For 357 days, between December 1968 and December 1969, families in the countryside around Coburg, Lichtenfels, Kronach and Bamberg kept their daughters close. Three girls, one aged 14 and two aged 16, were murdered in under a year. Parents drove girls to dances and fetched them home again. The man arrested for the killings on December 12, 1969, was not a stranger to the area. He was Manfred Wittmann, a single man in his mid-twenties from the village of Kaltenbrunn in the Itzgrund, who mixed concrete and bitumen on building sites and lived with his parents in the middle of the village.
He confessed within hours. In late 1971 the jury court at Coburg rejected his lawyer's argument that he should be sent to a psychiatric hospital, found him fully responsible, and sentenced him to life imprisonment three times over, with a finding of particular gravity of guilt. He served the sentence in Straubing. In June 2013, at 70, frail and barely able to walk without help, he was released on probation to a care home after 43 years, following a ruling by the Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg. The decision, and the reasons the courts gave for it, made the case a regional argument for a second time, more than four decades after the murders.
Kaltenbrunn is a village of about 500 people in the Itzgrund. At the time of the murders it belonged to the district of Staffelstein. The Fränkischer Tag, the regional daily for Upper Franconia, has described the shock that ran through the area when the killer turned out to be a local man whom no one had suspected of anything of the kind.
Wittmann was in his mid-twenties during the murders; the Fränkischer Tag's Kronach edition gave his age as 26. The paper's reporters have described him as an unmarried man who operated a concrete mixer, and elsewhere as a bitumen mixer at an asphalt plant. His parents lived in the village center, and his sister worked locally. Little is known of his schooling, his training or his early family life, and his exact date of birth was never published; he was reported as 69 in January 2012 and as 70 in June 2013.
Years before the murders, Wittmann had already attacked a young woman. On the second day of Christmas, December 26, 1959, when he was 16, he attacked a 19-year-old woman, who survived.
Accounts differ on what followed. The Fränkischer Tag reported in 2020 that the woman was a coworker of Wittmann's sister and that he had been investigated over the assault at the time. A 2016 article in the same paper's Kronach edition said investigators did not identify him as the attacker back then. No conviction for the 1959 attack is on record.
Nora Wenzl was 14 and lived in Welsberg, a hamlet near Kaltenbrunn. On the evening of December 19, 1968, a few days before Christmas, she set out for home from Kaltenbrunn and did not arrive.
The search for her was large. Police brought in helicopters, and soldiers of the Bundeswehr joined the search. The trail ran out, and weeks passed. She was found dead near Viereth in mid-February 1969.
At his trial Wittmann admitted that he had killed her near Breitengüßbach. Afterward, according to the Fränkischer Tag, he set about destroying evidence. When he read in the newspaper that police had taken footprints, he burned his shoes, and he set fire to his car at a dump site. Those steps would later matter at his trial, when the court had to decide whether he had been in control of his own actions.
Little is known of Nora as a person beyond her age, her home village and her journey home that evening. Her death a week before Christmas, and the long weeks in which she was missing, marked the start of the year of fear that the regional press still writes about.
Helga Luther was 16 and came from Lichtenfels. She was killed on August 28, 1969, more than eight months after Nora Wenzl. She was stabbed. Her body was found near Beikheim, in the Kronach district.
Wittmann later admitted the killing. The similarity between this case and Nora Wenzl's death led investigators to link the two killings and to treat them as the work of one man.
After Helga Luther's death, police arrested a young man from Tettau and held him in the prison at Kronach. Investigators believed they had their killer. The Fränkischer Tag recalled in 2016 that he was not; the real killer was still free and killed again in November. What became of the young man afterward is not known, and there is no record that he was charged with any of the murders.
Sieglinde Heubner was 16 and lived in Kaltenbrunn itself, the same village as the man who killed her. On the evening of November 15, 1969, she left home and was not seen again. The regional reports disagree on where she was going: the Fränkischer Tag's 2020 account says she was on her way to a dance in Rossach, while its 2016 and 2017 accounts say she wanted to go to Untersiemau. Either way, she did not arrive.
Wittmann killed her. She was found dead near Freudeneck after his arrest.
