On the evening of Thursday, December 19, 1968, Nora Wenzl, fourteen, set off for home in Welsberg from her job at a hairdresser's in Kaltenbrunn, in the Itz valley of Upper Franconia, and did not arrive. Searchers near Bodelstadt followed tracks into a plowed field and found, in the middle of it, her bicycle, her handbag and pieces of her clothing. The tracks ran on some two hundred yards to a farm lane and stopped, and police concluded she had been taken away in a car. Helicopters and Bundeswehr soldiers searched for weeks. She had been killed by a man who lived in Kaltenbrunn, a bachelor who worked mixing concrete and bitumen on building sites, and who would kill twice more before anyone suspected him.
Manfred Wittmann was born in Kaltenbrunn in 1943 and trained as a carpenter. His violence had begun years earlier. On December 26, 1959, when he was sixteen, he lay in wait for Irmgard Feder of Freiberg as she came home from the movies, struck her, forced her to undress, and cut at her neck with his pocketknife until the blood flowed and he believed she was dead. She survived. Her age is reported as sixteen and as nineteen. She went to the police, but the attack was never solved.
On August 28, 1969, he killed Helga Luther, sixteen, of Lichtenfels. On November 15 he killed Sieglinde Heubner, also sixteen and from Kaltenbrunn itself; her name also appears as Hübner. Both deaths were more savage than the first. The weapon is described in the reference literature as a pocketknife and by Der Spiegel as a common knife of the kind called a stiletto in Bavaria. The killings put Coburg town and county and the neighboring districts in fear for a year, and the press called the killer the Beast of Upper Franconia and the Staffelstein killer.
He was arrested in Kaltenbrunn on December 12, 1969. His neighbors knew him as a man firmly settled in village life, and the reaction was violent: in the taverns people called for the death penalty, and some wanted to lynch him. The trial before the jury court at Coburg opened in November 1971, with building workers from around Kaltenbrunn who knew him personally crowding the public seats. He was defended by the Munich trial lawyer Rolf Bossi, who with the psychiatric expert Dr. Schorsch tried to have him committed to a psychiatric hospital instead of prison. The court refused, found him fully responsible, and on December 15, 1971, sentenced him to three terms of life imprisonment.
He served the sentence at the prison in Straubing. At the time of his sentencing a German life term carried no prospect of parole; the Federal Constitutional Court held in 1977 that one was required, and a 1981 law allowed life prisoners to apply after fifteen years, but because of the particular gravity of his guilt he could not be considered before thirty. When that time came he applied for release and then withdrew the application; no public reason was ever given. The criminologist Stephan Harbort, who visited him repeatedly at Straubing, wrote that his killings had been aimed entirely at the victims' suffering, and that he had rehearsed the torture and killing of girls countless times in fantasy until fantasy no longer satisfied him.
In 2011 he produced a psychiatrist's report concluding that he could be released under conditions. The Coburg prosecutors, who still regarded him as highly dangerous, fought the application through every level of the courts and lost at the Nuremberg Higher Regional Court. In the summer of 2013, after forty-three years in custody, he was released at seventy to a nursing home in Franconia whose location the authorities kept secret. A court spokesman said he needed constant medical care and could barely walk, and the chief prosecutor in Coburg said his poor health had been one of the decisive reasons. In Kaltenbrunn, a villager of his own age told a reporter he had better not show his face there.
An older English-language reference describes the case as ending in a guilty plea; the German reporting of the trial describes a contested hearing before the jury court and a verdict of full criminal responsibility.