Man on trial for murder of ex-wife

The prosecution had initially suspended the case due to the unusual death in Küsnacht, then reopened it. There is now a circumstantial trial in the Meilen District Court.

Christoph Ruckstuhl / New Zealand

He will no longer comment on the matter, says the defendant on the first day of the murder trial in Meilen District Court. On the one hand, his lawyer advised him to do so, on the other hand, his memory did not improve over the years. However, his version of the events in Mallorca is the result of dozens of questions that the judge presided over. The defendant had testified before the Prosecutor’s Office, and also wrote a book entitled “To hell and back,” which is in the files and in which he wrote down what should have happened.

He and his wife rented the farm in Mallorca for three and a half months and paid the full amount in advance. The incident occurred the first night after her arrival on December 17, 2012. Even on the flight, the woman said funny things about the sects that persecute her. On the way to the farm in the rental car, she had a loud attack of screaming for three to five minutes that surprised him. The landlady had said that the woman looked sad, intimidated, and upset when the farm was handed over to her. According to the defendant, his wife tried to strangle their son with a cloth “like a wild animal with all her might” in an attack that he now interprets as “psychotic shock”.

Therefore, he locked the woman in a storage room and fled the house with the child. He was afraid. He did not know the Spanish emergency number. Later he called the emergency number. It was difficult to find the way back to the farm. With the ambulance and the nurse he had met at a roundabout, he found his way back. There the woman lay cold, badly injured in her nightgown on the esplanade. The storage room door was damaged. A window on the patio was open. The judges hold the defendant against numerous inconsistencies: the time, the times of the calls, the meeting point with the lifeguards, scratches and a broken side mirror in the rental car, 140 kilometers more on the speedometer of the rental car. what is compatible. with descriptions of the accused. This is mostly silent.

However, he answers questions about himself and his relationship with his late ex-wife in detail. Try to leave the judging panel as positive as possible about your marriage – the relationship was very happy and relaxed. That changed after the birth of their son, who is now in elementary school. The stress caused by the girl changed her life significantly. But he did not perceive “a crisis in that sense.” The woman couldn’t bear all the stress, hectic pace and constant burden of her motherhood. The relationship was still harmonious.

Even after the defendant was shown emails that his wife had written to an acquaintance in March 2012, the 50-year-old does not deviate from his position. In the emails, the woman writes about a nervous breakdown. The accused is unbearable. “There are no more us,” he is quoted as saying, and “he was not made to be a father” and “he has lost me forever.” The defendants did not want “any separation of any kind.” – In the courtroom, the defendant said without hesitation that he did not notice any relationship problems and was not aware of these emails. They are also not relevant to him. The defendant explains passages of text that indicate that the woman wanted to move abroad with the child that the couple planned to set up a second home together.

A psychiatric report is also discussed, which, however, was only prepared from files without the participation of the accused: the forensic psychiatrist comes to the conclusion that the accused suffers from a narcissistic-dissocial accentuation of the personality. He is controlling, arrogant and arrogant, he has a limited tolerance for frustration and a tendency for manipulative behavior. – He cannot identify himself at all with this finding, says the accused, who is described to the judges when asked as “balanced, direct, honest”, but also as “impatient”.

As part of the preliminary questions, the defense lawyer requests that the charges related to the incidents in Mallorca not be processed. The territorial jurisdiction of the Swiss court is questionable and evidence should not be used. In December 2014, employees of the insurance company in Spain questioned several witnesses – the emergency doctor, the nurse and the landlady of the farm – on their own and without commissioning the criminal authority. The witnesses were misled. As a result, unverified data was also included in the expert reports, which cannot be used either. The court only decides on these requests in the context of the evaluation of the evidence in the sentencing consultation.

A circumstantial murder and attempted murder trial against a 50-year-old Swiss IT manager has been ongoing in the Meilen District Court since Monday. The defendant is accused of trying to kill his wife on a Mallorca farm during the December 2012 holidays by beating her and driving her away with a car.

