Geisterschiff - Der Usedom-Krimi (2019)

After Julia Thiel is murdered, the members of her family try to cope with their grief in their own ways. Her widower, Stefan, turns increasingly to alcohol; her daughter Sophie continues her studies in Berlin; and her mother, Karin, works as a volunteer conflict counselor. In that capacity, she also looks after petty criminal Jens Kampwirth, who, during a botched robbery of restaurant owner Ingo Wiek, sends both his victim and himself to their deaths. Since a briefcase and the victim’s expensive sneakers are missing from the scene, Ellen Norgaard begins investigating whether Jens had an accomplice. Jens had gone off the rails two years earlier, after his father disappeared, and Karin had just arranged a victim-offender mediation for him. When Jens’s sister, Rike, tells Karin that she recently saw their father in Poland, Karin sets out to find him and succeeds in tracking down Heiner Kampwirth, who was believed to be dead. He had disappeared back then after burning Rike’s neck with an iron. The children received the life insurance payout, and Rike has since been running a small hotel. When Karin now tries to stop Heiner from fleeing again, he manages to get away with help from his Polish girlfriend. Heiner arranges for a Berlin taxi driver he knows, who is staying at Rike’s hotel, to pick him up in Poland, and goes to see his daughter. At first he apologizes, but what he really wants is money, since he owes his Polish girlfriend and assumes some of the life insurance money is still left. Rike angrily sends him away. The next morning, Heiner is found dead on a fishing boat, wearing Ingo Wiek’s sneakers. It looks as though he was his son’s accomplice. But neither Ellen nor Karin finds this convincing. Karin identifies one of Wiek’s employees as the accomplice—the same man who found Heiner that morning. He had planned the robbery with Jens, but did not know Jens would bring a loaded gun and that the robbery would go so grotesquely wrong. He also took the shoes because the victim was always bragging about them. But he did not kill Heiner Kampwirth: Heiner had injured himself during an argument with his Polish girlfriend and, as a result, died the following day from bleeding in the brain caused by the rupture of a small blood vessel.