Manfred Genditzki was imprisoned for 13 years for a murder he said he did not commit. Now the process of the death of an 87-year-old in the bathtub in her house in Rottach-Egern has been reopened – and there are high hopes that the 62-year-old will be rehabilitated. “We expect an acquittal,” said Genditzki’s defense attorney Regina Rick on Wednesday after the start of the retrial before the Munich I Regional Court. For the trial known as the “Bathtub Murder”, 19 more days of trial are initially scheduled until the beginning of July.
The 62-year-old, who worked as a caretaker in the residential complex of the dead, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Munich II Regional Court in 2010. According to the conviction of the jury, he hit the elderly woman on the head in October 2008 in her apartment in Rottach-Egern and then drowned in the bathtub. After two revisions, the judgment finally became final and has now been reopened – which is extremely rare.
read the statement
Genditzki, who was born in Kalübbe in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 1960 and is a trained agrotechnician and mechanist, had a statement read out through his defense attorney at the beginning of the proceedings on Wednesday. In it, Rick denied any guilt on the part of her client. “He was innocently imprisoned for 13 years and seven months,” she said. Genditzki did not kill the 87-year-old and did no other violence to her. Instead, according to her, he maintained an almost family relationship with her, prepared her breakfast or went shopping for her.
The lawyer sees weighty arguments on the part of her client, who had visited the old lady on the afternoon of her death until around 3 p.m. “The reports will also show that the time of death is much later,” she said during a break in the negotiations. According to her statement, the 87-year-old fell into the bathtub. “All of that was ruled out by the original court.” It was a scandal that an expert had adjusted his report to the expectations of the law enforcement authorities.
Revision already in 2010
Rick also criticized the reasoning that Genditzki had hit the woman on the head during an argument. “After you lose all the charges, inventing an argument that doesn’t have the slightest evidence, I find that scandalous,” Rick said, referring to the prosecutor. “My personal hope is that the culture of error in the Bavarian criminal justice system will improve as a result of this process and that the way the police and experts sometimes work will also be addressed.”
Genditzki appealed after his first conviction in 2010. The Federal Court of Justice referred the case back to another chamber of the Munich II Regional Court, which sentenced him again in January 2012 to life imprisonment for murder to cover up another crime and bodily harm. Genditzki also appealed against this – this time, however, without success. Finally, he tried to get the proceedings to be resumed, which was finally ordered by the Munich I Regional Court, as well as Genditzki’s release on August 12, 2022.
