Short Stuff: Marianne Bachmeier: Vigilante Mother

Marianne Bachmeier committed a shocking act of violence in court in Germany in 1981 to avenge the murder of her young daughter. Many people understood. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:39Josh Clark?

  Hey, I'm welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave. So this is a good old fashioned short stuff. The, oh man, edition.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Vigilante justice. Thank you to perplexity and YouTube and how stuff works and morbidology for the information on the kind of shocking story of Marianne Bachmeier.

• 1:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so Marianne Bachmeier, you say vigilante, you usually think guys in the Old West, right? No, Marianne Bachmeier was a woman in Germany, in Lübeck, I believe, Germany in the 1980s, who carried out essentially an execution in the middle of open court to kill the murderer of her daughter. And if you want to start talking about moral quandaries and ethical twists, this is about as, as good as it gets.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and as bad as it gets. On May 5th, 1980, and you know, trigger warning, because this involves sexual violence and violence against a child, which is the worst thing you can imagine. But her daughter Anna was abducted at the age of seven by a man named Klaus Grabowski. He was a 35 year old butcher. He had, he was out on probation. He had a history of crimes against children and sexual offenses. And little Anna got in an argument with her mother, apparently that morning, skipped school and Grabowski lured her to his apartment because he said that he had cats that she could play with. He.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  Sexually assaulted her over the course of several hours and then strangled her to death, put her body in a cardboard box and disposed of it in a canal. And that is the most awful part of the story. So I'm glad that part's over with.

• 2:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure. And Mary Ann was a single mom. Did you say that?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:34Josh Clark?

  So Grabowski was actually turned in by his fiance. And like you said, he was out on probation. He'd actually been chemically castrated before. And his chemical castration was reversed when he met his fiance while he was in prison.

• 2:50Josh Clark?

  And so he was caught fairly quickly, I believe. And he was put on trial for the murder of Anna. And during this trial, and within the first, I think, couple of days, his defense was, I didn't sexually abuse her. She said that she was going to tell her mom that I did sexually abuse her if I didn't give her money. So that's why I killed her. And that caused Mary Ann Bachmeier to absolutely snap. Not only was her young seven-year-old daughter sexually assaulted and murdered, now she was being slandered in open court by the guy who murdered her.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and gaslit. The whole country is being gaslit by this guy. So on day three of the trial, she comes into court and she has smuggled in a gun, a small caliber, a 22 Beretta pistol. And she shot him very calmly, apparently, walked over, fired eight shots at him. I saw seven in other places, but both places I saw that she hit him six times, killed him on the spot. And the court was going nuts, obviously, but apparently she was very calm through the whole thing with her demeanor, said things like, I wanted to kill him. He killed my daughter. I wanted to shoot him in the face, but I shot him in the back. I hope he dies.

• 4:10Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And her just calmly saying this stuff too, while the rest of the court's going crazy, that's, I mean, that's movie type stuff, you know?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 4:19Josh Clark?

  So I say we take a little break and come back and talk about how people felt about this vigilante execution in Germany after this.

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• 7:03Speaker 02

  All right, so the vigilante killing has happened in court in front of everybody. So like, you know, kind of no doubt what happened as to her guilt goes. Details emerged about, you know, her past and, you know, how, what kind of a mother she was. Some people at some point like questioned her grief a little bit, criticized her parenting. But most people, a lot of people were like, heck, yeah, you know, you avenged the death of your daughter. They're in plain view and you took care of things very quickly and efficiently. And $100,000 Deutschmarks were raised for her legal defense because of that.

• 7:39Josh Clark?

  Right. And I have to say, I looked into it, it's pretty gross, the people who are like, oh, I don't know, I questioned her moral character.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:47Josh Clark?

