Erzgebirgskrimi - Familienband (2023)

Corinna Ott reports her 16-year-old daughter Mia missing to the police in Chemnitz, and Chief Inspector Robert Winkler and Inspector Karina Szabo begin searching for her. At the same time, forester Saskia Bergelt finds an abandoned newborn with dark skin in an old mine tunnel in the forest. At first, she considers taking the baby in as a foster child. It turns out that the missing girl is the mother of the baby. Neither Mia’s parents nor her friends had noticed that she was pregnant. Mia’s father, Frank Ott, struggles to keep his wheelwright’s workshop going. His brother Ralph Ott, who sits on the local council, makes xenophobic remarks and points to the refugee shelter, which is unpopular in town. Szabo finds Mia’s body on the shore of a lake; she was killed with a sharp-edged object. Winkler correctly suspects that her twin brother Moritz knew about the pregnancy. Moritz names Ado, a young dark-skinned refugee from Burundi who is living with a foster family nearby, as the child’s father. Ado is an unaccompanied minor foreign national (umA). The uncle suspects the “blackie from the refugee home” of being the murderer, but comes under suspicion himself when it emerges that he had threatened the young couple and demanded that they end their relationship. Ado denies killing Mia. Afraid that they would not be allowed to keep the child and that he would be deported, the couple had decided on a secret birth. They had planned to hide together in the Czech Republic until they came of age. Ralph and Corinna Ott turn up outside Ado’s house amid a threatening mob carrying torches, intending to confront him. The forester helps him escape through the back door and takes him to her home. – The inspectors search for the murder weapon. Suspicion of both Ralph and Ado grows stronger. – Ralph forcibly abducts Ado from the care of retired forester Georg Bergelt and drives him, bound, to his brother’s. He tells the horrified Otts that their son Moritz is the culprit. The uncle had been trying all along to cover up the crime by making Ado out to be the murderer. Now Ado has to “disappear” so that no one discovers the lie. Ralph appeals to the family’s solidarity, and the brothers eventually take Ado to a mine shaft to throw him in. But before another crime can be committed, the brothers argue about this and old family matters. Frank Ott finally lets Ado go. Winkler has found the murder weapon, one of Moritz’s carving tools, bearing Ralph’s fingerprints. When the inspectors confront the Ott family with it, Ralph unexpectedly confesses to the crime. Mia had blackmailed him over a sex video, and he had lost his temper; he happened to have the tools with him, borrowed from his nephew. But Winkler has another theory and draws Moritz into conversation. Moritz eventually explains that, for Mia, suddenly only Ado and the baby mattered, not the siblings’ shared dreams for the future as they had before. That made him angry, and he struck her with the spokeshave. He, his parents, and his uncle, who had been willing to sacrifice himself for his nephew, are arrested—the entire family. Winkler and the forester get another opportunity to grow closer romantically.