Martin Ney is a German former educator who, for close to twenty years, entered school camps, tent camps, boarding schools and family homes in northern Germany at night, wearing a mask and dark clothes, and sexually abused boys as they slept. Three times he took a boy away and killed him: Stefan J., 13, in 1992; Dennis R., 8, in 1995; and Dennis K., 9, in 2001. The children who survived his attacks described a "black man" in a mask. For years, a special police commission worked to find him.
He was identified in 2011, when a man he had abused as a 10-year-old recognized the pattern from a police appeal and remembered a camp supervisor called Martin. Ney confessed, and in February 2012 the Landgericht (regional court) of Stade sentenced him to life imprisonment, with a finding of particular gravity of guilt that rules out the usual early release. That conviction is final.
A second case followed him for years afterward. In April 2004 a 10-year-old French boy, Jonathan Coulom, disappeared at night from a school seaside trip at Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, on the Atlantic coast. Ney always denied any part in it. In June 2026, after a trial built on circumstantial evidence, an assize court in Nantes found him guilty of Jonathan's murder and gave him a second life sentence. He has appealed, so the French conviction is not yet final.
German courts and newspapers, following German practice, publish Ney's name as "Martin N." and the murdered German boys' names as first name and initial. French media, the international news agency AFP and the French Gendarmerie, in an official appeal for witnesses in 2021, have published his full name. The German boys appear as the German press names them, and Jonathan Coulom in full, as French courts and media name him. The surviving victims of sexual abuse go unnamed.
Ney was born in Bremen in 1970. French reporting on the 2026 trial, drawing on the French indictment order, said he grew up in a household where his mother's authority was both gentle and strict, and that he told investigators he had himself been sexually assaulted at about 12. According to that reporting, his attraction to young boys emerged in his early teens, and he began offending against children by about 18.
He trained as a teacher and reached the stage of a Lehramtsanwärter, a trainee teacher, but never worked as a teacher. Instead he worked as an adult educator in Hamburg and, crucially, as a supervisor on youth trips and in children's homes, which gave him access to boys and to the places they slept. He had lived alone for about twenty years when he was arrested, and a police profiler later noted that this meant little social control over his life. By 2011 he had lived in Hamburg for about a decade.
He was not unknown to the authorities. According to the Tagesspiegel, he had a record for extortion from the age of 16. In 2004 he was accused of abusing two boys, a case that ended with a payment of 1,800 euros. In 2005 he tried to extort money from a social worker in Berlin, which brought a 10-month suspended sentence. That same year, Hamburg prosecutors seized his computer. It held photographs of him abusing an eight-year-old boy at the Wulsbüttel school camp in 1999, the camp from which Dennis K. would later be taken, but the images were not identified until March 2011. French reports say he lost his job in 2008 after he came under suspicion of holding images of child sexual abuse.
From 1992 onward, a series of nighttime attacks hit school camps and youth hostels in the districts around Bremen. A masked man would enter a dormitory or a tent, go to a sleeping boy's bed and abuse him, usually leaving before anyone else woke. Later he also entered family homes in Bremen and Delmenhorst. Children who described a "schwarzer Mann," a man in black, were at first often not taken seriously.
The full extent of the series has never been settled. When he confessed in April 2011, Ney admitted to about 40 abuse offenses besides the three murders. At trial he admitted 20 further offenses that prosecutors could no longer charge because the time limits had run out, and he described about 50 acts of abuse to the court's psychiatric expert. The charges that reached court covered 20 or 23 counts, depending on the report, and the final judgment rests on eleven acts.
The investigation into those attacks was flawed. A 2011 NDR documentary, reported by the dapd news agency, found that police and prosecutors had destroyed files on at least two of the earlier abuse cases even though the offenses had not expired, including a 1992 case at a school camp in Zeven-Badenstedt. In Bremen, where seven boys were abused in one district within two years, police refused requests from victims' families for a public warning to parents, arguing that it would unsettle the public. In one case a boy's shoes, held as evidence, could not be found when his father asked for them back.
Stefan J. was 13 and lived at a boarding school near Scheessel, in the Rotenburg district of Lower Saxony. His younger brother was five years old when Stefan disappeared in 1992. Ney took him from the school at night. According to the prosecution's account at trial, he abused the boy, carried him off and strangled him so that he could not report what had happened, then buried him in sand.
When the case came to court almost twenty years later, Stefan's father, then 68, joined the prosecution with his wife and Stefan's brother. He told reporters that the indictment did not go far enough and that he believed the killing had a sexual motive. Asked about Ney after the first day of the trial, he said the man left him cold.