  She had a kid, she had two kids out of wedlock, one at 16, one at 18, and she adopted both of them off right after they were born because she was 16 and then 18. When she was 23, she had Anna. She made the decision to raise her on her own as a single mom. And then, so that was like her, like her past that people were like, oh, I don't know about that. And then her behavior after Anna died, she, apparently Mary Ann spent a lot of time at work. She worked in a pub and that was enough for people to be like, I don't know about this lady. I was okay with her murdering this guy in open court, but she's spending time at a pub and I've lost faith in her.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Which surprises me for Germany because they love their beer.

• 8:34Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I should also say, this is West Germany and I don't know if Germans refer to it historically like that still, or if they prefer people to just say Germany? Because this is 1980 and 1981 and it was definitely still West Germany that we're talking about. So if you're German, write in and let us know.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So she initially had a murder charge put on her. They eventually convicted her of manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm. That always cracks me up when a tiny little offense is tacked on. Six-year prison sentence, she served three and got out. People thought that that was a fairly lenient sentence for obvious reasons. And if you talk about a pretty evenly split survey, there was a survey about a year later in 83 by the Allen Spock Institute, and 28% felt the sentence was just right, 27% thought it was too harsh, 25% thought she got off too lightly, and 20% weren't sure. So it's

• 9:33Speaker 02

  very evenly, pretty much evenly divided as to how people felt about her even serving those three years.

• 9:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and plus it also sparked a lot of debates about other stuff, too. In particular, whether or not the West German or German court system was a little too lenient with repeat offenders. Remember, Grabowski was out on bail, or on probation, I'm sorry. So that was a big discussion. And also, like, you know, what, like, what right does a person like that have? Do you have, like, a moral right to murder somebody who did that to your child? And then also, does that right extend to your, if somebody did that to your husband, or your wife, or your brother? Like, is it just specifically, is it really

• 10:19Josh Clark?

  narrow that only a mother could do that only for her young child, only under circumstances like this? This is the stuff that the people of Germany were talking about at the time.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. She served those three years, was released in June of 85, and obviously wanted to sort of get away from all that. She withdrew from the public eye, pretty, you know, pretty smart move, and moved to Nigeria. She married a teacher, moved to Nigeria. She was there through the 90s, but got divorced after a few years. And then after her divorce, went to Sicily and developed pancreatic cancer, a terminal case of cancer. So that eventually got her to go back to Germany, such that she was, you know, in the mid 90s, like, occasionally interviewed and stuff like that again because she was back there.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  In the mid 90s, she was interviewed for a television show where I don't know why she felt like she needed to admit this because everyone knew it happened, but sort of was like, yeah, I did this. I meant to do it. And just passed away about a year later in 1996 at the young age of 46 from cancer.

• 11:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think what she was saying too was that she finally admitted that it was premeditated because that's what the case against her hinged on. Was it something that she had planned out?

• 11:39Speaker 02

  She brought the gun, of course.

• 11:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah. But was it planned even further than that? And like, the prosecution apparently had firearms experts that were like, she hit this guy six out of seven or eight, however many shots she fired times. Like, you actually would have to have firearms training. The average person would do to for that number of hits. So like, people were saying like, she definitely thought about this, planned it out, prepared for it. And she finally admitted in 1995 that she did. And she had a really hard life, man, dead at 46 of pancreatic cancer. And I also read that she herself also had been sexually abused as a child, too. So she had a really hard, hard, sad life, you know?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:17Josh Clark?

  I feel for her.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. She was laid to rest beside her daughter there in Burgdorf Cemetery in Lübeck, Germany.

• 12:26Josh Clark?

  Yep. So if you're in Lübeck, Germany, and you want to go pay your respects to Mary Ann, or Anna, or both, you can do that.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  That's right. And this certainly is something still people talk about over there, especially, you know, as far as all the kind of things we were saying. And certainly, we're not weighing in on that here as far as vigilante justice goes. But the world was probably a better place without that guy walking around.

• 12:51Josh Clark?

  Probably. Hard to disagree with that, Chuck. And I think before we say anything else, short stuff is that.