On the afternoon of July 24, 2024, a neighbor in a multi-story apartment building on the Neue Krugallee in the Berlin district of Plänterwald noticed a fire on the ground floor at about 1:15 p.m. The fire brigade put it out and carried the tenant, a 72-year-old woman, out of her apartment. She was already dead. The police statement the next morning was two sentences long and said the investigation into the cause of the fire and of her death was continuing.
It was the fourth fire of its kind in Berlin in six weeks. In each one an elderly, seriously ill woman had died at home, and in each one the same doctor from a palliative-care team had visited her that day. Thirteen days later that doctor, a 39-year-old physician with a doctorate in medicine, was in custody. Two years later, on July 8, 2026, the Landgericht Berlin I convicted him at first instance on fifteen counts of murder of his own patients and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He has appealed, and as of the latest reports the verdict is not final.
German courts and the German press do not publish his surname. He appears in the Berlin papers, on ZDF and in Associated Press reports as Johannes M., and that is how he is named here.
Johannes M. was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1984, according to the Berliner Zeitung's report from the first day of his trial. He studied medicine at Frankfurt's Goethe University between 2004 and 2013 and took his doctorate there, Hessischer Rundfunk (hr) reported after confirming his Frankfurt origins with the Berlin prosecutors. His dissertation, submitted in 2013, was titled "Warum töten Menschen?" ("Why do people kill?") and studied homicides in Frankfurt between 1945 and 2008. According to hr, one subchapter dealt with the killing of elderly people and the high number of such cases that go undetected. After his arrest, the university told hr it had seen no early warning signs.
He completed two specialist trainings, dpa reported. AFP, citing German media, said he trained as a radiologist and a general practitioner before moving into palliative care. Patient reviews from 2011 and 2013, hr found, indicated that he had worked as a ward physician in the radiation oncology department of the Nordwest-Krankenhaus in Frankfurt. In 2020 he moved to Berlin. He is married and has a son of primary-school age.
In Berlin he worked in outpatient palliative care, the field that looks after people with serious, incurable illness at home, where the aim is to relieve pain and keep up quality of life. The court found that he worked first for a Berlin medical care center (Medizinisches Versorgungszentrum) and later for a Berlin nursing service; ZDF described one employer as a Kreuzberg nursing service specializing in palliative care. The people who worked with him, the patients and their relatives described him as empathetic. A former colleague, quoted by the court's psychiatric expert, put it this way: "So nice and kind, it was such a smooth surface, you couldn't see anything underneath." Witnesses called him "the nice one, the kind one, the helpful one."
The authorities have not released the names of the fifteen people in the indictment. Their ages, the dates and the Berlin districts come from the Berlin Attorney General's office (Generalstaatsanwaltschaft) and from joint police and prosecution statements. All fifteen were seriously ill. None of them, the court found, was close to death.
The first was a 25-year-old woman who died in her apartment in Buckow, in the south of the Neukölln district, on September 22, 2021. The Berliner Zeitung identified her as Kadiatou D. She had cancer. She came from Guinea, and her mother attended the trial as a joint plaintiff, weeping as the indictment was read on the first day. Her mother's lawyer told the court in closing that the young woman had been a fighter who "wanted to beat the cancer," and that she had let the doctor in because he was known as helpful and friendly, "a carer." Her mother told the court: "She never said that she didn't want to live anymore." After the defendant's confession in June 2026, she showed reporters a photograph of her daughter outside the courtroom.
The second was a 70-year-old woman in Tempelhof, on June 24, 2022. Afterward a fire was set in her apartment. A neighbor called the fire brigade, which stopped the flames from spreading through the building.
On September 5, 2022, the doctor visited a physically weakened 56-year-old woman at home in Neukölln. According to the indictment, after giving her the drugs he grew afraid of being found out, called the emergency services himself, and told them falsely that he had found her needing resuscitation and had already begun it. The paramedics revived her and took her to a hospital in Neukölln. She had an advance directive saying she did not want life-prolonging treatment. Knowing this, the prosecution said, he then phoned her daughter and apologized for the breach of her directive. With the consent of both daughters the ventilation was stopped, and she died on September 8, 2022. (The April 2025 indictment release gives the year of her death as 2024; dpa and AFP report she died three days after the visit, which fits 2022.)
