In a Hamburg apartment building, a man stabs his wife in a violent rage. In the end, a three-year-old boy is left behind and a court that finds no motive for the crime.
© Philotheus Nisch for DIE ZEIT
Until January 2, 2025, the bright brick apartment building in the affluent north of Hamburg could have been called an idyll. The house is just a few hundred meters away from a tranquil hiking trail in the countryside along the Tarpenbek stream. Young families in particular live here. But at 8:28 p.m., it was a Thursday, this middle-class peace came to an abrupt end: 38-year-old Daniel Sauter* stabbed his wife, the mother of his child Tim, in the stairwell. He will later explain his crazy motive to the investigators: he wanted to protect his three-year-old son, who his mother was taking with him cocaine poisoned.
