Newsbreak makes a flashback to more than 40 years ago when a German woman, Marianne Bachmeier, shot dead a man who had unlawfully killed her young daughter.
In a famous case, Bachmeier was convicted of the 1981 courtroom killing of an alleged murderer.
The male defendant had been on trial for strangling Bachmeier’s daughter. The female shooter was subsequently paroled – in 1985.
Bachmeier was convicted of premeditated manslaughter by a Luebeck court in 1983 for shooting Klaus Grabowski, a twice-convicted child molester. She shot him in court while Grabowski’s trial on charges of killing her seven-year-old daughter Anna was underway.
Witnesses at the trial testified that she pulled a .22-caliber Beretta pistol from her purse and fired seven shots at Grabowski on March 6, 1981. He died on the way to the hospital.
There was a public outcry that the shooting was justified, but the court decided in 1983 that the attack was premeditated and imposed a six-year prison sentence.
Bachmeier married in 1985 and in 1988 moved to Lagos, Nigeria, with her husband, a teacher. They lived in a German camp where her husband taught at a German school. They divorced in 1990.
On 17 September 1996, she died at the age of 46 from pancreatic cancer in a hospital in Lübeck.
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