Lotte Jäger und die Tote im Dorf (2018)

Detective Chief Inspector Kurt Schaake introduces Detective Senior Inspector Lotte Jäger, a special investigator with the Potsdam murder squad’s cold-case unit, to retired Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Dahlke, his former instructor. Dahlke and Schaake look back on an unsolved murder in the Brandenburg village of Großlühne, which took place 16 years earlier. The day before a young woman was murdered, the whole village had been in a state of euphoria because the local football club had won an important promotion match. Kurt Schaake recalls that Manuela Kirschner, who was later murdered, left the celebration at around two o’clock, after saying goodbye to her fiancé, Jan Stober. She then went off alone. Manuela must have opened the door to someone, perhaps because she thought it was her fiancé or because she knew the person. The killer tried to rape the young woman and stabbed her again and again. The murder weapon, a knife with a blade a good 10 centimetres long, was never found. The victim’s father and brother, who were away at the time, were the only ones definitely known to be innocent. Everyone else in the village had something to hide. Questioning people yielded nothing, since most had been heavily intoxicated that night and could not even remember how they had got home. The list of suspects had then narrowed to three young men and the football club’s manager at the time. Schaake shows Jäger a picture of Tom Riebe, then 18 and the prime suspect, who had no alibi for several hours on the night of the murder. At the celebration, he had danced with Manuela repeatedly, but she had probably rebuffed his further advances because of her fiancé. Dahlke says that an anonymous person sent him a videotape containing footage from the night of the crime. Schaake explains that at the time they searched desperately but unsuccessfully for the tape. “You don’t just send something like that for no reason,” Dahlke adds. Dahlke says that the whole village stuck together back then, and he still believes that everyone knows what happened. Jäger drives her convertible to Brandenburg and checks into the local inn in Großlühne. The villagers are hostile toward her. That night, she has nightmares. She speaks with Kurt Holler, the innkeeper, whose wife Ulla died in a fatal car accident ten months ago, for reasons that are impossible to understand. “Back then, everyone in the village basically died,” Holler says. Next, Jäger talks to Jan Stober, who is now married to the mayor’s daughter. He blames himself for not having accompanied his fiancée. Jäger also speaks with Hans Breth, Manuela’s former landlord. He says he has been unable to rent out the apartment since then, and that he liked Manuela. She had been courageous; together with Ulla, the innkeeper Holler’s wife, she had fought against having a huge number of wind turbines put right on their doorstep. Now both women are dead. Jäger discovers that the home of Tom Riebe, the prime suspect at the time, is directly opposite the house where Manuela lived, and that he could see into the young woman’s room from his window. Riebe’s parents are dismissive of Jäger. His wife Claudia even makes a veiled threat against the inspector. Further conversations with local residents do not really move the case forward either. Florian Grasso, who runs a flight school, tells Jäger that, as far as he is concerned, everyone in the village who suspected him is dead. Jäger takes a flight over the village with him and is thrilled by the experience. Afterwards, the inspector speaks with Jan Stober and then witnesses a strange gathering of various people. After Jäger has spoken with Lore Kosch and had a glass of juice at her place, she experiences lapses while driving. When she comes to, she is at the inn in the wrong room and notices that Kurt Schaake has arrived; he had been worried because he could no longer reach her. Jäger seems desperate. “We’re going round in circles,” she tells Schaake. “Everyone is lying.” It has since emerged that there was a landfill in the village, operated for four years by influential residents, who received substantial subsidies from the Treuhand. Could it be that Manuela Kirschner and Ulla Holler had opposed not only the wind turbines but also a landfill? Hans Breth shows the investigators photographs proving that radioactive waste was dumped at the landfill. Perhaps that was why so many people in the village had become ill, including Manuela’s mother. Jäger has an insight about the murder knife, which is then indeed found with metal detectors in the area they have cordoned off. Holler now reveals that his wife had compiled documents that she wanted to make public; they concerned, among other things, groundwater contamination. The landfill had been used not only for radioactive waste but also for nuclear waste from the Russian barracks. That had saved the investors a great deal of money. “No expensive hazardous-waste disposal—just get rid of it, here with us,” he says bitterly. His wife would no longer listen to him—and then she was dead. By court order, the villagers are summoned to provide saliva samples. The result is more than surprising: none of the villagers is the killer. The DNA test shows a match with a man who has been in prison for years for another offence. Suddenly, life returns to the village, along with its old sense of community; a burden that had weighed on the residents for years has been lifted from their shoulders.