Scholl had planned. In the chapel was a big picture of her with Ursus in her arms. Frank gave the eulogy. He spoke of his mother’s popularity in the town, of her dedication to others. Only her closest friends came: Inge Karther, Karin Singer and their husbands, Joachim Lehmann and his wife, their social democrat friends from Lichtenrade and Gitti’s school friend Maria. They took up their wreaths and followed the undertaker. At the head of the funeral procession was Heinrich Scholl with a wreath of white roses.

  Ludwigsfelde’s cemetery is a park-like enclosure with a chapel, tall trees and old family tombs; it is one of the few places where the town loses its cold, desolate character. Even the constant roar of the motorway seems a little quieter. The townspeople like coming here to meet acquaintances or walk their dogs. The cemetery is busier than the square in front of the town hall. Only right at the back on the left is there a deserted spot, where no candles burn and people seldom pass. There is a small urn plot here: number 146. This is Brigitte Scholl’s grave.

  Later, in the restaurant, Heinrich Scholl went from table to table. He looked in a bad way, says Horst Karther, who offered to visit him in Ludwigsfelde. ‘If you’re in trouble, Heiner, I’ll come.’ Heiner replied: ‘Oh, give over, I’d rather come to you.’ They talked for a while, among other things, about Gitti. Scholl was surprised at how fondly the mourners spoke of his wife. At the end he said: ‘Gitti loved everyone—just not me.’

  Two days after the funeral, at dawn, the police turned up at Heinrich Scholl’s house. He was still in his pyjamas when he opened the door. In the hall, the public prosecutor read him the arrest warrant: he was under strong suspicion of the heinous murder of Brigitte Scholl. And the dog. Scholl was allowed to get dressed; then he had to hand over his keys and phone. In the car, handcuffs were put on him. He asked for permission to ring his son.

  Shortly before ten, Frank’s phone rang. He had returned home to Wiesbaden, five hundred kilometres away. The chief superintendent informed him that his father had been arrested early that morning and was currently being held for questioning by the homicide squad in Potsdam.

  Ten months later, at 9 am on 18 October 2012, the hearing against Heinrich Scholl was opened in the Potsdam Criminal Court. He was charged with ‘the heinous murder of a human being in coincidence with the killing of a vertebrate animal without reasonable cause’.

  News broadcasters from Berlin and Brandenburg were there to announce the start of the trial. The first visitors were outside the court at half past seven. Among the first in the queue were an old teacher of Heinrich Scholl, a chiropodist who had been a member of the district assembly alongside the defendant twenty years before, friends, and townspeople who couldn’t believe that their former mayor was accused of murder.

  No one could believe it. Since being arrested, Heinrich Scholl had maintained that he had nothing to do with his wife’s murder. When friends visited him in custody, he turned his hands palm up and asked: ‘Can these hands kill?’

  He had hired two prestigious lawyers, Stefan König and Heide Sandkuhl. König is known for defending criminal politicians such as the former Stasi boss Erich Mielke. Heide Sandkuhl, who was based in Potsdam, had defended plenty of Brandenburg politicians against charges of corruption or criminal behaviour while in office.

  While his lawyers prepared his case, Heinrich Scholl had by no means been idle himself. The arrest
warrant stated that he was lacking an alibi for the time of the murder. He had, however, been sighted by witnesses near the woods. With his wife. When the vet went to see him in prison, Scholl asked him to track down some horse riders who had seen him and Gitti in the woods on 28 December, the day before the murder; he wanted to prove that the witnesses must have got the day wrong.

  He also placed a notice in a weekly paper that was delivered free to all households in Ludwigsfelde. The notice read:

  Dear residents of Ludwigsfelde, spa guests, visitors to the town,

  As you will be aware from radio and television, I, Heinrich Scholl, am suspected of having killed my wife and our dog. In consequence, I have been in custody since 25 January 2012.

