‘And did it help you process it?’ the defence lawyer asked, coldly.
‘I haven’t got as far as processing anything yet,’ said the son.
His tone too was getting edgier: it was like a long overdue confrontation between father and son, only the father let his lawyer do the talking, and the son stared past them both to the judge’s bench. Not once did he look at his father, and the older man too avoided eye contact of any kind. It was like watching some kind of family therapy.
‘Have you ever asked your father whether he committed the murder?’ the judge asked Frank.
No, he said, he hadn’t.
Brigitte Scholl’s son returned to his seat beside his lawyer. He was sweating. He looked as if he were returning from battle. In the break he sat with the public prosecutor and the psychiatric expert witness, far removed from the two defence lawyers and his father’s friends. The court canteen divided the ranks. Although everyone stood in line together at the coffee machine—prosecutor, defence lawyers, son, journalists, townspeople—once past the till, they split into Scholl supporters, Scholl opponents and neutral observers. Who was on which side often seemed to be a question of belief rather than a judicial question, especially on the days when the hearing touched on all the humiliations Heinrich Scholl had suffered in his marriage.
Like a butler, Gitti had treated him.
He always did what she wanted and never uttered a bad word.
At the end, he’d had to sleep under the roof on a mattress.
The dog had had it better than her husband.
Brigitte Scholl’s hairdresser said that Gitti had insisted on getting her own way, even when the hairdresser expressed her doubts: ‘Please, Doris! Do it like this!’
Inge Karther wept and laughed as she told the court about the long phone calls between Ludwigsfelde and Anklam.
‘When Heiner had to read me the poem,’ Maria Zucker reported, ‘he said to me afterwards: “She always does that to me.”’
‘If I told Gitti she was being annoying, she laughed,’ said Heike Schramm.
Almost all Brigitte Scholl’s female friends continued to come to the hearing even after giving their statements. They wanted to know what would happen next; they wanted to know whether it was Heiner. The trial was as gripping as a crime story—the best entertainment Ludwigsfelde had to offer and, besides, a good opportunity to catch up at last. Since Brigitte Scholl’s death, her circle of friends had fallen apart. No one bought theatre tickets any more, no one invited them to the basement bar. Now Heike, Karin and Maria, three energetic pensioners, organised car pools and brought homemade biscuits to the hearing. You could even get used to the canteen food. During Advent there was roast duck and red cabbage; the first week of the new year kicked off with a low-calorie diet from a popular women’s magazine. The ladies dressed up for their court visits: trouser suits, blouses, and scarves at their necks. Brigitte Scholl would have been proud of them.
Helga Gerlich, the social democrat from Lichtenrade, used her court appearance to set a few things straight. She had told the police that Frau Scholl always wore the trousers in her marriage, and when the judge asked her what she meant by that, she yelled: ‘Somebody has to wear the trousers. I don’t know how it is in your household.’ She looked defiantly at the judge. When he didn’t reply, she gave him a little lecture on women who have to hold everything together. ‘We women have the children, we have to do everything and we have to talk till we’re blue in the face. I always said to Herr Scholl: “Be glad you have a wife who takes care of you.”’
The judge smiled at her as if she were an obstinate child; someone in the gallery groaned. It was one of those moments when you forgot this was about a brutal murder. The unadorned courtroom became a platform for the discussion of major and minor gender issues. How could a marriage end this way? Why had Heinrich Scholl let his wife boss him about so much? And who was actually the victim here?
The women in the gallery were for the most part on Brigitte Scholl’s side; the men on Heinrich Scholl’s. Among his greatest defenders were his childhood friends. Hans Streck, who hadn’t seen Brigitte Scholl since the dress-code fiasco, had been one of the first to visit Heinrich Scholl in custody, and now the trial was under way, he set off on the long trek from his remote village to Potsdam each morning to give his school friend moral support.
