Mordsfreunde (2014)

Investigators Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are faced with a macabre puzzle: body parts are found in various places around a zoo. The person initially suspected is quickly ruled out, since he is himself the murder victim. He is high-school teacher Hans-Ulrich Pauly. His commitment to animal and nature conservation won him many friends, but also many enemies. At least one of them seemed to mean business. Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein probe the murdered man’s social circle and uncover a complex web of relationships. Many leads go back to the 1980s and extend into the present. Pauly’s former university classmates and housemates are now among the town’s leading citizens, and their children were his students. As activists, they have more in common with him than a simple student-teacher relationship. Tensions from thirty years in the past, as well as a death and a conviction from that period, seem to hold the key to Pauly’s murder. His former classmates became enemies, and it eventually emerges that the teacher was only using and inciting his students in order to act against their parents. His former exceptionally gifted student Tarek also realizes that Pauly is exploiting him for his own ends. Finally, it turns out that it was not Pauly’s former friends, among them the zoo director, who were responsible for his death, as initially suspected, but Tarek. Shortly after he also kidnaps Pia Kirchhoff, he is found and ultimately takes his own life.