There is a gap of more than a year in the indictment. The next case is a 70-year-old man in Neukölln on January 29, 2024. After him came an 83-year-old woman in Britz on the morning of March 29, 2024; a 61-year-old woman in Schöneberg on April 4; an 83-year-old man in his room at the hospice of the DRK-Kliniken Köpenick on April 29; an 83-year-old woman in Gropiusstadt on the morning of April 30; a 73-year-old woman in Köpenick on the morning of May 6; and a 57-year-old woman in Kreuzberg on June 5.
On June 11, 2024, residents of a building on the Niemetzstraße in Neukölln saw flames in an apartment at about 12:30 p.m. The fire brigade evacuated the building. Rescuers carried out the 87-year-old tenant, unconscious, and revived her; she died in hospital a short time later. Three other tenants were treated at the scene for injuries. Arson investigators of the State Criminal Police Office took over the case. The prosecution later charged that the doctor had killed her and then set the fire.
On the morning of July 8, 2024, a 75-year-old man died in his apartment in Kreuzberg. A few hours later, according to the indictment, the doctor went to the home of a 76-year-old woman in Neukölln, gave her the drugs and tried to set a fire, which went out on its own. When he realized it had failed, prosecutors said, he called one of her relatives and claimed he was standing outside her door and no one was answering the bell.
A week later, on July 15, a 94-year-old woman died in her apartment in Neukölln, and a fire was set in her kitchen. On July 24 came the woman in Plänterwald. The Tagesspiegel identified her as Gisela B. Her son, 54, told the court in September 2025 that he had phoned her that morning to ask how she liked her new mattress. "Mother said she had slept wonderfully," he said. A few hours later she was dead. "She had plans, she wanted to travel to the Baltic Sea with her sister. My mother wanted to go on living."
Twelve of the fifteen were women and three were men, aged 25 to 94. Most were alone when he came. On a few occasions, the prosecutor said at the opening of the trial, relatives were in the home while he gave the drugs.
The investigation did not begin as a homicide inquiry. Police first investigated the fires as arson resulting in death. Autopsies showed that the dead women had not died as a result of the fires, and the doctor came increasingly into focus. Tips from the nursing service he worked for helped, the prosecutors said. AFP, citing German media, reported that a co-worker first raised the alarm in July 2024 because so many of his patients had died in fires.
On August 6, 2024, an investigating judge issued a warrant at the prosecutors' request, and he was taken into pretrial custody. The joint police and prosecution statement of August 7 described him as a 39-year-old doctor who had worked in the palliative team of a nursing service, held on suspicion of four counts of manslaughter (Totschlag), one count of completed and three of attempted especially serious arson. He was suspected of having killed four patients of the nursing service "in a manner not yet known" between June 11 and July 24, 2024, and of setting fires in their apartments to cover up the killings. The four were the women of June 11, July 8, July 15 and July 24.
A special investigation group was set up within the homicide division of the Berlin State Criminal Police Office (Landeskriminalamt) together with the prosecutors. It went through hundreds of patient files.
On November 28, 2024, the warrant was extended. The prosecutors now treated the four deaths of summer 2024 not as manslaughter but as murder, on the ground that he had no motive beyond the killing itself, which meets the German legal element of Mordlust, the desire to kill. Patient records and forensic examinations, two of them after exhumation, had added four more suspected cases: the 70-year-old woman in Tempelhof in June 2022, the 70-year-old man in Neukölln in January 2024, the 61-year-old woman in Schöneberg in April 2024 and the 83-year-old man in the Köpenick hospice. In each, prosecutors said, he had given a "mixture of various medications" without medical reason.
Within a week, media reports said the investigators were looking at more than forty deaths. A prosecution spokesman, Sebastian Büchner, would not confirm a number. "The review of the patient files is continuing," he told dpa. Eugen Brysch of the German Foundation for Patient Protection (Deutsche Stiftung Patientenschutz) called for every one of the doctor's patient contacts to be checked and said the bereaved had a right to a full accounting. In Frankfurt, hr reported, the Nordwest-Krankenhaus was checking whether there had been irregularities during his time there.
On February 11, 2025, the warrant was extended a second time, to ten counts. The two new cases were the 25-year-old woman in Buckow in September 2021, then the earliest known, and the 57-year-old woman in Kreuzberg in June 2024. The police asked colleagues of the suspect and relatives of patients who had their own suspicions to contact the 2nd Homicide Squad.