In law, Stefan's case shows how much time had passed. The Federal Court of Justice later ruled that the sexual offenses against him were time-barred before the investigation against Ney began in April 2011, leaving the murder conviction, combined with deprivation of liberty resulting in death, as the only verdict for his death.
Dennis R. was eight. In July 1995 he was sleeping in a tent at a holiday camp at the Selker Noor, an inlet near the town of Schleswig in Schleswig-Holstein, when Ney took him. Prosecutors told the court that Ney drove him to a holiday house in Denmark and killed him there, strangling him, and buried his body by a dune.
In its judgment the Stade court found that the boy had been playing on the floor when Ney attacked him from behind without warning, and it held that this killing was treacherous, one of the aggravating features that make a killing murder under German law. Dennis's father joined the case as a co-plaintiff and was in court when the trial opened.
Dennis K. was nine and came from Osterholz-Scharmbeck, north of Bremen. In September 2001 he was on a class trip at the Schullandheim Wulsbüttel, a school camp in the countryside between Bremen and Bremerhaven, and was asleep in a room with four other children when Ney took him from his bed. According to the prosecution's case, Ney abused him in the camp's common room, and when the boy said he would tell his teacher, Ney killed him. His body was found two weeks later beside a forest path.
His death led the police to set up the Sonderkommission, or Soko, "Dennis," which quickly concluded that it was looking for a pedophile who had killed before. Dennis's mother told the court through her lawyer that she wanted to see the man who had killed her son with her own eyes. She said her family had not known for ten years what had happened to him.
The Soko, based in Verden near Bremen, spent almost ten years on the case. It linked the murders and many abuse cases to one offender and worked with criminal profilers from Bavaria. Because of the mask, investigators called the unknown offender the "schwarze Mann."
Ney came close to the inquiry in 2007. After the commission learned of his earlier sexual offenses, he was checked and questioned. He was not treated as a suspect in Dennis K.'s death at the time. Police said later that he had answered their questions untruthfully or evasively, and that many of his 2007 statements could be disproved by 2011. In 2008 French investigators also began looking at whether the German offender could be linked to the death of a boy in France.
The breakthrough came from a survivor. In February 2011 the Soko issued a renewed public appeal. A man then in his mid-twenties, who had been attacked in his bed at home as a 10-year-old in 1995, saw it and remembered something from his childhood. Months before the attack, on a youth trip, a supervisor named Martin had asked him detailed questions about his home and the layout of his room. Investigators later described this as the key to the whole series. The man had given evidence as a boy in 1995.
The tip led police to Ney. On Wednesday, April 13, 2011, special forces and Soko officers searched his apartment in the Wilstorf area of Hamburg. He was arrested there in mid-April.
At first Ney did not confess. Questioned by the Soko's head, Martin Erftenbeck, and the profiler Alexander Horn, he admitted that he was sexually interested in boys. The next morning he told Horn that he was the "schwarze Mann." On Thursday, April 14, he confessed to three killings and to about 40 other abuse offenses, and that evening the Stade court issued an arrest warrant.
On Friday, April 15, investigators presented the case at a press conference in Verden. Horn described the suspect as socially inconspicuous, friendly, helpful, precise, reserved and intelligent, and said that people who kill more than once are often well adjusted to the world around them. The criminal director of the Verden police, Uwe Jordan, said investigators felt relief and that many relatives and victims could now begin to come to terms with what had happened. Erftenbeck said Ney had spent long periods abroad and that police would examine possible links to the killings of a boy in France and a boy in the Netherlands, which Ney denied.
After his arrest, investigators found the photographs from the 1999 Wulsbüttel abuse on the computer seized in 2005. Ney was held on remand in the prison at Sehnde, near Hanover.
The trial opened at the Landgericht Stade on Monday, October 10, 2011, before a panel presided over by Judge Berend Appelkamp. The prosecutor was Johannes Kiers. Ney was charged with three murders and with sexual abuse of children; reports gave the number of abuse counts as 20 or 23. The parents of the three dead boys and one abuse survivor joined the prosecution as co-plaintiffs. On the first day Ney held a folder in front of his face until his lawyer touched his arm. His defense lawyers said they would present a full statement for him, and that he would not speak himself.
Evidence about his online life was put before the court. Between 2000 and 2011 he had written about 4,500 posts under the pseudonym "GerdX" on internet forums used by pedophiles, describing sexual and violent fantasies. The trial also heard from further survivors. In late 2011 two half-brothers came forward, one describing abuse between 2002 and 2004 and the other abuse in 2007. Their evidence suggested that Ney had kept abusing boys after the last charged act, which bore on whether he should be held in preventive detention.
