In 1987, the innkeeper’s daughter Claudia Otto was murdered. A man has been accused of the crime for a long time, but the first trial against him fell through. Now the judiciary is making a new attempt.
Bonn – The 36-year-old robbery and murder of the innkeeper’s daughter, Claudia Otto, has been at the Bonn regional court again since Wednesday. An already convicted double murderer is charged with allegedly strangling the 23-year-old in her apartment above her parents’ restaurant in Lohmar in 1987. According to the prosecution, he then stole the daily income of 6,100 euros from the safe.
On the first day of the trial, the German once again protested his innocence. “I have nothing to do with the crime I am accused of,” he let his defense attorney explain. Otherwise, the defendant appeared disinterested, leafed through a briefcase, and even seemed to be a little amused when the presiding judge projected investigation documents onto a screen using a projector.
Arrest warrant revoked
The man from Detmold had to answer for the crime in the district court last year. But at the beginning of December, the first trial against him was surprisingly suspended because two crucial DNA traces that could prove his guilt may not have been properly examined by the Forensic Medicine Institute at the University of Munich. Traces of the victim and the accused could have been mixed in the laboratory, it was said at the time. The court then revoked the arrest warrant and ordered the evidence to be checked again. The chamber now wants to present the result on the next day of the hearing.
The concrete worker was targeted by investigators shortly after the murder because he had worked on a construction site near the “Naafshäuschen” excursion restaurant and was a frequent guest at the restaurant. However, the suspicion could not be confirmed at the time. A textile fiber that was taken from the corpse with a film did not match any of the defendant’s clothing, and a shoe print and fingerprints also did not match him.
It was only in December 2017 that a genetic fingerprint was found in the “cold case” using new DNA analysis methods, which led to the defendant’s first arrest. However, since a second DNA trace from an unknown person was found at the same time, the crime could not be proven with certainty. After another check, the unknown forensic investigator was identified as an employee of the State Criminal Police Office, and the suspect was then taken into custody again in April 2022.
The defendant is a legally convicted double murderer who has already spent more than half of his life in prison. In 1988 he killed a child and his grandmother in Sauerland in connection with a planned kidnapping. In this case, he had made a confession at the time, while always denying the killing of Claudia Otto. dpa
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