Much of the case rested on bodies that had already been buried. By the time of the indictment in April 2025, twelve bodies had been exhumed, five of them in cases that were part of the charges, and five more exhumations were planned for the separate investigation. By the opening of the trial in July 2025 the prosecution spokesman said exhumations had been ordered in fifteen cases, with one still to be carried out.
The investigation group had examined 395 deaths in all. In 95 of them the investigators found initial grounds for suspicion and opened proceedings; in five, that suspicion was not borne out. In April 2026 the prosecutor, Philipp Meyhöfer, said a further exhumation would take place in Croatia at the end of April, because the woman concerned had been buried there. The Berliner Zeitung reported in July 2026 that it had been carried out. That woman is part of the uncharged investigation, not of the fifteen.
In court, a toxicologist explained that without artificial ventilation a muscle relaxant stops breathing within minutes. Residues of a muscle relaxant were found repeatedly in the examinations, dpa reported, and toxicology reports documented lethal substances in several cases.
On April 16, 2025, the Berlin public prosecutor's office indicted Johannes M., then 40, before the Landgericht Berlin I on fifteen counts of murder, committed with treachery (Heimtücke) and from other base motives (sonstige niedrige Beweggründe). The indictment ran to 255 pages. It charged that on each occasion he had given the patient, without medical indication and without the patient's knowledge or consent, first an anesthesia-induction drug and then a muscle relaxant, which paralyzed the respiratory muscles and caused death within minutes. The prosecutors asked the court not only to convict him but to find particular gravity of guilt, to impose a lifetime ban on practicing medicine and to order preventive detention after his sentence.
Because the prosecutors chose to concentrate on the murder charges, the arson allegations were dropped from the indictment under German procedure. The defendant, the release noted, had so far said nothing about the accusations.
The trial began on Monday, July 14, 2025, in courtroom 700 of the criminal court building in Moabit, a wood-paneled room where, the Berliner Zeitung noted, the "Captain of Köpenick," Erich Honecker and Erich Mielke had all been tried. The presiding judge was Sylvia Busch. Johannes M., in a black jacket and a white patterned shirt, sat behind his three defense lawyers and listened to the prosecutor read the charges for about twenty minutes. "Our client will not make any statement for now," said his lawyer, Christoph Stoll. His other lawyers were Ria Halbritter and Klaudia Dawidowic.
Meyhöfer told the court that the doctor had visited his patients "under the pretext of medical care," arranged home visits already intending to kill, and "deliberately exploited the fact that he was given complete trust as a doctor." He had acted, the indictment said, "in disregard of the right to life and self-determination" of his patients, in order to carry out his "own ideas of dying and of the moment of the end of life," and had set himself up as "master over life and death." He had sometimes arrived unannounced, and the patients were usually alone.
Thirteen relatives of the dead had joined the case as joint plaintiffs (Nebenkläger), a role German law gives to victims' families. Three came in person on the first day. "Beloved family members have died. They want that heard here," one of their lawyers said. One plaintiffs' lawyer called it potentially "the largest case in the judicial history of the Federal Republic." The court began with the fire cases and initially set 35 hearing dates through January 28, 2026, with about 150 witnesses. The trial ran far longer.
Over the following year the court heard 204 witnesses and 22 expert witnesses on 58 days: relatives, nurses, firefighters, police officers, neighbors and former colleagues. The first witness was a former supervisor. Investigators had analyzed his mobile phones and his smartwatch and built profiles of his movements. The court also read out numerous documents from the evaluation of his electronic devices.
The most important evidence came from his own voice. From pretrial detention he was allowed to phone his wife, and the homicide squad tapped her line. On April 16, 2026, the 44th day of the trial, a 31-year-old police officer described about 25 of the calls, and parts of the recordings were played in court. According to the officer, the doctor said that society was not yet far enough along and that the law needed to change; that he had always held preliminary talks with the patients; and that he had used medications partly for treatment and partly to kill. In one call he described giving a man an injection "so that it would go quickly," and spoke of it as assisted dying. He told his wife he had been killing for a long time. It had given him no pleasure, he said, but it had not really worn him down either; he would act the same way again; he had made many mistakes from a criminal-investigation point of view and was annoyed about them. "I'm only grumbling and confessing to killings," he said at one point. He described what he had done as "moral action with the wrong means" and said that he had killed but that it had not been murder.
