The monster

The Kalinka Bamberski case was an incredible murder case involving a young girl that occupied the German and French judicial systems for almost 30 years and was only solved because the biological father kidnapped the murderer. Kalinka Bamberski was a 14-year-old French girl who was spending her summer vacation in July 1982 in Scheidegg in the district of Lindau, known as the sun terrace above Lake Constance, together with her mother and her younger brother Nicolas in the house of her stepfather, the German cardiologist Dieter Krombach. Completely unexpectedly, the healthy girl was found dead in her bed by her stepfather at 10 a.m. on the morning of July 10, 1982. Her stepfather told the police that he had given her an iron injection the night before because Kalinka had complained of feeling unwell. He also stated that he had injected her with medication into her heart and lower leg to resuscitate her, even though rigor mortis had already set in. He then admitted that, in addition to sedatives to help her sleep, he had also injected her with a tanning agent, as Kalinka, who was an avid surfer, really wanted to be tanned. Dieter Krombach, who was a respected doctor, arranged for Kalinka’s body to be transported to the morgue without involving the criminal investigation department. It was not until two days later that the Kempten public prosecutor’s office ordered an autopsy of the body, which was performed by the district court doctor Höhmann together with the senior physician Dohmann. The time of death was determined to be between three and four in the morning. However, the cause of death could not be clearly established. Although an injury to the vagina was found, it was not documented whether Kalinka was still a virgin or whether she had had sexual intercourse before her death. In addition, the drug that Krombach had injected Kalinka to make her tan was not suitable for this purpose and was highly dangerous. But despite all these mysterious and dubious circumstances and the fact that Krombach was present during the autopsy, the Kempten public prosecutor’s office closed its investigation on August 17, 1982, just one month after Kalinka’s death. Kalinka was buried in France. After her father, André Bamberski, received a copy of the autopsy report in September 1982 from his ex-wife Danielle, who had left him for Dieter Krombach at the time, he was certain that Dieter Krombach had raped his daughter and administered narcotics that had caused her death. The stated time of death could not be correct, as half of her dinner, about 3 liters, was undigested. Kalinka must therefore have died on the evening of Friday, July 9. André Bamberski then initiated several legal proceedings. Since Kalinka was French and had been buried in France, her father managed to have her body exhumed in France on December 4, 1985. It was found that her genitals had either decomposed in the meantime or had been removed during the autopsy in Germany. However, the Munich Higher Regional Court saw no evidence of a crime and finally declared the case closed five years later. However, André Bamberski filed a criminal complaint against Krombach with the French authorities. In 1995, Krombach was sentenced in absentia by a Paris jury court to 15 years in prison for bodily harm resulting in death. However, since the investigation in Germany had been closed, the German authorities refused to extradite Krombach. Since no defense attorney had represented Krombach in 1995, the European Court of Human Rights overturned the verdict against Krombach, but the arrest warrant remained in effect. In the meantime, Dieter Krombach was sentenced in 1997 to two years’ probation for raping a 16-year-old patient in his practice, whom he had previously drugged. He then had to sell his practice in Lindau. He was now socially ostracized. He subsequently continued to work as a doctor in various clinics and medical practices without a license. For this, he had to serve time in prison from the end of 2006 to 2008. This only confirmed Kalinka’s father’s belief that Dieter Krombach was Kalinka’s murderer. André Bamberski, who had sacrificed his professional and private life to solve his daughter’s murder and founded the association “Justice pour Kalinka,” saw only one chance to convict Dieter Krombach as the perpetrator. Since the arrest warrant was still in effect, on October 18, 2009, after 27 years, he had Dieter Krombach abducted from his home in Scheidegg and taken, bound, to a courthouse in Mulhouse, France. Thus, on March 29, 2011, the trial against Dieter Krombach, who had suffered a skull fracture during the abduction, could begin. On October 22, 2011, he was sentenced in France to 15 years in prison for bodily harm resulting in death. André Bamberski, who was celebrated as a folk hero in France, received a one-year suspended sentence on June 18, 2014, for the abduction of Dieter Krombach. Due to Dieter Krombach’s poor health, he was released from prison on February 21, 2020. He died on September 12, 2020, at the age of 85 in a nursing home near Winsen. The murder case was so spectacular that it was made into a film in 2016 entitled “In the Name of My Daughter – The Kalinka Case.”