Her family still lived in Kaltenbrunn when he was released in 2013, as did his own relatives, the Fränkischer Tag reported.
The three murders, and the knowledge that the killer had not been caught, changed daily life across the region. The Fränkischer Tag's Kronach reporter Friedwald Schedel, writing in 2016, called it 357 days of fear. Parents walked their daughters to events and collected them afterward. Many young women at the time hitchhiked without a second thought. Hans Welscher, later head of the Fränkischer Tag's Kronach office and then a young man, tested it by driving around and offering lifts to hitchhiking girls. He was dismayed by how readily they got in.
A local paper in Coburg ran the headline "Der Mörder lebt unter uns" ("The murderer lives among us"). The paper also brought a self-styled clairvoyant, Erwin Grünig, known as the "Seer of Lake Constance," to Coburg after Helga Luther's death. Grünig described the killer as a man with dark, wavy hair and attached earlobes who worked with machines. Not all of his description was accurate, the Fränkischer Tag noted in 2020, but some of it matched Wittmann, and his appearance in the area seems to have played a part in pushing Wittmann toward a confession under questioning.
The case also reached national television. Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst, the ZDF program that asked viewers to help solve crimes, had begun in 1967. The Wittmann case was featured on it shortly afterward, the Fränkischer Tag reported on the program's 50th anniversary in 2017.
Meanwhile, in Kaltenbrunn, Wittmann was talking about the murders. According to the Fränkischer Tag, he boasted in the village that the killer would never be caught because he was "zu schlau," too clever.
Police arrested Wittmann in Kaltenbrunn on December 12, 1969, less than a month after Sieglinde Heubner disappeared. Karl Schardt, a police officer from Staffelstein who took part in the arrest, recalled it in a 2006 interview quoted by the Fränkischer Tag. "Gewehrt hat er sich nicht," he said: he did not resist. Schardt called the arrest "mein größtes Ereignis," the biggest event of his career. Schardt, who was born in 1918, died in 2009.
About eight hours after his arrest, Wittmann confessed.
News of the arrest set off an angry reaction. People in the taverns called for the death penalty, and shortly after his arrest Wittmann came close to being lynched, the Fränkischer Tag reported.
The trial opened in November 1971 before the Schwurgericht, the jury court of the Coburg regional court. Hundreds of people gathered outside the court building; 140 were let in. A bomb threat was made against the courtroom, and spectators were searched for weapons. The court took security measures because of signs that some people meant to take the law into their own hands.
The court held hearings at the places connected with the murders, and crowds turned out there too. At one, a man shouted "Steckt ihn in den Ofen!" ("Put him in the oven!"). At another, police had to take Wittmann away in a patrol car to protect him from the crowd.
Wittmann was defended by Rolf Bossi, a well-known Munich defense lawyer. Bossi's case was that his client was not criminally responsible. He asked the court to acquit Wittmann and to commit him to a psychiatric hospital instead of sending him to prison.
Two psychiatric reports were put before the court. The experts found minor malformations of the brain that they judged to have no clinical significance. They also described a serious personality disorder.
The court did not accept the defense. It found Wittmann fully responsible for his actions. One of its reasons, the Fränkischer Tag reported, was the care he had taken to destroy evidence after the first murder, burning his shoes and his car. A man who could plan that, the court reasoned, was able to control his behavior.
On December 15, 1971, the court convicted him of murder in all three cases, with other charges, and sentenced him to life imprisonment three times. It also found that his guilt was of particular gravity, "besondere Schwere der Schuld." That finding would weigh on every later decision about his release.
The choice between prison and a psychiatric hospital proved important. Matthias Konopka, the director of Straubing prison, told the Fränkischer Tag in 2012 that if the court had classed Wittmann as mentally ill and sent him to a hospital, his release would probably never have been considered at all.
When Wittmann was sentenced, a German life sentence carried no legal path to release other than a pardon. That changed in 1977. In a judgment of June 21, 1977, on a referral from the regional court at Verden, the Federal Constitutional Court upheld life imprisonment for murder but held that human dignity requires that a prisoner serving life keep, in principle, a chance of regaining freedom. A pardon alone was not enough, the court said; the conditions and procedure for release had to be set by statute.
