Uhudler Verschwörung - Ein Stinatz Krimi (2025)

When Uhudler winegrower Alois “Loisl” Fabsits is found dead in his wine cellar, a fermentation-gas accident is initially suspected. Although Inspector Sifkovits is instructed by his boss, Colonel Taschner, in Eisenstadt not to get involved and instead to investigate a chicken theft at Edi and Kiki Brus’s farm, Sifkovits takes up the investigation. His mother, Baba Sifkovits, and Resl Grandits provide him with information, while Hilda Resetarits is away at a spa. The inspector notices a wound on Alois’s head that may have been caused by a fall. He also sees that Alois’s car has no hail damage, even though it hailed the day before. Christa Fabsits is the victim’s widow; Sifkovits went to school in Güssing with her daughter, Bettina. Adrian Popescu was the victim’s right-hand man, and Christa says he had met with Alois shortly before his death. Popescu tells the inspector that Alois had argued with his competitor Markus Schillinger. According to Christa, the dispute was about a wine cellar that Markus Schillinger’s father had bequeathed to Alois Fabsits. Kiki Brus admits to Sifkovits that she was jealous of the chickens because her husband, Edi, took more care of them than he did of her. She had delivered the chickens to the innkeeper Javorics. Sifkovits notices that something is wrong with the victim’s belt: it is threaded in the wrong direction for a right-handed person. Christa says he was not left-handed either. So Fabsits could not have put the belt on himself. Looking at a wedding photo of Adrian and Mariana Popescu, Sifkovits identifies it as a fake because the shadows fall in different directions, and suspects the two are not married. While examining the deed gifting the wine cellar, Baba notices that the postcode on it was incorrect at the time it was issued, meaning the deed is also forged. Schillinger had discovered this and confronted Loisl about it. But Sifkovits says Schillinger is not the murderer, because he is left-handed. After his brother-in-law, who works at a bank, alerts him to payments sent to Cluj, Sifkovits travels to Romania. There he comes across the names of siblings Eugen and Tereza Trifu, who live in Stinatz under the names Adrian and Mariana Popescu. Their sister Vali has been missing since she worked as a nanny for the Fabsits family. According to Alois, she returned home back then because she was homesick. He had transferred a substantial sum of money to the Trifu family. Mariana then knocks Sifkovits out from behind. The autopsy reveals that Alois did not suffocate from the fermentation gases; he was already dead when he was placed in the cellar. Alois died of cardiac arrest triggered by a pharmaceutical interaction between two medications. Dr. Elke Glatz had diagnosed Bettina Fabsits with dissociative amnesia. In the Fabsits family’s vehicle inspection pit, Sifkovits finds Vali Trifu’s remains. The Trifu siblings, living as the Popescus, had discovered that Alois had sexually abused and murdered Vali, then 15, and bricked her into the vehicle inspection pit. Loisl had paid them substantial sums of money to keep quiet. The fact that Alois’s car has no hail damage leads Sifkovits to conclude that Bettina killed her father with medication because he had also abused her when she was a child, though for a long time she could no longer remember it.