Persuaded women to undergo life-threatening electric shocks

The girls and young women were subjected to up to 230 volts through their bodies. They cut off electric cables and held them to their fists, stuck electrodes to their sleep, stuck nails into sockets or touched electric fences.

A sensational trial has begun at the regional court of munich II. A 30-year-old man from the wurzburg area is charged with attempted murder of 88 women and girls. He allegedly posed as a doctor and claimed to be conducting scientific studies on pain therapy. By means of the video chat program skype he made his victims – according to the indictment – to inflict life-threatening electric shocks on themselves.

He allegedly offered money for each of them – sometimes 200, sometimes 450 euros, even 1500 or 3000 euros. In some cases, even the parents of the girls helped in the alleged scientific experiments. One father, according to the indictment, repeatedly electrocuted his daughter with an electric shock device.

The prosecutor’s office in charge of the case, munich II, speaks of an "unusual case" and the court excluded the public directly at the start of the trial for a possible admission of the accused, testimonies of the underage victims as well as the closing arguments. It thus followed a motion of the defense.

The presiding judge justified the exclusion with the fact that it concerns the "sexual life" of the accused and "intimate desires". The indictment is based on the "satisfaction of the sexual instinct" as a murder characteristic and on a "fetishistic component" in the motive for the crime. The indictment alleges that the defendant became sexually aroused when a woman suffered pain from an electric shock. "Both the infliction of pain by means of electric current, and naked tubes per se, as well as bondage, are a fetish of the accused," the prosecutor said.

According to a report in the wurzburg newspaper "main-post", the defense, on the other hand, assumes that the defendant is mentally ill and has asperger’s syndrome. The newspaper quotes the defender klaus spiegel. According to the indictment, it was an "attempt by a sick person to communicate with the environment". The audience had to leave the courtroom for the defense statement.

"Life-threatening application for a part-time job," wrote the police when the case became known last year. From 2014 at the latest, the IT specialist, who appears at his trial wearing glasses and a black hoodie, is alleged to have contacted women and girls who were looking for a part-time job on portals. And he offered it to them. He promised money for participation in a scientific study on pain therapy. Sometimes he posed as a doctor in a hospital, sometimes as a doctor from a renowned university. According to the indictment, his youngest victim was only 13 years old.

In skype chat, the indictment alleges, he laid out the experimental setup "and then asked each of the alleged subjects to expose themselves to electric shocks via the house’s electrical system, which carried a voltage of 230 volts.". Over the years, the alleged attempts became more frequent. While he started out by sticking nails in sockets, he later made his victims build devices with plugs or get tied to a chair for the electric shocks.

According to the prosecution, he recorded the video chats that showed all this – so that he could watch them again and again and also sell them on the darknet. Investigators tracked down the IT specialist from the wurzburg district after a 16-year-old victim of the man filed a complaint. He was arrested in february 2018 and was held in custody until the end of september 2019, since when he has been treated in a psychiatric hospital. At the start of the trial, his mother sits next to him "as legal guardian. During the reading of the indictment, she keeps grabbing her head.

120 victims from all over germany are said to have fallen for the information technology merchant, according to the police. According to the public prosecutor’s office, the fact that only 88 cases have now been charged is due to the fact that "in the other cases investigated (…) "criminal liability does not exist or cannot be proven".

According to the police, the analysis of the seized data carriers revealed more than 200 video recordings that the arrested man had made of his alleged probands. According to the police, the man had made a "partial confession" to the police in the past year. The prosecutor’s office also confirmed that he had pleaded guilty to the charges, but left open how.