Wilfried B. did not exercise his right to remain silent as a defendant. “Yes, I want to testify,” the 83-year-old said at the start of the trial at Frankfurt regional court. He was accused of murder. He “killed without being a murderer,” said the prosecutor who read the indictment.
In September 2022, B. was reported to have killed his crazy wife. Both of them woke up early because the woman had to go to the toilet. B. took him there and wanted to help him take off his nightgown and underwear. But the woman refused and shouted at him: “Stop it!” He dug his fingernails into the man’s arm, which felt a sharp pain. B. is said to have then put his hands around the woman’s neck and strangled her – “accepting death,” the public prosecutor said.
The defendant did not deny his crime. He described the morning and his despair when he saw his wife no longer moving. She then sat on the living room sofa in fear for several minutes, then she called her niece: “I think I killed Irene
The defendant described his daily life with the crazy woman
The defendant testified for more than an hour. He came to court as a free man and the arrest warrant against him was suspended. B. talks about his childhood, his professional life, and how he met his wife. He talked about Jeffrey, his wife’s son, who suffered from an immunodeficiency disorder and then epilepsy. As a couple, they care for the child intensively.
B. explains how his wife’s dementia continues to progress. How she misplaced her jewelry, how she forgot where she lived, how she became increasingly confused, how she “ran away” and he had to spend a long time looking for her in the settlement where they lived for years. And he talked about his exhaustion, how he could barely sleep at night because his wife woke him up so often. “But helping my wife is not a job for me,” said the defendant. “When you love someone so much and have been together for almost 50 years, you enjoy doing it. That’s never too much for me.”
The three years since the crime have been “very difficult” for him. He found it hard to think about anything else. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t ask myself: What have you done?” The fact that the process had only just begun bothered him. “I kept asking myself: What will happen to me?”
What the niece said about the couple
On the first day of the trial, B.’s nephew, who called B. in despair after the crime, also testified. He described his relationship with her as very close. B. and his wife always treated each other very harmoniously, he reported.
He was “very worried” about the defendant before the crime occurred. He saw her as overwhelmed and he wished she could pay more attention to herself and “think for herself,” he said on the witness stand. The trial continues next week.