In April 2014, he is said to have climbed and drowned the woman who had meanwhile divorced him and was seriously disabled due to the Mallorca incident. The accused has been detained since October 2016, which has been repeatedly extended due to the risk of flight and fainting. Deny the facts.

The negotiations should last – with interruptions – until February 10. The judgment will come later. There are currently seven trial days. The court case should have been carried out last October but had to be postponed on very short notice because the defendant could not stand trial.

3-D computer technology is used in the process: A “virtual inspection” of the crime scene in Mallorca is planned. To protect the son of the alleged aggressor and the victim, the public was excluded from the process. Only accredited court reporters have access with restricted conditions to report.

According to the indictment, which is a unilateral assertion of a party in a criminal trial, there was an argument between the TI manager and his then wife on a December night in 2012, around 1 am, on a farm in Mallorca. The defendant is said to have initially inflicted several fractures to her face. Shortly thereafter, he is said to have struck the woman on the farm esplanade with a rental car, leaving her with serious knee injuries. The fractures also developed into fat embolism in the brain.

The defendant is said to have opened a bedroom window 4.4 meters above the esplanade to simulate a jump or fall by his wife. Then he went to Palma de Mallorca with his son to find a hotel room for the night. It is said that he deliberately did not request immediate medical help for the seriously injured person. The temperature that night was between 10.8 and 12.2 degrees Celsius and the humidity was 60 percent.

It wasn’t until shortly after 3 a.m. that the husband first called the emergency call center and reported an alleged epileptic seizure from his wife, who was allegedly lying on the floor with cramps. Shortly after 3:30 am, at an agreed meeting point in a roundabout about 950 meters from the farm, he met the doctor on duty and a nurse. According to the indictment, he is said to have deliberately steered them in the wrong direction to further delay medical care for the seriously injured. The doctor and nurse did not reach the woman until 4 am, who, meanwhile, was also severely hypothermic.

As a reason for the act, the prosecutor stated that the woman had been planning to separate from her husband for months and that she feared the loss of care for her son.

Around 16 months later, the defendant is said to have completed a murder after all: In February 2014, the woman was able to leave the clinic after a long stay. He then continued to care for the severely disabled woman and rented her an apartment in Küsnacht. There it is said that he caused great scalds on his back and buttocks with hot water. He is later said to have drowned her head in the water-filled sink or bathtub. Then it is said that he poured hot water into the bathtub to simulate the fall of the victim and the subsequent drowning “and, therefore, a not very suspicious explanation for the burns that he caused and the death that he caused.”

The prosecutor sees the reason for this act of the accused in the fact that the woman in need of care has “become an annoying disruptive factor in her professional and private life.” Her desire to participate in life with her son also bothered her, as she had sought “an exclusive union” with the child. Economic reasons are also given: he had obtained a death insurance payment of 500,000 francs and wanted to get rid of the monthly alimony obligation of 3,700 francs. This is reflected in the indictment as yet another count of attempted fraud.

The defendant is also charged with total fraud: he is said to have registered with RAV Meilen as totally unemployed in June 2009, but retained a job with an annual salary of 175,000 francs and thus obtained illegal payments from an unemployment fund of around 50,000 . francs. The charges are attempted murder, murder committed, attempted fraud and fraud. Requests are only made to the main audience.

The authorities had not initially assumed a crime in either of the two incidents. In Mallorca it was assumed that the woman had leaned out of the window with suicidal intent, and that an accident was in the foreground when she died in the bathtub. When the man demanded half a million Swiss francs from his life insurance shortly after the woman’s death, the insurance company became suspicious and commissioned an expert opinion that concluded that someone had been involved in the death in the bathtub. The Mallorca incident was then reopened. In September 2014, the prosecution had initially closed the proceedings due to the unusual death in Küsnacht.