  I would like to ask you for your help! Did anyone see me in or around the thermal spa between 12 am and 1 pm on 29 December? I was wearing a three-quarter-length dark blue all-weather jacket and blue jeans.

  The letter appeared on page six under the rubric ‘Law and Order’, usually the reserve of solicitors’ ads. It caused a stir throughout the country. No one could remember a defendant ever daring to use a small ad to find defence witnesses from prison, but it was not against the law. In Ludwigsfelde, people wondered whether Heinrich Scholl had finally gone completely mad, or whether he really was innocent. The case was growing more and more bizarre. At the end of the letter, Heinrich Scholl thanked his readers for their attention as he had once thanked them for voting for him. Beside the notice was a photo: Heinrich Scholl in collar and tie, the illustrious mayor everybody knew. He was smiling wearily.

  The man who entered Courtroom 8 in Potsdam Criminal Court at nine o’clock was not smiling. Heinrich Scholl wore a blue polo shirt under an open jacket and was flanked by two uniformed guards. His hair was shorter than usual. He stared at the floor. When the flurry of flashes ended and the photographers were ushered out, he glanced up and nodded at local reporter Jutta Abromeit and at a friend in the gallery. He did not look at his son.

  Frank was sitting opposite on the side of the prosecution, a heavy man with the bewildered look of a child. His face was red, his forehead beaded with sweat.

  Until August, Frank had visited his father in prison. Heinrich Scholl had protested his innocence to his son, as to all his visitors, but Frank didn’t know whether he could believe him. He didn’t know anything. He was the suspect’s son; the police told him nothing. Both the public prosecution and Scholl’s lawyers denied him access to their files. The start of the trial was repeatedly delayed. Frank sat at home in Wiesbaden, trying to figure out what had happened. He was getting nowhere alone. In the summer he hired a lawyer and decided to appear at the hearing as a co-plaintiff. Now the court had to put the results of the investigation at his disposal.

  The files seemed to yield a clear picture: Heinrich Scholl had no alibi for the time of the murder, his mobile phone signal indicated that he had been near the crime scene, forensics had found traces of his DNA on the shoelace and on the deceased woman’s underwear, and the prosecution had minutely reconstructed the events of that day with the help of witness statements. There were, however, doubts as to whether it would be possible to prove in court that Heinrich Scholl had murdered his wife. The DNA traces and mobile phone records were not unequivocal proof of culpability. Furthermore, there were neither eyewitnesses nor a confession.

  Heinrich Scholl, who had always been a big speaker in his politician days, had decided to exercise his right to silence in court. He spoke only one word, when he was asked whether his date of birth and other biographical data were correct: ‘Yes.’ Her client needed a little time to acclimatise, Heide Sandkuhl explained. Sitting upright, he stared at his hands, his lips pressed so tightly together they were almost blue. This time it wasn’t the most beautiful woman at stake, the best Mardi Gras costume, the next election victory, or conquering Everest: this time, everything was at stake.

  In Germany, criminal offences are tried by a judge, or panel of judges, not by a jury. Serious offences such as murder are heard by a panel of two or three professional judges and two ‘lay judges’, who are members of the community nominated to serve on the court. The presiding judge orchestrates the trial, deciding what order the evidence will be presented in and questioning witnesses and the defendant directly. Presiding over Scholl’s case was Judge Tiemann, a slightly built, softly spoken man who sat enthroned between the associate and lay judges like a headmaster.

  The first witnesses Tiemann called were the police who had spoken to Heinrich Scholl the day his wife had disappeared. Neighbours and friends followed—everyone who had seen Heinrich Scholl during those December days, or could comment in any way on his problems and his marriage. Half the town was on the witness list, along with many others: son, vet, cleaning women, beautician, Berlin landlady, the victim’s best friends, the doctor on call, the head of investigations, the publisher, the former mistress, a driving instructor, a tax advisor, SPD friends, a florist, a former lover of the deceased, the Macedonian landlord from Heinrich Scholl’s favourite Italian restaurant, the cashier from the naturist spa, the spa operator, business friends. As if performing on stage, they made their entrances in Potsdam Criminal Court and then exited again. Scholl sat there throughout it all, furiously taking notes.

