Wolfgang Schmidt
- Victims
- 6 - 5 CONVICTIONS FOR MURDER AND 1 FOR ATTEMPTED MURDER, all at one trial in 1992. The killings themselves are not in doubt; the contested question at trial was diminished responsibility, which the court accepted, and which is why the sentence was fifteen years plus indefinite psychiatric commitment rather than life
- Years active
- October 1989-April 1991
- Location
- Potsdam/Beelitz, Brandenburg, Germany
- Method
- Strangulation - Stabbing with knife
- Status
- Arrested on August 1, 1991 after a witness described his moped, and confessed. Tried at the Landgericht Potsdam and CONVICTED ON DECEMBER 22, 1992 OF FIVE MURDERS AND ONE ATTEMPTED MURDER, along with rapes and other offences. Because the court found him of DIMINISHED RESPONSIBILITY he received fifteen years rather than life, and in addition was committed to a PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL under section 63 of the criminal code. The fifteen years expired in 2007. HE HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED: THE PSYCHIATRIC COMMITMENT IS INDEFINITE, reviewed annually, and every review has found him too dangerous to release. He is held in the forensic psychiatric unit at the Brandenburg an der Havel clinic. In 1990 and 1991 he had killed a woman and her three-month-old child in the same attack, and the case is remembered in Brandenburg as the first serial murder investigation of the reunified state.
Schmidt was born in 1966 and lived near Beelitz in Brandenburg, then in East Germany. He was a large, conspicuous man who wore women's clothing, which is where the press names the Pink Giant and Beate came from.
Between October 1989 and April 1991 he attacked women in the woods and on the paths around Beelitz and Potsdam, a period spanning the collapse of the East German state and unification. He killed five women aged thirty-four to sixty-six and a three-month-old baby, strangling or stabbing them, and interfered with several of the bodies after death. German reporting called him the Beast of Beelitz.
He was arrested on August 1, 1991 and convicted in 1992. He was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment with subsequent detention in a psychiatric hospital.
He has remained in detention since. Applications for release have been refused, most recently on the ground of continuing danger, and he has been the subject of periodic German reporting about preventive detention. The mechanism by which a person who has served a determinate sentence continues to be held.
The timing is part of why the case is remembered: the killings straddle the end of the GDR, and the investigation passed from East German police to unified German police mid-series.