Another friend since childhood, the glassblower Dieter Fahle, burst into the hearing in the middle of Frank’s questioning. Heinrich Scholl leapt from his seat for joy. For years, Fahle had been living on a sailing ship in Indonesia. When he had heard that his friend was in trouble, he had jumped straight on a plane. He didn’t believe a word of what the prosecutor said. He knew Gitti from schooldays and knew it was his friend Heiner who had been oppressed by his wife, not the other way round. For him there was only one explanation: Gitti had staged her own murder to get one over on her husband. As he saw it, the evidence was unequivocal: Gitti’s mother’s suicide, her sister’s suicide, the funeral plans she had revealed only to her best friend and her son. Last but not least, Fahle claimed that when Frank came to Ludwigsfelde on 30 December, he had brought with him the paperwork setting out his mother’s plans for her funeral, even though he couldn’t have known she was dead at that point.
In the court canteen, Dieter Fahle’s suicide conspiracy theory aroused considerable interest, although everyone agreed you couldn’t strangle yourself or cover yourself with moss. But there were so many things that didn’t make sense: how, for instance, was Heinrich Scholl supposed to have killed his wife and the dog unaided? Wouldn’t Ursus have barked or snapped if someone had attacked his beloved mistress? Why was the corpse covered with moss? What were the shoes doing in the woods? And why would Heinrich Scholl kill his wife in broad daylight and then drive through the town where he had been mayor for eighteen years in a car everybody knew? He was an intelligent man; everyone was agreed on that. He would never have run the risk of being found out.
These doubts seemed confirmed when witnesses were called who claimed to have seen Heinrich Scholl with his wife at the edge of the woods on 29 December, the day of the murder. One of these was Anita Ludwig*, a friend of Scholl’s from the SPD. She called him Heiner, knew of his marital troubles and his flat in Berlin. What she didn’t know, however, was that he had moved back to Ludwigsfelde. Until, that is, she was driving along Siethener Strasse one day between Christmas and New Year at around midday. As so often when Brigitte Scholl was walking her dog in the woods, Anita Ludwig saw the Mercedes parked at the side of the road. But this time, the mayor’s wife was not alone: Anita saw her friend Heiner get out of the passenger door. He was wearing a grey jacket and stumbled as he got out. She said she thought, ‘Ooh! Are they back together again?’ and then, ‘He has gone grey.’
The time of day corresponded with the time of the murder, the place with the crime scene, and Anita Ludwig had precisely recognised the accused. There was only one more question. The judge put it to her with exaggerated casualness, as if to detract from its significance, its force. ‘And,’ he asked the witness, ‘do you remember what day it was?’
Anita Ludwig looked at the judge. Then she launched into a long story about not sending off her Christmas cards on time and having to get it done after Christmas. She had written the cards in the morning and driven to Ludwigsfelde in the afternoon to drop them off at the post office or the news agent’s. She had done that on three consecutive days, always between midday and 1 pm. But on which of those days had she seen Herr Scholl at the edge of the woods?
The court heard that on Wednesday, Anita Ludwig had bought a certain variety of potato she particularly liked at the market in Ludwigsfelde. On all three days, she had been to the bank. On Friday it had been her birthday and she’d driven into town twice. She assumed it was on one of these trips that she had seen an emergency vehicle at the edge of the woods. So it couldn’t have been Friday. That left Wednesday and Thursday. At her first questioning in January, she had said to herself: �
��Wednesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Thursday.’ When asked by the superintendent, ‘Are you coming down on Thursday then?’ she had nodded. Now, in court, Anita Ludwig shrugged. She couldn’t remember.
Hers wasn’t the only statement to fall apart in court because the witness was suddenly unable to remember exactly what had happened. A cyclist had also seen Brigitte Scholl by her car at the edge of the woods ‘with another person’. In her police statement, she had identified this other person as ‘Herr Scholl’. Ten months later, in court, the cyclist had changed her story. She hadn’t recognised him at the time, she said; she had only reckoned it could have been him.
The next to appear in the witness stand was a gardener who gave her statement in a strange, sing-song voice. On Friday at about twelve o’clock, she had driven to the hypermarket at Langerwisch with her husband. Actually, they only ever went on Tuesdays or Thursdays, she said, but that week it was a Friday, which was unusual. They had seen Frau Scholl’s car. The boot was open, and Brigitte Scholl had been rummaging around in it—‘Town shoes off, forest shoes on,’ the gardener trilled, making it sound like a nursery rhyme. She had assumed Brigitte Scholl was going for a walk in the woods, as she so often did.
