Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
As is well known, real life writes the best stories, as the following criminal case proves. On 8 August 2018, Ekaterina R.-S., a 48-year-old woman originally from Bulgaria, found her 60-year-old husband, Hans-Gottfried S., lifeless in his bed in the bedroom of their shared flat on Lake Tegernsee. She immediately contacted their GP, who could only confirm the death of the former ophthalmologist. At first, the GP suspected suicide, as the ophthalmologist had been taking antidepressants for his depression for some time. As the cause of death was unclear, the criminal investigation department from Miesbach was called in. They found a syringe next to the bed, the contents of which would later prove to be highly explosive. Ekaterina, a former nurse, had been married to the ophthalmologist since 2013; he adored his attractive wife and granted her every wish. Whether it was an expensive luxury car or a fur coat, Ekaterina simply got everything she wanted. He even transferred his property to her. Due to the unexplained cause of death, the Munich II Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered a post-mortem examination of the body. This revealed that the ophthalmologist had been injected with a lethal cocktail of a sleeping pill, insulin and morphine. But why would a man who was not diabetic inject himself with insulin? All the evidence pointed to the ophthalmologist having been murdered by his wife. She had fleeced her husband like a Christmas goose. As he could no longer provide for her financially, Ekaterina had already started a relationship with a new, wealthy man. Just a few months after the murder, she was arrested; following the urn burial of her dead husband, she had drilled a hole in his gravestone and removed the ashes. She had poured some of these into a glass, which she had placed in the flat, and stuffed the rest into her pillowcase, on which – according to the testimony of a later female prisoner – she is said to have masturbated and slept. Ekaterina, referred to by the media simply as the ‘Fur Lady of Tegernsee’, had had sex with her husband before administering the poisonous cocktail to him. She then gave him a sleeping pill instead of his prescribed antidepressant, so that her husband was in a state of light sleep. She then injected him with insulin. When he did not die, she injected him with morphine. Her husband died in agony after hours of struggling for his life. Ekaterina remained silent regarding the charges brought against her for the murder of her husband and desecration of a grave. The Munich II Regional Court sentenced Ekaterina – who repeatedly interrupted the judge with loud outbursts during the reading of the verdict, whereupon she was removed from the courtroom – to life imprisonment on the grounds of particularly grave culpability. Thus, Ekaterina’s ‘dolce vita’ was finally a thing of the past; she will now spend the rest of her days behind bars.