The Munich forensic psychiatrist Norbert Nedopil examined Ney for the court. He found a pedophilic disorder but no personality disorder, and held Ney fully responsible for his acts. He described him as insecure, compulsive, highly repressed and lacking in empathy, traits he said are hard to treat, and he assessed a high risk that Ney would offend again.
On the last day before the verdict, Ney spoke. He denied any part in the two unsolved killings in the Netherlands and France. He wept, said he hoped to work through his life in therapy in prison and spoke of wanting to start again as a changed man. Judge Appelkamp did not accept the tears. In the judgment he described them as remorse put into words and suggested that Ney was feeling sorry for himself, which matched the expert's findings.
On February 27, 2012, the court convicted Ney of three murders and of sexual offenses against children. It sentenced him to life imprisonment, found that his guilt was of particular gravity, and ordered preventive detention after the sentence. The sentence followed the demands of the prosecution and the co-plaintiffs. The finding of particular gravity of guilt means that he could not be considered for release after 15 years, the usual minimum for a life sentence in Germany. The court called Ney a ticking time bomb.
The court also awarded damages to the father of Dennis R., the mother of Dennis K. and the survivor whose tip had led to the arrest; Stefan's family waived its claim. The survivor turned 27 on the day of the verdict. He had suffered for years from sleep problems and depression, and he smiled with relief in court; his mother said a huge weight had been lifted from her. Defense lawyers Christian Esche and Ralph Wichmann declined to comment.
Ney appealed on points of law. On January 10, 2013, the Third Criminal Senate of the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) decided the case under the reference 3 StR 330/12. It upheld the life sentence, the finding of particular gravity of guilt and the murder convictions, and rejected Ney's challenges to the findings about the July 1995 killing and to the gravity finding.
It made two changes. First, it struck out the order for preventive detention. Following a 2011 ruling of the Federal Constitutional Court, preventive detention could then be ordered only where it was indispensable to protect the public. The judges held that it was not indispensable on top of a life sentence, because a life prisoner who is still dangerous will not be released on parole anyway. Second, it found the sexual offenses against Stefan J. time-barred and removed them from the judgment.
The final German judgment convicts Ney of three murders, one combined with deprivation of liberty resulting in death and one with attempted sexual abuse of a child, along with sexual coercion and sexual abuse of children. According to the court's findings, he sexually abused or tried to abuse children in eleven cases, sometimes using force or threats, and in three cases killed his victims to cover up earlier crimes, in one case also treacherously.
Jonathan Coulom was 10 and came from the Cher department in central France. In the spring of 2004 he was in the last years of primary school and went with his class on a "classe de mer," a school trip to the sea, at a holiday center in Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, near Saint-Nazaire in Loire-Atlantique. On the night of April 6 to 7, 2004, he vanished from his bed. His roommates woke to find it empty.
Hundreds of soldiers and gendarmes searched for him. On May 19, 2004, 43 days after he disappeared, his body was found in a private pond on a property near Guérande, about 30 kilometers from the holiday center. He had been bound hand and foot and weighted down with a concrete block. The autopsy found that he had died of suffocation and had not drowned.
His family has lived with the case ever since. At the 2026 trial, his mother, his stepfather and his grandmother were all civil parties, each with a lawyer. His mother's lawyer, Catherine Salsac, said the mother had wanted the truth for 22 years.
The case was handled by the gendarmerie's Section de recherches in Rennes. In the first weeks, German authorities told the French that the disappearance resembled the abductions attributed to the "man in black," and German police came to France on April 22, 2004. French investigators, however, concentrated for years on a possible local offender who might have known the isolated pond. Dozens of people gave DNA samples and thousands of statements were taken, without result. A retired gendarme who led the inquiry for three years later said the German information had not given them anything they could use.
Experts first estimated that the body had been in the water for one to three weeks, which seemed to rule out the night of the abduction. A new report in 2008 found that the time could not be fixed so precisely and might go back to April 15, when a witness had noticed something floating on the pond, or even to the day Jonathan vanished.
After Ney's arrest in 2011, French gendarmes looked at him. A car with German plates had been reported near the scene, but questioning him produced nothing that incriminated him. He told investigators that he had not been in France at the time and pointed to a cash withdrawal with his card in Hamburg, though it could not be shown that he had made it himself.
