Thomas Holst was convicted of killing three women in the Hamburg area between November 1987 and November 1990. Two of the killings were judged murder by the Landgericht Hamburg, which sentenced him on April 6, 1993 to life imprisonment and ordered his placement in a psychiatric hospital. The third was judged manslaughter by the Landgericht Stade in 1992. German newspapers gave him a press nickname that stayed with the case for decades.
His name returned to the headlines in September 1995. A psychologist who had worked with him at the closed forensic ward of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll helped him escape, sheltered him for about three months and was arrested at the end of December. Holst surrendered to the Hamburg police the following day. In July 1996 she was sentenced to two years in prison, suspended on probation. In March 1997 she married him.
Holst was born in 1964. A Federal Social Court judgment later set out his working life in outline: he left school in 1985, broke off a training course early in 1986, worked until the end of that year and did civilian service from January 1987 to August 1988. He then held another job until December 1988, followed by unemployment, retraining and employment from May to December 1990. When he stood trial in 1992 and 1993 he was described by the news agency dpa as a graphic designer in his late twenties. He lived in Holm-Seppensen, in the district of Harburg, south of Hamburg.
Little has been published about his family or his school years. The record proper begins with the first killing in November 1987.
Andrea G. was 21. The killing in November 1987 took place in the Hamburg area, in the district of Rissen, and the Landgericht Hamburg later dealt with it as murder. The date given in the Federal Social Court judgment for the first killing is November 23, 1987.
The second woman, Petra M., was 28 in the account published by t-online in 2023 and 29 in the dpa report of January 1993. She was a mother of two children. She was killed in February 1988, a few months after the first death, and the Hamburg court dealt with her death as the second murder.
Lara H., a 22-year-old from Buchholz in the Harburg district, was killed in November 1990, according to the dpa report of the Stade trial, on November 26. She is the third woman. Her death was not tried in Hamburg but in Stade, where the court's findings were different.
No relatives of the three women have been named. Nothing published records their own interests, work or plans; they appear in the coverage only through the court's findings. That is a limit of what was published, not of the lives themselves.
In the months after the first killing, Holst was involved in a separate case with a 19-year-old woman who survived and reported him. In 1988 he was tried for it. The Berliner Zeitung reported in 1995 that the court did not convict him of the most serious charge, but found him guilty of coercion, unlawful detention and intentional bodily harm. He received a suspended sentence. The t-online account puts the sentence at 18 months on probation. Both outlets described the outcome as a scandal in light of what followed. The young woman has not been named in any report and is not named here.
Holst was in pretrial detention from December 24, 1990, according to the Federal Social Court judgment and an epd report. The second trial, in Hamburg, was later said to rest largely on witness evidence and circumstances: the taz reported in January 1993 that police had found fibers from the clothing of one of the dead women in his apartment, and that nothing else tied him directly to the scene.
The first trial to reach a verdict was in Stade, for the death of Lara H. According to dpa in August 1992, the prosecution described the case as a deprivation of liberty and murder committed with full responsibility and asked for life imprisonment. The defense asked for an acquittal. The court heard that Holst and the young woman must have had contact on the day she died.
The verdict, in September 1992, was lower than the prosecution had demanded. The Landgericht Stade found him guilty of manslaughter and sentenced him to twelve and a half years. The Berliner Zeitung wrote in 1995 that the judges considered only coercion and manslaughter proven, not the more serious charges, and that the verdict was seen by observers as a scandal, because the court knew that Holst faced a second trial in Hamburg for two further deaths. The taz reported in January 1993 that he had denied the charges to the end.
The second trial opened in the Landgericht Hamburg on January 8, 1993 and was adjourned within minutes because the court's psychiatric expert was absent. Only the indictment was read. Holst, then described as 28, said he would not testify on the allegations. The indictment named two murders: that of Andrea G. in 1987 and that of Petra M. in 1988. The taz reported that sixteen more hearing days were planned and that a verdict was not expected before early March.
The judgment is dated April 6, 1993. It is recorded in the text of the Federal Social Court's 2018 judgment, which says that the Hamburg court convicted him of murder in two cases and imposed life imprisonment. It also ordered his placement in a psychiatric hospital under section 63 of the Criminal Code, because he was extremely dangerous to the public, and the judgment is final. The same court found a personality disorder associated with a markedly increased risk of developing fantasies of killing. A 2018 report in the Eppendorfer, a newspaper on psychiatry and social issues, described a severe narcissistic personality disorder with sadistic and paranoid features.
How the Stade sentence and the Hamburg sentence were combined has not been reported. Later reports in the taz describe him simply as a three-time killer of women who was serving a life sentence.
The Hamburg court ordered that he serve in the closed forensic ward of the Allgemeines Krankenhaus Ochsenzoll, in the north of the city. A prosecution spokesman said in January 1996 that this was the only place in Hamburg where such an order could be carried out.