The officer testified that the calls began affectionately but became increasingly businesslike, and that he had the impression the wife was being drawn more and more into developing ways to explain the cases. The couple discussed, he said, how consent forms might be produced after the fact, and the doctor said he was good at forging signatures. The officer's conclusion was that the doctor "did not kill at random, but in a well-thought-out way." The Tagesspiegel described the moment a passage, scratchy and hard to make out, was played several times in the courtroom: "master over life and death" could be heard. On hearing his own voice from the loudspeaker, the reporter wrote, the defendant straightened briefly.
For almost two years, from his arrest to the last weeks of the trial, he said nothing. On June 25, 2026, the 54th day, he was allowed for the first time to leave the glass-enclosed dock and sit beside his lawyers. He spoke for a little over thirty minutes and admitted killing twelve of the fifteen patients.
"Only now am I able to explain my actions, and I take responsibility for my acts," he said. Addressing the relatives, his own family and his colleagues, he said: "I apologize for the great suffering I have brought upon you." He said he was speaking not because of the "overwhelming evidence" but because of what he had worked through about himself in recent months. He had talked himself into believing he was doing the right thing and sparing patients "suffering and decline" (Leid und Siechtum). "In everything, I thought it was the best for everyone," he said. He had not allowed himself any negative feelings, had not faced the fact that he was overwhelmed, and had acted on his own authority, a dynamic that took on a life of its own as he increasingly authorized himself. "After every killing I thought: this has to stop." He said he had hated himself for it. He was now, he said, a different person from the one arrested in August 2024, and wanted to understand "how I could experience myself for so long as acting responsibly and medically competent, when in fact I was so destructive." He added: "I know that I will be sentenced to life imprisonment. Perhaps that is a consolation for the relatives."
He did not say when he had first killed or give a motive. He denied the other three charges. The reports do not say which three.
The families' lawyers were not persuaded. André Mors, who represented the mother of the youngest patient, said the doctor was citing his patients' illnesses "to hide the true motives." "That was not a full confession," Mors said. "We may never learn his motives." Other plaintiffs' lawyers called the statement "remarkably superficial" and "a slap in the face of the relatives."
Johannes M. refused to be interviewed by the court's psychiatric expert, Dagny Luther, so she based her opinion on observing him at trial and on the evidence. On June 29, 2026, she told the court she could find no disorder that would raise any question about his criminal responsibility. He was fully responsible. She described a self-doubt and insecurity that had been the leading theme of his life since childhood, and a man who defined himself to an unusual degree through his profession. He may, she said, have committed the acts as an anxious person seeking a feeling of power. "His profession made that possible for him." As for whether he would still be dangerous in perhaps fifteen years, that was hard to say. "At the present time the danger has not been averted."
On July 2, 2026, Meyhöfer asked for the maximum: life imprisonment for murder in fifteen cases, a finding of particular gravity of guilt, preventive detention after the sentence and a lifetime ban on practicing medicine. "Anyone who abuses his profession like this may never practice it again," he said. The doctor had exploited his patients' trust "with hostile intent," and the killings showed "a profound indifference to the dignity and the value of the lives of seriously ill people." He gave the confession little weight: it was a partial confession that retraced, "in remarkably superficial fashion," what the evidence had already shown, and showed no credible understanding of the wrong. With an eye to the further investigation, he urged the defendant to spare the relatives further suffering and to take real responsibility.
The plaintiffs' lawyers called his conduct "dangerous and malicious" and said his confession was not carried by remorse but showed "a calculating face."
The defense did not contest that a life sentence would follow. Stoll argued that his client had not acted from base motives; Halbritter said he had lived with the idea that he was relieving suffering, and that a propensity to kill had not been proved. They asked the court not to find particular gravity of guilt and not to order preventive detention. A professional ban hardly mattered, Halbritter said: he would never work as a doctor again and would never get his license back. The defense rejected the criticism that the timing of the confession had been tactical, and denied that it was only partial.
In his last word on July 6, 2026, the defendant apologized again to the families. "I have killed people. That is why I despair of myself," he said. He was only now beginning to grasp "the extent of the suffering." He also said, looking ahead to the further investigation: "In the coming proceedings I will make a statement much earlier."
On July 8, 2026, the 21st Grand Criminal Chamber of the Landgericht Berlin I, sitting as a Schwurgericht (the chamber for the most serious offenses), convicted the 41-year-old on fifteen counts of murder of his patients. It imposed life imprisonment, found particular gravity of guilt, ordered preventive detention (Sicherungsverwahrung) to follow the sentence, and banned him from practicing medicine for life. The court followed the prosecution's requests on every point.