The case moved again in 2017, when a former cellmate of Ney's in Germany told investigators that Ney had confessed to killing a child in France. According to the witness, Ney said he was surprised he had never been identified, because he had been seen at the time by a man with a German shepherd dog. That detail had never been made public. It matched an account given years earlier by a farmer, who said that on an evening in April 2004, while walking his German shepherd near the scene, he had seen a large man with a sedan car with German plates and its trunk open, and that the car had then driven away. The report of the cellmate's statement became public in April 2018. That month the gendarmes also appealed for information about a brown leather backpack that might have been found near Saint-Brevin-les-Pins in April or May 2004. At the time Caty Richard, the lawyer for Jonathan's grandmother, warned that remarks to a cellmate were not a confession and urged caution.
The French issued a European arrest warrant in October 2019. At the end of January 2021, Ney was handed over to the French authorities from his high-security German prison, taken to Nantes and placed under formal investigation (mis en examen) for kidnapping and murder. In March 2021 the Gendarmerie published his name and photograph and appealed for anyone who had seen him in France between 1990 and 2011, or had rented or lent him accommodation, to come forward. The appeal described him as 1.96 meters tall.
The trial opened before the Cour d'assises de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, the 22nd anniversary of the day Jonathan's body was found. The presiding judge was Karine Laborde. Ney, then 55, was charged with abduction, unlawful confinement and murder. He followed the hearings through an interpreter. Asked at the start whether he admitted the charges, he said he had not done it, but he agreed to answer the court's questions. The case file ran to 163 volumes and held no physical evidence or DNA linking him to the crime.
The prosecution relied on a set of converging indications. The farmer testified. The former cellmate gave evidence by video link; the defense pointed out that in 2020 he had been convicted of making false accusations against relatives. Ney called his account an invention from start to finish. The judge read out forum posts that Ney had written in the 2000s. In one, posted in April 2004, before Jonathan's body had been found, he wrote that the "man in black" had struck again. Ney replied that he had never identified with that figure, which he called a ghost to which crimes were attributed whether or not he had committed them, and noted that another murder once blamed on the "man in black," in the Netherlands, had since been solved. A psychological expert told the court that Ney was of above average intelligence, controlled what he said, showed little emotion and had no psychotic disorder.
The advocate general said she had no doubt that he was guilty, that the killing bore his criminal signature and that a body of converging evidence is itself proof. She asked for life imprisonment. Ney's lawyers, among them Marie-Emmanuelle Beloncle, asked for acquittal, arguing that there was no concrete proof that he had been in France at all. Ney told the court that he had revealed everything he had to reveal, and that the Jonathan case was not part of it.
On June 4, 2026, after twelve days of hearings and about five hours of deliberation, the court found Ney guilty of Jonathan's murder. It sentenced him to life imprisonment with a 22-year security period and banned him permanently from French territory. Ney listened without visible reaction. Jonathan's family wept when the sentence was read. "Justice has finally been done for our son," his stepfather said. Catherine Salsac said that the family at last knew the truth, and called Ney's denials an outrage to the boy's memory. The advocate general said the French sentence would have to be considered if German authorities were ever asked to shorten his German one.
In June 2026 Ney's lawyer, Marie-Emmanuelle Beloncle, confirmed that he had appealed against the verdict, AFP reported on June 12. Under French law, an appeal against an assize court verdict leads to a new trial before a different assize court. By October 18, 2026, no date or venue for that hearing had been reported. Until the appeal is decided, Ney stands convicted of Jonathan Coulom's murder with an appeal pending.
Ney remains a prisoner serving the German life sentence, which he was serving in a high-security German prison when he was handed to France in 2021. In July 2026 the dpa news agency, citing the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, reported that the Landgericht Lüneburg had confirmed that he must serve at least 32 years, which would make about 2043 the earliest possible date for release. Even then, under the German system, a life prisoner is freed only if experts conclude that he is no longer dangerous. Prosecutors and the court in Stade said at that time that there was no exchange with the French authorities about how the French verdict might affect the German sentence. No later court decision or news report was found when this was checked on October 18, 2026.
The arrest was felt across northern Germany. Reports at the time noted that many parents had grown reluctant to send their children to remote camps and school homes while the "black man" was at large. The failures exposed by the 2011 NDR documentary, from destroyed files to refused warnings, raised hard questions about how seriously children's accounts had been taken.