Frau Scholl could not, however, have gone for a walk in the woods on Friday, because she was murdered on Thursday. The gardener’s husband clearly recalled that the sun was shining on the day of the murder, but the weather report gave evidence to the contrary. The judge eventually lost his patience, slamming his hand flat on the table. All to no avail. He ended up being told how you know whether a rose is fresh or not: the stem shouldn’t be brown at the bottom, the gardener explained.
Though Judge Tiemann usually spoke so softly he could hardly be understood, he had a temper. He exploded if there was talking in the gallery or if the defence asked too many questions. In the breaks, he doffed his robes, put on a leather jacket and went outside for a smoke, looking more like an aging rocker than a distinguished jurist. Brigitte Scholl’s girlfriends whispered to each other that Tiemann was ‘a dish’.
The confusion and contradictions continued, reaching a climax when Wolfgang Schröder* was called to the stand, a key witness who claimed to have seen Heinrich Scholl in his wife’s car on 29 December 2011.
Fifty years ago, Wolfgang Schröder had been the sporty apprentice who cycled from Ludwigsfelde to Teltow every morning and waited on the station every afternoon to take the train back with Brigitte Knorrek. He had been one of her admirers, Heinrich Scholl’s rival, so to speak. The man who entered the courtroom on this January day was bald, with a moustache, and a gold chain around his neck. Legs akimbo, he strode to the witness stand. He answered the court’s questions with a Russian ‘ne znayu’ or ‘dunno’, and sometimes he told the judge, ‘You just don’t get it.’ When asked to describe the clothes he’d been wearing on 29 December, he replied drily: ‘Waistcoat, cardigan—and trousers, I guess.’ The whole courtroom laughed; even the accused and the judge grinned.
Wolfgang Schröder had only seen his teenage sweetheart by chance since her wedding, but he had never lost sight of her altogether. He knew her friends, her dog, her car—and, of course, her husband.
‘When did you last see Heinrich Scholl?’ the judge wanted to know.
‘On the twenty-ninth.’
‘Can you tell us about the encounter?’
‘I was really stressed that day. The dry cleaners had fucked up my duvet. After that I drove to the dentist to pick up my anti-grinding mouthguard. My appointment was at twelve-thirty; I was out again fifty minutes later. Then I got a few bottles of sparkling wine at Netto and drove off again. On the left, in Fontanestrasse, Gitti’s car was parked, and Heiner was sitting in it.’
It was very quiet in the courtroom. Everyone understood that this was an important statement, perhaps the most important so far.
Who but Brigitte Scholl’s murderer could have been sitting in her car?
‘Are you sure it was Heinrich Scholl?’ the judge asked.
‘One hundred per cent sure.’
Everything tallied: place, time, weather. It was not looking good for the accused. Brigitte Scholl’s teenage sweetheart was going to be his undoing.
But then, immediately after Wolfgang Schröder, two Ludwigsfelde car dealers testified to having seen Heinrich Scholl at his favourite Italian place at the time of the murder. It must have been 29 December, because that was the day they discovered that their car showroom was to be sold, and they went to Da Toni’s as soon as they heard to discuss the situation over red wine. Scholl had been wearing a blue trench coat. He’d approached the restaurant on foot from the direction of the spa, and had also drunk red wine. Until late in the afternoon.
It was a curious statement, above all because Heinrich Scholl himself had never claimed to have been in Da Toni’s at midday. His alibi was the spa. After the spa he’d had lunch in Berlin between 2.30 and 3.30 pm. That much was certain; there were witnesses to confirm it.
It was impossible to tell what Scholl made of his double alibi; as usual he was covering his notepad with writing. His lawyer merely asked whether Heinrich Scholl could have been gone for two hours in between times. The witnesses couldn’t remember. They stuck to their statement.
It was getting more and more complicated. Everyone seemed to know something, but no one was impartial. Wolfgang Schröder had been in love with Brigitte Scholl. One of the car dealers had once leased an Audi to Heinrich Scholl, and his ex-sister-in-law was a close friend of the accused. Scholl’s neighbour had been given lifts to football games and other local events by the mayor. Almost all the men who appeared in court knew Heinrich Scholl from the car works. The women had gone to Brigitte Scholl for facials.