A 1981 amendment added section 57a to the Criminal Code, in force from May 1, 1982. Under it, a court suspends the rest of a life sentence on probation once 15 years have been served, if the particular gravity of the prisoner's guilt does not require the sentence to continue and the conditions of the general parole rule are met. The probation period is five years.
In a 1986 decision, the Constitutional Court said that the weighing of guilt belongs to the court that enforces the sentence, that a prisoner's advanced age weighs increasingly in favor of release, and that a release decision may not simply wait until the prisoner is frail or close to death. "Das Recht auf Achtung seiner Würde kann auch dem Straftäter nicht abgesprochen werden," the court wrote: the right to respect for one's dignity cannot be denied even to an offender. When Wittmann's release was confirmed in 2013, the court spokesman in Nuremberg gave almost the same reason.
Wittmann served his sentence in the prison at Straubing. In 2012 the Fränkischer Tag described him as one of the longest-serving prisoners in Germany. Konopka, the prison director, said Wittmann had worked well for more than 42 years and had behaved well, which he said was not unusual for long-term prisoners. He had been treated with medication and had been castrated, Konopka said, but the director still saw a possible danger and pointed to another case in which a treated offender had later attacked a woman.
The criminologist Stephan Harbort interviewed Wittmann several times at Straubing and wrote about the case in his book Das Hannibal-Syndrom, published by Piper. Quoted by the Fränkischer Tag in 2013, Harbort described what drove the killer as "Dominanz, Macht, Kontrolle, Entmenschlichung, Vernichtung": dominance, power, control, dehumanization and destruction.
In 2011 Wittmann's lawyer, Gerlinde Groß of Parkstetten, applied for his release to the sentence-enforcement chamber that handled his case. At the end of December 2011 the chamber decided that he could be released, and in January 2012 a justice spokesman in Straubing confirmed that he might go free in September 2012. The ruling was not yet final. The public prosecutor's office in Coburg could appeal, and the Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg would then decide.
The chamber attached strict conditions. Wittmann was to have no contact with minors. He was to undergo outpatient sexual therapy. He was to live in a suitable facility with medical and social support around the clock, and if no place could be found, or if the placement failed, he would go back to prison. Finding a place was the hard part. There were few suitable facilities, and the few that had been approached turned him down once the case became public.
His lawyer had asked for more freedom than that, such as a rented flat or a place in a monastery near the Czech border, and said she was looking into whether a more home-like arrangement was legally possible. She noted that the chamber had not ordered electronic monitoring.
The prison opposed release. Konopka said in January 2012 that he would not be so sure about it, and that he viewed a free Manfred W. "very critically," acceptable at most in a protected setting. The prison had argued against the application.
The prosecution's view shifted over time. Anton Lohneis, the chief public prosecutor in Coburg, said in January 2012 that he was examining whether an appeal could succeed. He also said he now shared the experts' view that Wittmann no longer posed a danger, given his age and frailty. In the end, the Fränkischer Tag reported in 2013, the Coburg prosecutors objected first to ending the sentence at all and then to release without conditions, arguing that no one could guarantee with complete certainty that he was no longer dangerous. "Man kann einen Menschen nicht einfach mit dem Täschchen unter dem Arm auf die Straße lassen," Lohneis said: a person cannot simply be put out on the street with a little bag under his arm.
In June 2013 the Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg rejected the last complaint against the release, on the strength of new expert reports. Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the courts, confirmed the decision. Under German law, he said, every person has "ein Recht auf seine Würde," a right to his dignity, including a murderer who has served his sentence, and that was why the court had opened the door.
Wittmann was released directly from the prison in Straubing. The release was on probation, with a probation period of five years and a list of conditions, and a probation officer was assigned to help him with daily matters. Lohneis said that under those conditions the release was acceptable. He added that there was hardly any risk of Wittmann returning to Kaltenbrunn, or even to Franconia: "ist alt und krank und kann ohne fremde Hilfe kaum einen Schritt gehen," he said, he is old and sick and can hardly take a step without help.
He had been in his mid-twenties when he went into custody. When he came out, at 70, he had no money. The Fränkischer Tag noted that there had been no mobile phones and no internet when he went in.
