The case Peggy: guilty or innocent?
The Case Peggy Knobloch: Is Ulvi K. really the culprit?
On May 7, 2001 Peggy Knobloch, 9 years old, disappeared from Lichtenberg. Her body was never found. A year later, Ulvi K., a young mentally retarded man, confessed to killing the girl. Later he revoked his confession but remained in detention. Even before, there were many inconsistencies in the investigation: Seven witnesses said that they had seen Peggy after her disappearance. However, the investigators believed a witness, who remembered only one year later, to have seen Ulvi K. at exactly 1:15 pm on the bench next to the cemetery, which could not confirm 65 people who had crossed over the place in the time. According to the verdict, Peggy is said to have been last seen alive at 1:15 pm at the cemetery. But the tachograph on the bus where the witness who held this time was misread. Thus, assuming the correct time, Ulvi K. must be able to commit the perfect, unerring murder in 45 minutes.
Now, in April 2013, Ulvi K.'s defense lawyer Michael Euler filed for retrial. There are many new facts and evidence, the lawyer says. The State Prosecutor's Office at the Bayreuth Regional Court announced that it would scrutinize the more than 2,000-page application meticulously.
Not only his lawyer believes in the innocence of Ulvi K. Gudrun Rödel, a retired secretary, has been campaigning for his release for years. ChroniquesDuVasteMonde editor Georg Cadeggianini met the woman in the fall of 2012. Read his report here:
"Without Ulvi nothing is going on in my life anymore."
She sticks to him: Supervisor Gudrun Rödel can not believe that Ulvi K. is the murderer
© Jens SchwarzA can of tobacco, filter sleeves, a glass of dissolving coffee and a kebab. Gudrun Rödel sits in the visitor room of the forensic psychiatry Bayreuth, high-security wing. "The most important thing for him is what I bring." Ulvi K., 34, trots towards her, two caretakers in front of him, the security chief behind him. Gudrun Rödel, 64, gets up, she is a head shorter than him, hugs him. He does not seem to know exactly where to go with his arms, where with his big hands. The hands he was supposed to have suffocated a nine-year-old girl. He grins: good-natured, a little bit rapt. Gudrun Rödel lights up.
Eight years ago, she visited the disabled Ulvi K. for the first time. Since he was already the convicted murderer of Peggy Knobloch, the blond girl with the bright blue eyes from the Upper Franconian Lichtenberg. Gudrun Rödel knows Peggy only from wanted photos. The retired secretary lives 35 kilometers away in Münchberg. She has never met the convict and his family before. Today she says, "Without Ulvi, there is nothing left in my life."
On May 7, 2001, Peggy disappears somewhere between school and home in broad daylight. One of the largest searches in German history turns the 1100-inhabitant city of Lichtenberg on its head. Without a result. To date, neither Peggy's body nor her satchel nor any DNA trace of her found. After more than a year and more than 40 interrogations, the innkeeper's son Ulvi K., who is 80 percent disabled for meningitis in childhood and has a mental status of 10 with an IQ of 67, confesses, but later revokes it.
The jury court Hof is that he is fully guilty and the confession credible. He is sentenced to life imprisonment.
The day after this verdict, Gudrun Rödel climbs into her red Honda Civic. She leaves her canning jars with cucumbers behind, her cat Mauzi, the television on which she followed the process. Your life gets a new direction. It was the strange feeling that something had to be done and no one else was there to do it. Gudrun Rödel herself has a severely handicapped daughter who lives with her in the house. She knows the feeling of helplessness. "These are often the last in society." But there is not only pity: It was also the rush against their own powerlessness. "There was nothing against him, except that he said it was him, no traces, no corpse."
At the scene: Again and again Gudrun Rödel has left the Schlossbergweg in Lichtenberg. Peggy is supposed to have been killed here.
She drives to Lichtenberg. She's on the way, where everything should have happened - she will do that again and again in the following years. The whole 600 meters from the bank at Henri-Marteau-Platz, where Ulvi K. is said to have been waiting for Peggy, past cemetery and allotments, on the Schlossbergweg through the forest, around half Lichtenberg rum - as it is confessed. She wants to run because she has to run to catch up with a nine-year-old girl who is running for his life.The path is rocky and goes uphill. Gudrun Rödel only manages the first quarter. Then she puffs to the pace. She stops at the place where the girl fell. Where Ulvi pushed it, shut his mouth and nose, "until she was quiet," as his confession says. Where he should have hidden her dead body and satchels under branches. Gudrun Rödel lowers her head, her sandals are wet. As if the path would reveal its history if you just stare at it long enough.