In her oral reasons Busch rejected the defendant's account of his motive. "The patients placed themselves in his hands, and he was the one who raised himself above life and death," she said. "The patients wanted to live. These acts have nothing to do with palliative medicine or assisted dying." He had chosen to work in that field, she said, in order to be able to kill. He had not killed out of pity, misguided assisted dying or exhaustion, but "because he was able to do it undisturbed," and to gain, as "an insecure person," a feeling of the greatest possible power. The court's written summary described an insecure, anxious-avoidant personality who wanted to raise his own worth through the acts, lived out fantasies of omnipotence and played the "master over life and death." That made each killing murder from base motives and, because of how the acts were committed, by treachery as well.
The court called his denial of three of the counts a self-serving claim and found the evidence proved he was responsible for all fifteen. Busch described the case as beyond comprehension, not only for the number of victims but for the fact that the man responsible appeared to the world as a friendly doctor and family man. She said the fifteen counts were probably only "the tip of the iceberg," and pointed to the call in which he told his wife he had "always, for a long time" been killing. The chamber regarded him as a serial offender, and said there was a suspicion that "beyond this, many more people died at the hand of the defendant."
German law does not allow life sentences to be stacked. The court imposed a separate life sentence for each of the fifteen murder counts and, under section 54 of the Criminal Code, merged them into a single aggregate life sentence; the court's press release noted that, unlike in some other countries, several life sentences cannot be imposed side by side in Germany. A person serving life can normally be considered for release on probation after fifteen years. The finding of particular gravity of guilt under section 57a means that fifteen years will not be enough, and the time served will be longer; the Berliner Kurier wrote that release after fifteen years was now all but ruled out. Preventive detention under section 66 allows a person to be held after the sentence has been served if a court finds him a continuing danger to the public. The professional ban was imposed for life under section 70. The case number is 521 Ks 4/25.
The judgment was not final when it was pronounced. The court's own press release said so: "The judgment is not yet final. It can be challenged by the legal remedy of Revision." A Revision is an appeal on points of law only, decided in this case by the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) in Karlsruhe, which reviews the judgment for legal errors and does not rehear the evidence. His lawyers announced it immediately after the verdict, and on July 10, 2026, a court spokeswoman confirmed to dpa that the defense had filed it.
As of that July 10, 2026, dpa report, the Revision was pending and the defendant remained in pretrial custody, as the court had ordered. His legal status is therefore that of a man convicted at first instance whose conviction is under appeal. The Berlin criminal courts' press releases and the Berlin public prosecutor's press releases, checked on October 14, 2026, contain nothing on the case after the July 8 verdict release: no announcement of a Federal Court of Justice decision and no second indictment. That is the absence of an announcement, not a confirmed statement of the appeal's progress, and the Federal Court of Justice itself was not checked.
The fifteen convicted counts are not the end of the matter. Parallel to the trial, the prosecutors kept investigating other deaths among the doctor's patients. The number has moved over time: 75 cases at the indictment in April 2025, 71 at the opening of the trial in July 2025 (AFP was told 96 that day, a figure that appears to count all 95 opened proceedings plus one), "more than 70" in April 2026 and 76 by June 2026. At the verdict the prosecutors said they expected a second indictment before the end of 2026. Those deaths are uncharged. He has not been convicted of any of them, and they are not counted among the victims here.
Among them is the death of his mother-in-law. She had cancer, and according to media reports cited by AFP she died the same weekend in early 2024 that he and his wife visited her in Poland. The prosecution spokesman confirmed in July 2025 that her death was among the cases under investigation. Nothing in the sources fetched says whether the investigators found evidence of a crime in her death.
At least thirteen families joined the trial as joint plaintiffs. What is known about the people who died comes mostly from their testimony. The son of Gisela B. described a mother with plans for a trip to the Baltic coast with her sister. The mother of Kadiatou D. sat through the first day in tears and, a year later, held up her daughter's photograph outside the courtroom. Both said what the court later found: that the patients wanted to live. Busch repeated it in her reasons.
The Berliner Zeitung photographed Tina Kromm and her mother Gertrud Uecker, whom it described as relatives of an alleged victim, at the verdict. The article available without a subscription does not say which death their case concerns.
Several layers of the case have different standing and are kept apart here.