By September 2013, three months after the release, Wittmann was living in a care home in Middle Bavaria, far from Kaltenbrunn. Neither the court in Nuremberg nor the prosecutors in Coburg would say where it was. He was expected to stay there for the rest of his life. Because he had no means of his own, the cost of his care was met through social assistance from the Bezirk Oberfranken, the regional authority for Upper Franconia, which the paper expected to be a lifelong commitment.
The Fränkischer Tag's Günter Flegel, writing that month, pointed out why the case had lasted so long. In 1971 the court had stressed the particular gravity of Wittmann's guilt. A German life sentence, he noted, does not necessarily mean prison until death; and in 1971 the alternative to prison would have been commitment to a psychiatric hospital, while retrospective preventive detention did not yet exist.
The village did not forget. When Wittmann was released, the Fränkischer Tag reported, relatives of both the victims and the killer still lived in Kaltenbrunn, and the paper described the calm of the place as deceptive: few residents were willing to talk about what had happened. Decades on, the regional press has returned to the case at anniversaries, in a 2016 Kronach retrospective, a 2017 article on the 50th anniversary of Aktenzeichen XY and a long 2020 account in the Fränkischer Tag that described the three murders as traumatic for the region.
The 1969 arrest also stayed with the police officers who made it. For Karl Schardt, the Staffelstein officer who helped take Wittmann into custody, it remained the biggest event of his working life.
In 2020 the Fränkischer Tag recalled his release to a care home in 2013, after 43 years; nothing later about him has been made public.
Several details remain in dispute.
The 1959 attack. The Fränkischer Tag reported in 2020 that Wittmann had been investigated over the 1959 assault on the 19-year-old woman, a coworker of his sister. The paper's Kronach edition said in 2016 that investigators did not identify him at the time. No conviction for that attack is on record.
Sieglinde Heubner's last journey. One account says she was going to a dance in Rossach; two others say she wanted to go to Untersiemau.
The year of the sentence. A January 2012 report gave the year of the life sentence as 1969 and placed the trial in the 1960s. The fuller accounts of 2013, 2016 and 2020 agree that the trial opened in November 1971 and that sentence was passed on December 15, 1971.
The court that heard the release application. One report says the lawyer applied to the sentence-enforcement chamber in Regensburg; another refers to the justice authorities in Straubing confirming the chamber's decision. The two are not necessarily in conflict, and how the arrangement worked has not been explained.
The clairvoyant's role. The Fränkischer Tag wrote in 2020 that the clairvoyant's visit seemed to help bring about the confession; how far it did is not shown by any court finding.
December 26, 1959: Wittmann, 16, attacks a 19-year-old woman in the Itzgrund; she survives.
December 19, 1968: Nora Wenzl, 14, of Welsberg, does not arrive home. A large search follows, with helicopters and Bundeswehr soldiers.
Mid-February 1969: Nora Wenzl is found dead near Viereth.
August 28, 1969: Helga Luther, 16, of Lichtenfels, is killed near Beikheim. A young man from Tettau is later arrested and held at Kronach, wrongly.
November 15, 1969: Sieglinde Heubner, 16, of Kaltenbrunn, disappears.
December 12, 1969: Wittmann is arrested in Kaltenbrunn and confesses about eight hours later; Sieglinde Heubner is found dead near Freudeneck.
November 1971: Trial opens before the jury court at Coburg; Rolf Bossi defends.
December 15, 1971: Convicted of murder in three cases, with other charges; three life sentences, with a finding of particular gravity of guilt.
June 21, 1977: The Federal Constitutional Court rules that life prisoners must keep a chance of release.
May 1, 1982: Section 57a of the Criminal Code, on release from life sentences, comes into force.
2011: His lawyer applies for release.
Late December 2011: The sentence-enforcement chamber rules that he may be released under conditions; the prosecution considers an appeal.
June 2013: The Higher Regional Court in Nuremberg rejects the last complaint; he is released on probation from Straubing after 43 years, aged 70.
September 2013: Reported to be living in a care home in Middle Bavaria at an undisclosed location.
June 19, 2020: The Fränkischer Tag publishes a retrospective on the case.