Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
A criminal case that could easily have come straight out of a horror film took place in 1984 in Mönchengladbach, which, with its 272,000 inhabitants, is the largest city on the left bank of the Lower Rhine in the west of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was 20 February 1984 when the municipal gardener made the discovery of a lifetime in the ‘Bunter Garten’ on Bettrather Straße. He found a bag with gruesome contents hidden beneath some rhododendron bushes. Forty-two freezer containers and plastic bags contained human flesh. Some of it appeared to have been processed into a sort of goulash, whilst other body parts, such as a skull, had evidently been cooked in an oven. The city gardener immediately alerted the police, who set up a 13-member special investigation team. Who on earth was capable of such a heinous crime? But the key question was: who had actually been so cruelly dismembered and dumped in the ‘Bunter Garten’? On the basis of fingers found intact in the freezer bags, the dismembered body was identified as that of 32-year-old Hans-Josef Wirtz, a man with a criminal record who had been in a relationship with 26-year-old Martina Zimmermann. Martina was an extremely attractive woman who was divorced and the mother of two young children. When she was questioned, she confessed to the murder of Hans-Josef Wirtz, whom she had drugged on 29 April 1983 and then dismembered. Martina had subsequently bought a freezer specifically to store the body parts there. She had placed the freezer in her bedroom due to a lack of space. To mask the smell, she had baked the skull in the oven, with which she would frequently have conversations. She had turned other body parts into goulash. When the stench became unbearable, she had disposed of the body parts in the Botanical Gardens. Martina was a fan of occult literature, loved horror films and kept snakes and spiders as pets. Furthermore, Martina was heavily dependent on medication; at the age of 14, she had suffered from anorexia, which was accompanied by binge-eating episodes. Martina testified that she and Hans-Josef had attempted suicide together, but that the attempt had failed. She suggested that she would murder Hans-Josef and then take her own life once her children were safely provided for. Naturally, the murder case attracted considerable media attention. Martina was given the nicknames ‘Murder Witch’, ‘Horror Martina’ and ‘Bloodthirsty Martina’, as she had cold-bloodedly and without remorse killed her lover, dismembered him with a circular saw, and then boiled, baked and frozen his remains. Martina was diagnosed with a severe psychiatric disorder. Owing to her diminished responsibility, she was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, followed by placement in a psychiatric institution. Martina made several attempts to escape and is said to have died whilst back on the run in Amsterdam.
