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It is shortly after 6 a.m. on a Saturday in April 2019 when driver Thomas C. notices some unusual shadows in the distance from his cab. C. is on his regional train 93 between Erndtebrück and Bad Berleburg in Sauerland, the speedometer reads 52 kilometers per hour. It still has no passengers, it is an empty trip. The shadows draw closer. This is how he describes it later in an interrogation.
Finally, he initiates an emergency stop, ducks to the side, and then a crash ensues. Two massive manhole covers, each weighing 32 kilograms, cut through the windscreen of the driver’s cab. Fine splinters from the safety glass fly first class. Manhole covers had previously been fixed to the railing of a railway bridge with ropes. The police initially assumed an attack. Researchers believed that C. escaped death only because of his quick reaction.
Did the train conductor organize the attack himself?
The 49-year-old train conductor has been sitting on the dock at the Bad Berleburg district court since Friday. The prosecutor accuses him of dangerous interference in rail traffic and of pretending to be a crime. C., according to the prosecution, he is said to have orchestrated the attack on April 13, 2019. The prosecution does not provide any indication of a possible motive. C. denied the act during interrogations. He is silent in court. It is a purely circumstantial process.
C., bald and double chin, sits almost motionless in his chair, his arms crossed over his chest. The plaid shirt crosses his stomach. C. is a colossal specimen of human being. It has grown since the incident, says a court investigator. He didn’t remember the train conductor so much. C. in any case seems mistreated. He was employed as a contract worker for the railroad. Since what happened, he lives on sick pay of 80 euros a day and his wife’s income. In an interrogation he said: “What would I have gotten? I only have damage.
A third manhole cover on the track bed.
The court must now clarify whether it was really C. who tied the manhole covers with ropes and lowered them the night before the crime so far from the bridge that they hung exactly at the height of the driver’s cab. The police found a third manhole cover on the road platform; apparently its installation had failed. According to police, the attacker had recently lifted the heavy steel cap of a nearby country road. Relevant gaps were quickly found.
Investigators had created a homicide squad immediately after the crime. But the useful evidence from the witnesses would not be opened. In front of the court, several policemen said that C.’s behavior immediately after the crime seemed strange and funny to them. After arriving at the scene, they found C. unusually quiet in the driver’s cab. However, they admitted, this was perhaps also due to the shock situation.
How does the DNA trace get onto the string?
A few days later, the case took a surprising turn: C. was the investigators’ target. They found traces of her DNA on the ropes and manhole covers. They searched his small reunion apartment, which he shares with a roommate, but found nothing suspicious. They went to their main residence, 200 kilometers away. Here the agents found a device on his bicycle that was tied with a knot similar to that of the manhole cover.
The day of the judgment reveals some peculiarities. One of the policemen visited C. a few hours after the crime to question him as a witness. It seemed strange to him that the train conductor was apparently already chatting with his colleagues on WhatsApp, but he did not want to contact his wife. At the crime scene, C. also testified that he had left the driver’s cab after the crash and touched both the broken ropes and the manhole cover. According to the researchers’ findings, this would only explain part of the DNA traces found. Because agents also found the genetic material on one of the broken strings, which hung just under three meters above the runway.
And another strange thing hit him while he was studying the files, says a young criminal investigator in court. While evaluating C.’s data storage media, he came across deleted image files that he had rebuilt. The photos were taken in early February 2019 and showed a collection of CDs and DVDs. It was precisely these collections that C. had been stolen in a burglary just three days after the photo was taken. Even if it doesn’t say: apparently the officer is also thinking of a fictitious crime in this case.
Defense attorney Dennis Tungel left open whether his client would comment in the course of the three-day proceedings. “First we want to hear what the witnesses have to say.”
The process will continue on October 2. Then, the experts from the State Bureau of Criminal Investigation should comment in detail on the location of the DNA traces.