Convicted at first instance: fifteen counts of murder, twelve women and three men aged 25 to 94, from September 22, 2021, to July 24, 2024. These are findings of a trial court. They are not final while the Revision is pending.
Admitted: twelve of the fifteen, in his statement of June 25, 2026. He denied the other three; the court rejected the denials.
Found but not charged: setting fires at five of the scenes (one of which went out by itself). The arson counts were set aside at indictment, so the fires are part of the court's findings of fact but were not separately tried.
Disputed: his motive. He told the court he had persuaded himself he was sparing patients suffering. The court, the prosecution and the families' lawyers rejected this, and the court found he killed to feel powerful. In tapped calls he had described his acts to his wife as assisted dying and as "moral action with the wrong means." The patients did not ask to die, the court found, and none was in the final phase of dying.
Suspected and uncharged: 76 further deaths under investigation as of mid-2026, including his mother-in-law's. The judge's view that the fifteen were "the tip of the iceberg" is a statement of suspicion, not a finding of guilt for any other death. The prosecutors' early theory of Mordlust, killing for the sake of killing, was replaced at indictment by base motives and treachery.
Comparisons: several outlets wrote that, if further convictions follow, the case could become one of the largest series of killings in postwar Germany. That is a projection, not a fact. The largest so far is the case of the former nurse Niels Högel, convicted in 2019 of 85 murders of patients in Delmenhorst and Oldenburg.
The case revived questions that Germany has faced before in hospitals and care homes, but in a setting that is harder to watch: patients dying at home, where death is expected and doctors visit alone. Eugen Brysch of the German Foundation for Patient Protection said in November 2024 that serial offenders in outpatient care and medicine are hard to catch, because illness and death are part of daily life there, and that even artificial intelligence would fail because there is no standardized digital record of drugs given and visit times. He called for a whistleblower system for relatives and medical and nursing staff, and for specialized prosecutors and central investigation units for offenses in care and medicine in every German state.
In Berlin, a homicide-squad team spent the better part of two years opening graves, reading patient files and reconstructing visits from a smartwatch. What brought the case to light was not a medical audit but fires that failed to hide what had happened, and a nursing service whose staff passed on what they had noticed.
1984: Johannes M. born in Frankfurt am Main.
2004-2013: Studies medicine at Goethe University Frankfurt; doctorate in 2013 with a dissertation on homicides in Frankfurt.
2020: Moves to Berlin.
September 22, 2021: Death of a 25-year-old woman (Kadiatou D.) in Buckow, the first of the fifteen counts.
June 24, 2022: Death of a 70-year-old woman in Tempelhof; fire set.
September 5-8, 2022: A 56-year-old woman in Neukölln is given the drugs, revived and dies in hospital.
January 29 to June 5, 2024: Seven deaths in Neukölln, Britz, Schöneberg, the Köpenick hospice, Gropiusstadt, Köpenick and Kreuzberg.
June 11, 2024: Death of an 87-year-old woman in Neukölln after a fire; arson investigation opened.
July 8, 2024: Deaths of a 75-year-old man in Kreuzberg and a 76-year-old woman in Neukölln; attempted fire.
July 15, 2024: Death of a 94-year-old woman in Neukölln; kitchen fire.
July 24, 2024: Death of a 72-year-old woman (Gisela B.) in Plänterwald; fire.
August 6, 2024: Arrested and remanded on four counts of manslaughter and arson.
November 28, 2024: Warrant extended to eight counts, now treated as murder.
February 11, 2025: Warrant extended to ten counts; police appeal for witnesses.
April 16, 2025: Indicted on fifteen counts of murder; twelve exhumations so far; 75 further cases under investigation.
July 14, 2025: Trial opens at the Landgericht Berlin I; the defendant stays silent.
April 16, 2026: Tapped prison phone calls with his wife played in court.
June 25, 2026: On the 54th day he admits twelve of the fifteen killings.
June 29, 2026: Psychiatric expert finds him fully responsible.
July 2, 2026: Prosecution asks for life with particular gravity of guilt, preventive detention and a lifetime ban.
July 6, 2026: Last word; he apologizes again.
July 8, 2026: Convicted at first instance on all fifteen counts; life imprisonment, particular gravity of guilt, preventive detention, lifetime professional ban.
July 10, 2026: Court confirms the defense has filed a Revision to the Federal Court of Justice; 76 further deaths under investigation.
October 14, 2026: No BGH decision or second indictment announced on the Berlin court and prosecution press pages.