She has discovered inconsistencies in the confession. For example, how Peggy "could lie to lie in prone position" when Ulvi should have pushed her against the chest. Like him, a disabled, heavy man, to have run after her all the way. How he could see blood after the first fall on Peggy's knee, even though she wore jeans. Gudrun Rödel looks up, stretching her arms forward: "What's the whole cramp?" She lets her arms sink. From above yell shouts, a rehearsal for the Burgfest on the weekend. She nods. "That suits," she says. "Everything is staged, nothing has happened here."
At the beginning many thought: They want to make themselves important.
She researched for eight years. Peggy's mother has refused to talk to her. Gudrun Rödel is meanwhile the legal supervisor of Ulvi. When she visits him in psychiatry, they eat kebab, he cooks fruit tea, often she brings photos: from the outside world. This year she wants to apply for a retrial, she wants a new process. That's why she went to Lichtenberg again and again. In the passenger seat, a stack of files: testimonies, notes with open questions, and later the case files, to which she came through a lawyer. She wrote to witnesses; Leaflets stuck in the mailboxes at night; the citizens' initiative "Justice for Ulvi" founded; the speedometer disk of the school bus, in which a witness sat, under the magnifying glass, discovered further inconsistencies. In the beginning, she says, nothing worked. How closed were the people. "They thought: It wants to make itself important, there is nothing behind it."
For 21 of her 64 years she has worked as a secretary in various law firms. In 1998 she moved to her second husband in Münchberg and worked until her early retirement as a geriatric nurse. Her husband supports her research. Recently, her former boss, a lawyer from Zwickau, called. She has learned about her commitment, of her obstinacy she already knew. "She was excited."
Meanwhile, she has refused to tell her friends unasked by the latest developments. "Always only Ulvi," they say, "you have no time for us at all." She shrugs her shoulders: "Yes, there are many more important things." Two years ago, her own disabled daughter died. "The thing about Ulvi I see as her legacy: Do something, Mama." And if he was? If she defends a murderer? "At the beginning, I also had doubts, before I read the files, before I knew that someone was being sought here to do it with." Sometimes Gudrun Rödel is startled by herself. Why does she always want to help? Is she a bit crazy?
A framed photo of Ulvi: "For my carer"
Crazy? What is that? Rödel tells of last Christmas, when she celebrated with Ulvi and his half station. "How these people can be happy." She played Christmas songs on the keyboard. Always the same, because she can only handle a handful. "I learn this when I have time," says Gudrun Rödel. She takes a little break. "So never."
On the Schlossberg stalls are screwed together for the castle festival. Rödel goes to the people at the Met booth, it has nothing strategic as she talks to them. She does not look like a lawyer for something or someone. It is her own concern. Later she goes over to the "Ritterstübchen", the pub of Ulvis parents, meeting point of the citizens' initiative. She takes Ulvis mother in the arm, which can not sleep for days. The pastor had called her, someone was with him who had something important to say to the case. Would he be able to send him? Naturally. And then nobody came. What does Gudrun Rödel mean to her? "I know that Ulvi is in good hands when I'm gone," says the 74-year-old.
"There are a few here in Lichtenberg who just want to rest," says one who works at the tax office, "and a silent majority that is glad that it will be rolled up again, it probably needs someone from the outside a few times on the table in the tavern, but the whole thing brought Gudrun to shine. "
The gifts have long been handed over in the visitors' room of the high-security wing. Gudrun Rödel tells Ulvi about the "Ritterstübchen" and about a Tupperparty. Sometimes she asks if he can remember this or that. "Yes," he says, he nods his entire upper body. "And you, what did you work for?" He talks about the firelighters he put together this morning.He painstakingly chops words together, which carers help: First you have to cut toilet paper rolls into rings, then fill them with wood splinters. How many did he do? "If you do it fast, you do it wrong," he says. Nine pieces in less than two hours. She tells of the castle festival, of the turnstiles at the entrance to the small ticket booth. "I did not exist as I was," says Ulvi. She talks about the lawyer and a request in the Bavarian state parliament. "Do you understand that at all?" - "Yes," he says, again he nods his whole body.
In the end, Ulvi is the only one in the visitors' room who puts his chair back under the table. And Gudrun Rödel's too.
