It was a warm Sunday afternoon in September and people were out in the pedestrian center of Lörrach, a town of fifty thousand on the Swiss border. Sabine Radmacher, a lawyer of forty-one, was at her apartment at the edge of the center with her five-year-old son, who had been visiting her. His father came to collect him.
She killed them both in the apartment. Accounts differ on the order and on how the boy died: the fullest German account says she shot her husband and suffocated the child, and a later retrospective says she killed the boy first with a blunt instrument. The couple had lived apart since June 2010, and the boy lived with his father.
She had planned at least part of it. In the rooms, which also served as her law office, were about fifty liters of nitro thinner, ten to twenty liters of gasoline and several liters of spirit. She set it alight, and shortly before six o'clock there was a detonation that badly damaged the ground floor and set the building burning.
She came out onto the street with a small-caliber pistol and a dagger-like knife. The pistol was a Walther GSP, a target pistol she owned legally from her years as a sport shooter; she had left the club in 1996 and kept the gun, and about three hundred rounds were found with her.
Outside she met a group of visitors from the Baptist church next door. One of them, Ernst Barth, told her to drop the weapon. She turned calmly, aimed at him and fired, and the shot grazed his head. The congregation's pastor was hit in the back. She fired at other passers-by as she crossed to the St. Elisabethen hospital opposite.
Inside, on the first floor, she came upon a fifty-seven-year-old nurse in the gynecology department. She stabbed him and shot him in the head and neck. The reconstruction afterward concluded that he had stood in her way and held her up for a crucial stretch of time, and that by doing so he probably prevented more killings; the first police arrived shortly after. She then fired at the closed doors of patients' rooms, and at the police as they arrived.
In the exchange of fire an officer was seriously wounded and Radmacher was killed by a shot to the head. The whole thing had taken about forty minutes.
Three people died besides her. Eighteen were injured, three of them seriously.
Investigators put the motive down to the collapse of the marriage. There was no finding that she had been diagnosed with a mental illness: in 2004 and 2005, after miscarriages treated at the same hospital and the pregnancy that followed, she had seen a psychotherapist briefly. She had struggled to establish herself as a lawyer, and a letter found in the flat suggested that in 2006 she had applied for an administrative post at the hospital and been turned down. The case reopened the argument in Germany over sport-shooting weapons and whether guns and ammunition should be stored apart; the German shooting federation said the law as it later stood would not have let her keep the pistol after leaving the club. The novelist Barbara Aschenwald drew on it in her 2013 novel Omka.
None of the three who died has been publicly named. German reporting convention withholds the names of victims and offenders alike, which is why she appears throughout the German press as Sabine R. There is no court record to supply them, because she died at the scene and there was never a trial.