Für immer ein Mörder - Der Fall Ritter (2014)

In October 1999, a colleague from Frankfurt am Main arrives at the Eisenach station where Detective Inspector Frank Wolf works. Yvonne Weber has been assigned to Eisenach to solve an unsolved murder case from 1983. Since 1991, the German justice system has been dealing with unsolved serious crimes in the new federal states. Before the statute of limitations expires for all crimes committed in East Germany before 1990, the case of Konrad Ritter is to be reviewed once more as well. Frank Wolf remembers the case of Doreen Wojcik. In 1983, the daughter of a police officer was strangled. She was the girlfriend of the musician and village Casanova Konrad Ritter, who was not arrested until two years later, after his friends had strongly implicated him. According to the case files, Ritter was then interrogated for more than 300 hours, and during those interrogations he confessed to the murder. He had to be released after a witness gave testimony during an appeal proceeding. Since Ritter moved away afterward, no one pursued the matter any further. Yvonne Weber thinks it was negligent not to keep looking for the real killer. Wolf does not see it that way, because the investigators have never doubted Ritter’s guilt. To them, he has remained the murderer, whether he was acquitted or not. Yvonne Weber now reopens the case from scratch, and with Frank Wolf as the local investigator at her side, she first asks him to show her the crime scene and where the body was found. She then seeks out Konrad Ritter, who, still scarred by the events of that time, refuses to talk to anyone about them. Weber therefore takes up the files to study them further. She does not get far with her analysis, however, because the reports and examinations referred to in them are missing. So she and Wolf head to the Gotha prosecutor’s office archives to retrieve the missing documents. There, Wolf suddenly notices an old stool in the corner. Apparently no one had bothered to dispose of it—a stool with five rusty screws whose points, hour after hour during an interrogation, would dig deeper into a suspect’s flesh, just as Ritter had described. Even if Wolf may have had doubts about the interrogation methods used in the GDR at the time, this stool spoke for itself. Weber notices her colleague’s horrified expression, and together they confront Müller, the officer who investigated the case at the time and still works at the Eisenach police station. His superior, Schulte, tries to put a stop to the discussion and win Wolf back over to his side. Wolf is once again uncertain whether he should close the case to please his colleagues or continue investigating, but Weber finds a note in the files that strengthens his resolve to do the latter. It says that the GDR’s Ministry for State Security had taken over the case. This only happened in such circumstances when a member of the police might be a witness or a suspect. This puzzles Wolf, and the case becomes even more mysterious when the old files suddenly disappear from Weber’s office. Supposedly, Prosecutor Kleinert had requested that the files be returned to Gotha because they were needed there. This gives Wolf the final push to “pull together” with his colleague Weber. She had prudently copied all the documents, so they can continue investigating on that basis. First, they question the witness who last saw the victim at the time. She confirms her original statement, which she later altered somewhat because of pressure from a police officer. She also knows that Doreen Wojcik was seen afterward by another witness, something that was never recorded in the files. Wolf now finds further contradictions in the documents and is absolutely certain that the evidence was manipulated to make everything point to Ritter as the culprit. Exculpatory witness statements were omitted, and others were manipulated so that Ritter was the only possible suspect. After the Stasi interrogation methods were used, it was no longer difficult to get the suspect to confess. Unfortunately, the head of the police station, Wolfgang Schulte, is not only Wolf’s superior but also his foster father. This puts Wolf in a serious moral dilemma. Can he investigate his own family? Especially since Schulte has only one year until retirement, and the statute of limitations will expire by then as well. But Wolf is so disappointed that he has worked with such “monsters” among his police colleagues that he does not want to spare them. One of the last surviving witnesses is Walter Voss, a former police officer who had followed a different lead from his colleagues at the time. But because that lead pointed to fellow officer Anton Mesmer, they handed the whole matter over to the Stasi, which covered up this suspect and chose instead to go after the village Casanova. Voss is surprised that anyone is still interested in the truth after so many years, and tells the investigators that he had kept hair samples from the suspected killer and clothing from the victim that might bear traces of the killer. They are in the Gotha archives. At first, Weber and Wolf are unable to track them down, because Schulte gets there before them and not only removes them from the case but sends Weber to Gotha, where a permanent post is vacant, and Wolf away for six months of further training, followed by another six-month course in criminal psychology. As she leaves, Weber swears that they will not silence her that way. Several months later, Weber “orders” Wolf away from his training and to Gotha. She has also used her new position to secure the evidence Voss mentioned. By then, however, no direct comparison sample can be taken, because Anton Mesmer has been dead for fourteen days. Wolf’s colleagues and the Stasi officials responsible, who had made themselves complicit in the Ritter case, can no longer be held accountable once the statute of limitations has expired. Wolf breaks with his foster father and resigns from the police. He can at least take satisfaction in having found the real murderer and cleared Konrad Ritter’s name.