Schneekind - Ein Schwarzwaldkrimi (2024)

In May, a hiker is found dead in a patch of woods known locally as Murder Hollow. Opposite him is a snowman missing one eye. The person who finds the body is hunter Henriette Rösch. The dead man, Werner Bojarski from Hückeswagen, is sitting with his back against a tree and has frozen despite the summer temperatures. He had been hiking in the Black Forest with a group from North Rhine-Westphalia, but apparently had also been sent to Freudenstadt as a child in the 1980s. Investigators Maris Bächle and Konrad Diener of the Freudenstadt Criminal Investigation Department learn from forensic pathologist Dr. Stefan Zabel that the victim was flash-frozen. Soon afterwards, Maris finds another victim, Ingrid Angers, beside a playground marked on a map belonging to the first victim. The playground was part of a former children’s home that real-estate agent Karl Melchert intends to sell. Ingrid Angers had been interested in the property. She, too, was flash-frozen, and once again there was a snowman opposite her. The nature of the murders brings Florentin Sneelin under suspicion. He is a reproductive medicine specialist who lives in a romantic moated castle in the town of Glatt. The suspect knew both victims from a stay at the children’s home many years earlier. The female supervisors who looked after the children there enforced discipline and order, sometimes using sadistic methods. The children began treating one another the same way. A strict caste system prevailed among them. Sneelin belonged to the lowest caste. He was a “snow child”—a child whom the mother intended to pass off as the father’s. Using an analytical method, Claudia, Konrad Diener’s wife, has an acquaintance determine that the snowman by the first victim had been made from water from the Kübelbach, one of the streams that form the Glatt. The investigators therefore take Sneelin to the Criminal Investigation Department and detain him. Florentin Sneelin’s mother is Grazia Friedli, who murdered her husband, Rudolf Friedli, in the 1980s and spent 18 years in prison after her conviction. She lives in Dornstetten. City archivist Andreas Zollner, who had planned a weekend trip to Lucerne with Maris—they had just fallen in love—suddenly breaks up with her, supposedly because she is too focused on her investigations. Soon afterwards, viewers learn that Andreas Zollner, agent Melchert and hunter Rösch, like Sneelin, were also sent to the children’s home as children. Meanwhile, Martin Coerde turns up at the Criminal Investigation Department, claiming to be an investigator from the State Criminal Police Office. Soon after, Coerde, Maris’s former colleague at the Freudenstadt Criminal Investigation Department, overpowers her at the children’s home and locks her in its basement. Coerde had been suspended from duty because a woman died during an interrogation and Maris Bächle had not covered for him in the investigation into the incident. Coerde repeatedly calls Maris “Hauser,” a name explained in the first two episodes of the Black Forest crime series Und tot bist Du! – Ein Schwarzwaldkrimi. In the basement, Maris finds the body of Jonny Mersmann, who had been sent to the home as a child and died after falling through the ice in winter during a punishment. Coerde was the son of the children’s home doctor, Dr. Dietmar Coerde. Nelson, the city archivist’s assistant, discovers that death notices for the murder victims had been placed before they died. Diener and Senior Detective Bernadette Ramsberger discover that both city archivist Zollner and Florentin Sneelin belong to a Swiss foundation that acquired the children’s home property. Meanwhile, Maris manages to escape from the basement. At the same time, Andreas Zollner and agent Melchert attack Coerde with a flash-freezing machine. Coerde uses Maris’s firearm, however, and says that he has her in his power. This enables him to prevent his own death, and he escapes. The group had apparently used Maris to lure Coerde in. At the children’s home, hunter Rösch—who had also been part of the attack team against Coerde—knocks Maris unconscious, loads her into a van and takes her to the moated castle in Glatt. There she is given knockout drops, leaving her unable to remember anything afterwards. She is then released. It is meanwhile revealed that Florentin Sneelin was not Rudolf Friedli’s son, but the son of Silvio Zangrani, an Italian ice-cream seller from Freudenstadt who died in an avalanche in Italy that Florentin survived as a child. The avalanche disaster had been a crime orchestrated by Rudolf Friedli, which was also the motive for his murder by his wife, Grazia. The children’s home’s patient files also reveal that Dr. Dietmar Coerde had conducted experiments on the children sent there for the pharmaceutical industry. Maris and Konrad return to the children’s home. Maris then remembers again and leads Konrad to Jonny’s body. They also find the body of agent Karl Melchert there. At the end of the episode, Maris goes with Andreas Zollner to a meeting of the group that arranged the murders. Coerde also appears and shoots at Maris. Andreas throws himself into the line of fire and is hit; the police shoot Coerde dead, and Sneelin commits suicide by flash-freezing himself.