Vigilante justice in the courtroom!


On March 6, 1981, German restaurateur Marianne Bachmeier...



… shoots Klaus Grabowski (here in front) who is sitting in the dock in the courtroom at Lübeck…




… who is accused of being the alleged murderer of her daughter Anna.

On May 5, 1980, the then seven-year-old Anna Bachmeier…


… not going to school out of defiance of her mother. She wanted to visit a friend of the same age and fell into the hands of 35-year-old butcher Klaus Grabowski.

According to the indictment, he is said to have held her at home for several hours and then strangled her with pantyhose.

According to the public prosecutor's office, he tied the girl up, packed her in a box and then placed it in a hollow on the bank of a canal. He is said to have then placed the body in a hole and covered it with earth.

Klaus Grabowski was a convicted sex offender and had previously been convicted of sexually abusing two girls.

While in prison, he had himself castrated in 1976, but underwent hormone treatment two years later.

Marianne Bachmeier and Christian Berthold (Anna's biological father) later filed an unsuccessful criminal complaint against the urologist who had used this treatment on Grabowski and who, in their opinion, had thus restored his dangerousness.

He does not want to have molested Anna sexually. During the police interrogation, he stated that the girl wanted to tell the mother that he had touched her inappropriately with the aim of extorting a D-Mark from him. In the evening he was arrested in a restaurant.

Marianne Bachmeier smuggled this Beretta M1934 pistol on the day of the crime...



...into the courtroom of the Lübeck district court and shot Klaus Grabowski on the third day of the trial.

She aimed the gun at Grabowski's back and pulled the trigger a total of eight times. Six of the shots hit; the 35-year-old suspect died instantly.



On March 2, 1983, Marianne Bachmeier was then sentenced to six years in prison by the jury chamber of the Lübeck Regional Court for manslaughter and illegal possession of weapons. After three years in prison, she was released early from prison.

On September 17, 1996, Marianne Bachmeier died at the age of only 46 from pancreatic cancer in a Lübeck hospital.

What a sad, sad story.