Wolfgang Schröder had to appear in court again a few weeks later because it transpired that the dental practice had been closed between Christmas and New Year; there was also no evidence of the dry cleaning or the purchase of sparkling wine, and the neighbour whom Schröder had allegedly told of his encounter with Scholl claimed to know nothing. No one seemed to take the car dealers seriously any more either. The red wine had flowed freely that day; the court assumed the men had got the day wrong.
The next few days of the hearing were no more enlightening.
The publisher affirmed that she, not Heinrich Scholl, had invented the contentious scene in his erotic tale in which the hero says he’s never thought of divorce, but has considered murder.
The police sniffer dog, ‘Miss Marple’, had followed the trail of a policeman from the crime scene rather than that of Heinrich Scholl.
The mobile phone record, one of the few pieces of evidence that had seemed as if it might hold water, turned out to be unusable: the phone’s precise whereabouts at the time Scholl called his friend about their lunch in Berlin could not be proven.
It was true that the traces of DNA found on the underwear and on the shoelace used to strangle the dog very probably came from Heinrich Scholl, but it was hard to say whether they had been deposited when the crime was committed or on a previous occasion in the couple’s house. After all, they had shared a bathroom, and it was of course conceivable that the tidy-minded Brigitte Scholl had taken the shoelace with her from home to tie up her bag of moss. Moreover, the sample from the underwear had lain around ‘undocumented’ at the state criminal police office for a week. The defence referred to this as ‘colossal slovenliness’ and attempted to take advantage of it by filing an ever increasing number of petitions.
By now it was spring in Potsdam. A long, dark winter was over—the second since Brigitte Scholl’s death. Her girlfriends wore brightly coloured dresses and flimsy cardigans. Scholl’s friend Dieter Fahle had flown to Indonesia and back. His ship had got caught by a tsunami and been damaged. Sometimes he was accompanied to court by a young Indonesian woman who was looking for work in Germany. She hardly understood any German and didn’t even know what her acquaintance’s friend was accused of. She smiled a lot, bravely ate the canteen potatoes and was mistaken for Na
ntana by the journalists. Dieter Fahle only just managed to intervene when the photographers aimed their cameras at her.
Nantana Piamsuk had appeared as witness some weeks before, a slight, surprisingly unassuming woman in glasses, cloche cap, jeans, shirt and knitted waistcoat. At police questioning she had given ‘sex worker’ as her profession; in court she looked like a student.
Seeing his former mistress testify was humiliating for the once so highly esteemed mayor. First he had to listen as, coldly and without gratitude, she confirmed the list of his gifts read out to her by the judge; then he had to hear himself described as a sex maniac who had increasingly lost control of himself.
Her witness statement was translated by an interpreter, but occasionally, when she got worked up or thought the accused should be answering the question rather than her, she spoke in German: ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ she asked the judge.
Heinrich Scholl had been jealous and spied on her constantly. ‘He said, if you have a new boyfriend, that’s fine, if it’s nice for you. But his eyes said the opposite. His face was quite pale at that moment. In Thai you say: “He smiles, but he doesn’t show what he has in his heart.”’ Heinrich Scholl, not two metres away from her, listened, pale-faced, his muscles tense, and didn’t show what he had in his heart.
She described how she’d grown more and more afraid of him, especially at the end when he had even found out where her new boyfriend lived and broken into her home. Nantana Piamsuk was sure Heinrich Scholl took back the handbag he had given her. An email found on his computer by the police seemed to confirm this. ‘As you can see,’ he had written, ‘I’ve taken a few things with me. In exchange I’m leaving you our ring.’ The email ends with the words: ‘Don’t worry —I have good people. They’ll find you.’
Nantana Piamsuk never read these lines because she had changed her email address. She also immediately deleted the many text messages that Heinrich Scholl sent her. Their content could not be retrieved, but the times at which they were sent were known, and the judge read out those he wished the court to note: 28/12, 11.26 am and 7.07 pm; 29/12, 10.50 pm; 30/12, 12.43 am and 7.54 am. All of these times fell within the days, hours and minutes during which Brigitte Scholl was missing.
The Scholl Case Page 14