Thomas Rath

Victims

4 CONVICTIONS, all at one trial in 1985, and the four are the whole of the case: no further death has been attributed. A fifth woman survived, and her account led to his arrest

Years active

1981 - 1983

Location

Bremen, Germany

Method

Stabbing with knife

Status

Arrested on March 8, 1984 after a fifth woman survived an attack and gave a description that matched a man already known to Bremen police for sexual offences. Tried at the Landgericht Bremen and CONVICTED ON APRIL 26, 1985 OF FOUR MURDERS, each following a rape of a young woman he had picked up hitchhiking on the roads around Bremen. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and the court additionally found the PARTICULAR GRAVITY OF GUILT under section 57a of the criminal code, which bars the release review that a German life sentence otherwise allows after fifteen years, and ordered PREVENTIVE DETENTION under section 66 to follow the sentence. HE REMAINS IN CUSTODY. He has served more than forty years and every review has found him too dangerous to release. Held in the Justizvollzugsanstalt Bremen-Oslebshausen.

Rath was born in 1959 and lived near Bremen in northern Germany. Between October 1981 and 1983 he picked up four young women hitchhiking home at night and killed them: Britta Schilling, eighteen, who vanished on October 30, 1981 on her way home from a dance; Heike Schnier, twenty; Angele Marks, eighteen; and Martina Volkmann, twenty. He raped and tortured them and stabbed them to death.

He was arrested on March 8, 1984 and sentenced to life imprisonment on April 26, 1985.

The accessible sourcing is German press reporting and summary entries; the trial is not documented in detail in anything available. The entry is written on the conviction and the four named victims.

Like several German and American cases of this period in the archive, the shared feature is hitchhiking: it was an ordinary way for young people to get home at night, and the series that exploited it were slow to be recognised because the victims' last movements were untraceable by design.