  ‘Atypical’ was the word used by the policeman on duty at Ludwigsfelde police station on 29 December to describe Heinrich Scholl’s behaviour. He had wondered why anyone would go to the police after only four hours just because his wife hadn’t come home. Scholl’s neighbour described how the former mayor had rung at her door that same evening and flung his arms around her neck in tears. She had known him for years, was aware that he’d hardly been with his wife lately, and was surprised at the tears. Never before, she said, had she seen him so emotional. Other witnesses also reported that Heinrich Scholl had acted differently that day, more conspicuously somehow, even in the morning, when his wife was still alive. Instead of walking past the cashier at the thermal spa as he usually did, he called out: ‘Gosh, it’s busy in here!’ He apologised for stopping in a no-parking area to a woman having a cigarette break outside the spa: ‘Just got to pop in quickly, then I’ll be off.’ At the bank he had trouble withdrawing cash and walked back and forth in front of the security cameras several times. In Hamlet, the Berlin restaurant where he had lunch with his friend, the waitress clearly remembered him because he’d left such a big tip.

  The vet described how ‘Heiner’ had rung at his door and told him his wife was gone. The next day they’d gone in search of her together with Heiner’s son. It had been Frank who’d discovered the shoes. ‘They were standing there as if on display,’ the vet said. Not far from the shoes, he himself had then seen ‘something covered, in the shape of a body’ and ‘a little heap with a glint of red hair’. It wasn’t hard to put two and two together, he added.

  Frank, the Scholls’ son, was the first witness on the second day of the hearing. He told the court that his father had rung him at home in Wiesbaden and said his mum was gone, and so was the dog; the police had already sent helicopters with thermal cameras out looking for them. ‘I was amazed they were going to such trouble.’

  After a sleepless night he had driven to Ludwigsfelde where his father had been waiting to set out looking with him. They’d been in the woods about an hour. ‘The vet was already on his way back when my father called out: “Come over here to the left. She sometimes went this way too.” I thought: “What we’re doing here is complete madness. The woods are far too big.”’

  But he walked into the other part of the woods and suddenly came across the shoes, a pair of black slip-ons. ‘They were standing there, waiting to be found. My father said: “They’re Mum’s.” I said: “What is this?” I was leaping about like a dervish and he was saying, quite calmly and matter-of-factly: “Yes, they’re Mum’s shoes.”’

  The son described how alien his father seemed to him in the days, weeks and months following his mother’s death, how quickly he had reverted to everyday life
, how little he spoke. He had divided up his wife’s jewellery only the day after the funeral and the police later discovered that he’d set aside the bulk of it for himself. In an interview before the trial, Frank had said he wanted to be clear about whether or not his father was guilty. Now, in court, he gave the impression of having long since found the answer.

  Heide Sandkuhl’s questions, intended to shift the attention away from her client, did little to counter this impression. She asked Frank about calls Brigitte Scholl had received from a stalker, and about a local admirer. She also wanted to know whether he had forwarded letters to the criminal investigation department—personal letters to him from his father.

  One of these she read aloud:

  Dear Frank,

  I can imagine what’s going on in your mind. But rest assured that I didn’t do your mother and Ursus any harm. I may have been acting a little strangely, because I realised I was the target of police investigations. But I hope I can make up for it some time in the future.

  Your Dad

  Heinrich Scholl wiped the tears from his eyes, moved by his own words. His son didn’t cry. He deflected all attempts to put his father in a better light: the calls from the stalker had been a long time ago, he had only mentioned the admirer to the police so that all possible lines of inquiry could be pursued, and as for the letters, yes, he couldn’t deny that he had sent them on. ‘The murder squad was my only point of contact. I had to process everything somehow.’