Holst spent the following years in Haus 18, the closed forensic ward at Ochsenzoll. By January 1995 he had been on the admission ward for six months, and he began to complain publicly. He wrote a dossier of 13 pages arguing that his treatment was a sham, that the treatment plan required by Hamburg's law on the enforcement of psychiatric orders had not been drawn up, and that most patients received a single conversation of about 50 minutes each week. He filed a criminal complaint and named twelve witnesses. A member of the Hamburg parliament, the Bürgerschaft, was due to visit him, and he said he would demand a parliamentary inquiry committee.
The clinic's medical director, Klaus Böhme, answered with a five-point statement: a treatment plan existed and had been discussed with Holst as far as was clinically appropriate, one hour of psychotherapy a week was reasonable in light of the expected length of his stay, and the six months on the admission ward reflected his security needs. Böhme later said that Holst refused the clinic's own therapists and that even outside experts had found access to him extremely difficult.
No parliamentary inquiry into Haus 18 is known to have been set up.
The woman who would help him escape was a psychologist from Israel who had lived in Germany for almost twenty years. At Ochsenzoll she worked as an occupational therapist without a formal therapy mandate, according to the taz, and she saw Holst in individual sessions. After his escape, the clinic said she had lacked the necessary distance and had a helper syndrome. She said that the chief physician had told her to look after Holst personally and that the doctors knew about the sessions.
She diagnosed him with a multiple personality disorder which, in her view, could be treated. Staff at the clinic told the taz he had recognized in her someone who would believe his stories without critical questions. Hamburg forensic psychiatrists, according to the same report, saw him as a malingerer who wanted to avoid being sent to an ordinary prison. The prosecution argued in court that the escape grew out of a love affair; the taz noted that she lived as a lesbian and rejected the claim, and the court did not accept it either.
On September 27, 1995, Holst left Haus 18. The taz reported ten days later that the clinic had suspended his therapist. The Berliner Zeitung, on October 13, 1995, reported that police were running a national search from Hamburg, that about 400 tips had come in and that none was useful. A first published photograph was several years old. The newspaper added that police suspected a psychotherapist at the institution of helping out of affection for him, and that Holst had reportedly threatened revenge on witnesses who had testified against him, in particular his former fiancée.
Police later believed Holst spent the whole time in Hamburg, under arrangements his therapist had made under a false name, and that she had, as she put it, kept up her work with him. The investigation was led by a special commission, called the Sonderkommission Holst.
At the end of December 1995 the police arrested the therapist, who was 39, on suspicion of helping a prisoner escape, and held her because of the risk that she would flee. According to police, she had withdrawn about 250,000 marks from several accounts and might have meant to leave for Israel, with Holst to follow. The Berliner Zeitung gave the date of her arrest as December 29.
The next evening, a Saturday, Holst surrendered to the Hamburg police with 157,000 marks in cash. The taz quoted him as saying that he had again felt the urge to kill. He also said he had always meant to surrender and had left Haus 18 to protest against conditions in psychiatric care and against his planned transfer into the prison system. Police doubted it. They pointed to the money and to his changed appearance: he was thinner, his hair was dyed and his head shaved. A police spokesman called his account a self-serving excuse. The therapist's own account was that Holst had agreed to give himself up if she was arrested, and that he did.
In the first days of January 1996 the taz received a 17-page document bearing Holst's signature. In it he repeated his criticism of therapy, patient care and staff competence at Ochsenzoll, argued that disturbed offenders were locked away instead of treated, wrote that he would give himself up in due course and said he needed therapy. A Basel psychiatrist, Volker Dittmann, whom the taz asked about it, thought the text probably authentic from its style and spelling but suspected that clinic staff had given Holst inside information, and said that treatment for offenders of his kind was an unsolved problem. Böhme rejected the allegations.
He was taken back to Haus 18 within days. His lawyer filed a criminal complaint of coercion against two officers who took him to the remand prison. Prosecutors were also considering proceedings against two more suspected helpers, among them a former lawyer with a conviction whom Holst had met in prison; at first the police had spoken of three.
In early February 1996 the Berliner Zeitung reported that she had given a written confession of 15 pages, prepared with her lawyer, Yitzhak Goldfine. Earlier, in official questioning, she had denied helping. In the confession she said that she gave Holst access to a gym in the closed ward and arranged his way out of the building across the roof, and that she waited for him outside on a bicycle. The prosecution said the confession was meant to influence the judge who was to decide on her detention and passed over a great deal. She now acknowledged visiting him repeatedly and said that they had spent whole days together. The confession did not mention a love affair.