The case also reached television drama. In May 2016 ZDF broadcast "Im Namen meines Sohnes" ("In the Name of My Son"), written and directed by Damir Lukacevic, with Tobias Moretti as a father whose 12-year-old son disappears from a boarding school in northern Germany in 1992 and is later found dead; the father pursues the case until the killer is convicted in 2012. A television review described the film as based on real events and noted the "Maskenmann" reported by children in several boarding schools. The characters are fictional.
Proven and final: the three German murders and the sexual offenses set out in the Stade judgment as amended by the Federal Court of Justice in 2013. Ney confessed to these killings and did not dispute them.
Convicted, appeal pending: the murder of Jonathan Coulom. Ney denies it, no physical or DNA evidence links him to it, and the conviction rests on circumstantial evidence, chiefly the cellmate's account, the farmer's sighting and Ney's forum posts. The appeal court may reach a different result.
Confessed or reported but never tried: about 40 abuse offenses in all by his 2011 confession, and about 50 acts described to the psychiatrist. Many were time-barred or could not be proven. Later French reports speak of "nine" further sexual assaults and Euronews of "about 40"; the German records support only the figures of about 40 and about 50.
Suspected and not linked: the 1998 death of Nicky, an 11-year-old Dutch boy, near the German border at Aachen. Ney was briefly a suspect and always denied it; another man, identified through a large DNA screening in 2018, was later convicted. In 2019 British newspapers linked Ney to the 2007 disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal. AFP noted in 2021 that German prosecutors were investigating a different man in that case. No evidence tying Ney to it has been reported.
Details that vary between sources: whether Jonathan vanished on the night of April 6 to 7 (AFP, Gendarmerie) or April 7 to 8 (Euronews), 2004; whether the cellmate first spoke in 2017 (AFP, dpa) or 2018 (Gendarmerie, Euronews); the exact day of the 2011 arrest, given as mid-April (Legal Tribune Online) after a search on April 13 and a confession on April 14 (Tagesspiegel); the number of abuse counts charged in Stade (20 or 23); and where the German trial took place, which Euronews gives wrongly as Verden. Some German reports in June 2026 said the French court also ordered preventive detention; French reports of the verdict mention only the 22-year security period and the ban from France.
1970: Martin Ney is born in Bremen.
1992: Stefan J., 13, is taken from a boarding school near Scheessel and killed; a series of nighttime abuse attacks on boys at school camps around Bremen begins.
July 1995: Dennis R., 8, is taken from a tent camp at the Selker Noor in Schleswig-Holstein and killed in Denmark.
1995: Ney attacks a 10-year-old boy in his bed at home after questioning him on a youth trip; the boy's memory leads to Ney's arrest 16 years later.
1999: abuse of a boy at the Wulsbüttel school camp, photographed by Ney.
September 2001: Dennis K., 9, is taken from the Wulsbüttel school camp and killed; he is found two weeks later; Soko Dennis is formed.
April 6 to 7, 2004: Jonathan Coulom, 10, vanishes from a holiday center at Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, France.
April 22, 2004: German police travel to France over similarities to their cases.
May 19, 2004: Jonathan's body is found in a pond near Guérande.
2005: Hamburg prosecutors seize Ney's computer; Ney receives a suspended sentence for attempted extortion.
2007: Soko Dennis checks and questions Ney; he answers evasively and is not treated as a suspect.
2008: French investigators begin examining a possible link to the German series.
February 2011: Soko Dennis issues a new appeal; a former victim comes forward.
April 13 to 15, 2011: Ney's Hamburg apartment is searched; he confesses to three murders and about 40 abuse offenses; arrest warrant issued; police announce the arrest in Verden.
October 10, 2011: trial opens at the Landgericht Stade.
February 27, 2012: life imprisonment, particular gravity of guilt, preventive detention.
January 10, 2013: Federal Court of Justice upholds the life sentence and murder convictions and strikes out preventive detention.
2017: a former cellmate says Ney confessed to killing a child in France.
April 2018: the cellmate's statement becomes public; French gendarmes appeal about a backpack.
October 2019: France issues a European arrest warrant.
End of January 2021: Ney is handed over to France and placed under formal investigation in Nantes.
March 9, 2021: the Gendarmerie publishes an appeal for witnesses naming him.
May 19, 2026: trial opens before the Cour d'assises de Loire-Atlantique in Nantes.
June 4, 2026: convicted of Jonathan Coulom's murder; life imprisonment with a 22-year security period.
June 2026: his lawyer confirms an appeal.
July 2026: the Landgericht Lüneburg confirms a minimum term of 32 years on the German sentence.
October 18, 2026: in prison; French appeal pending, no hearing date reported.