Her trial began on May 30, 1996 in the Landgericht Hamburg before the presiding judge, Hans Runge. The prosecutor, Claudia Knoll, charged her with freeing a prisoner for base motives. The maximum sentence was three to five years, depending on the report. Her defense sought a suspended sentence of up to two years. She told the court that she had broken the law ("Ich habe mich strafbar gemacht") but did not accept moral guilt, and she described the act as civil disobedience against conditions in forensic psychiatry. She wrote 62 pages of notes explaining her reasons and planned to read a statement of 130 pages. The defense moved four times to disqualify the presiding judge for bias.
Her father, according to the taz, was taken to a hospital against his will after her arrest and died there. Her partner attempted suicide, later testified against her and left her.
The court gave its judgment in July 1996. It found her guilty of freeing a prisoner (Gefangenenbefreiung) and obstruction of the enforcement of a sentence (Vollstreckungsvereitelung), and sentenced her to two years in prison, suspended on probation. She had already spent seven months in pretrial detention, and the court confiscated one third of the escape money. The prosecution had asked for nine months more than the court gave. Judge Runge said the court found that she had acted unselfishly, not from the base motives alleged. The court also found that the escape was Holst's idea and that he had exploited her growing hostility toward the clinic management, but that she had lost her distance from Holst and his crimes and knowingly accepted a risk to the public. "Das ist kein moralischer Freispruch," the judge said: this is not a moral acquittal. He added that the probation could be revoked if she made insulting statements about clinic staff.
She accepted the verdict and did not appeal. The prosecutor said she was considering one. The t-online account of 2023 states the sentence as three years' probation; the taz report of the judgment, which was written the day after it, gave two years suspended.
In January 1996 the prosecution said the question whether he should be moved to another state, or serve in prison if he was judged untreatable, was under review and that only the Landgericht could decide it. In November 1996 doctors at Ochsenzoll asked for his transfer to a prison. A psychiatrist from Göttingen, Ulrich Venzlaff, whom the clinic had asked for an opinion, advised against both a prison transfer and the therapy Holst wanted. He told the taz that successful therapy would take eight to twelve years and that no therapist could be found for such a period; he recommended a different facility. An official of the hospital operator said that different conditions could allow a new start.
On March 13, 1997 Holst married his former therapist in the visiting room of the Hamburg remand prison. Only the couple, two witnesses, a registrar and security staff attended. He took his wife's surname. A request to hold the ceremony at Ochsenzoll had been refused, and the Landgericht rejected an urgent application to force an earlier date there. The hospital operator said she would keep her ban from the clinic and visits after the marriage, citing security.
The last public record of him is a decision of the Federal Social Court in Kassel on May 25, 2018 (case B 13 R 30/17 R). The man, who is referred to in the judgment only by his role as plaintiff, had applied in August 2012 for a pension for reduced earning capacity. The pension fund refused. The Sozialgericht Hamburg dismissed his claim in March 2015, the Landessozialgericht reversed it in July 2016 and awarded the pension from August 1, 2012, and the Federal Social Court set that decision aside and rejected his claim. The court held that his placement, not his illness, was the main cause of his inability to work, and that "die zum Schutz und Leben der Allgemeinheit angeordnete Unterbringung sei aber kein versichertes Risiko," in the words reported by Eppendorfer: a placement ordered to protect the public is not an insured risk. The case shows that in May 2018 the placement ordered in 1993 was still in force.
The reports differ on several matters. The age given for the second woman is 28 in one account and 29 in another. The surname of the third woman is given as Holz by the taz and the Berliner Zeitung and differently by t-online. One report puts the killings between 1987 and 1989. Two taz reports give the year of the Hamburg sentence as 1993 and one gives 1994; the court judgment gives April 6, 1993. Whether Holst acted from the motives he gave the courts or whether his later claim to have wanted treatment was sincere remains his own assertion; the police and the prosecution rejected his explanation of the surrender, and the clinic rejected his accusations.
November 1987: first killing, Hamburg area.
1988: tried in a case involving a 19-year-old woman; convicted of coercion, unlawful detention and intentional bodily harm; suspended sentence.
February 1988: second killing.
November 1990: third killing, Buchholz area.
December 24, 1990: pretrial detention begins.
September 1992: Landgericht Stade convicts him of manslaughter; 12 and a half years.
January 8, 1993: murder trial opens in the Landgericht Hamburg.
April 6, 1993: Landgericht Hamburg: murder in two cases, life imprisonment, placement in a psychiatric hospital.
January 1995: public complaint about treatment at Ochsenzoll.
September 27, 1995: escape from Haus 18.
End of December 1995: therapist arrested; Holst surrenders the next day.
May 30, 1996: trial of the therapist begins.
July 1996: she is sentenced to two years, suspended on probation.
March 13, 1997: marriage in the remand prison visiting room.
May 25, 2018: Federal Social Court rejects his pension claim.