A former babysitter from Wermelskirchen near Cologne has been sentenced to 14 years and six months in prison for the most serious sexual abuse of infants and small children. In its verdict, the Cologne Regional Court also ordered preventive detention for the 45-year-old due to the high risk of recidivism, so that he will not be released for the time being even after he has served his sentence.
239,000 euros in compensation for the victims
The serial offender has to pay the victims a total of 239,000 euros in damages. "We don't see a monster in you, but we can see that you have to be afraid," said the presiding judge Christoph Kaufmann.
In his opinion, the crimes - "sexual orgies" - are among the worst that even specialized investigators have been confronted with for many years. "Anyone who hasn't heard the children scream doesn't really know what this is about," said Kaufmann. The youngest of the 14 victims was four weeks old.
The perpetrator captured all his crimes on video. Kaufmann said his comprehensive confession was therefore not of much mitigating weight. "We had everything live and in color." One could imagine some extremely sadistic scenes in the "torture cellars" of some rogue states, but hardly behind the facade of a deeply bourgeois existence in the middle of the Federal Republic.
Judge: "The children are ventilated sex toys for you"
According to Kaufmann, the accused is a "delicate, smart guy", wealthy, successful, worldly. The married IT expert had a circle of friends made up of pilots, doctors and actors, took luxurious vacation trips to Singapore and New Zealand and owned a property worth millions in Wermelskirchen. In this particularly transparent building, however, there was a dark basement area in a figurative sense, said Kaufmann. The accused acted out his dark pedophile sexuality in an inhuman way. "The children are ventilated sex toys for you," said Kaufmann.
Like other abusers, the 45-year-old exchanged child pornography material over the Internet. In addition, however, he increasingly specialized in abusing small children - some of them only a few months old babies - in the most serious way as a babysitter. To do this, he administered narcotics to some of the children. In one instance, he abused a boy who was unable to talk about it due to his severe intellectual disability.
This was one of the reasons the perpetrator went unnoticed for so long - the crimes took place between 2005 and 2019. Another reason was that the 45-year-old was highly adept at gaining the trust of parents and older children. In one case he became a boy's godfather, in another he even managed to win the affection of a highly intelligent but difficult to approach boy. "The perfect facade - high gloss," said Kaufmann.
Culprit encrypted videos perfectly
In addition, the perpetrator is also a computer expert who was able to encrypt his videos perfectly. When the police finally became aware of him through a friend of the perpetrator and, after a long investigation, had collected sufficient evidence, they struck with a SEK commando when he was in a video conference with his boss. As a result, he could no longer lock the computer. "The system was so secure that the CIA wouldn't have gotten in either," Kaufmann quoted an expert as saying. As it turned out, the perpetrator kept an electronic archive with folders such as "Sex with infants", "Sadistic abuse", "Sex with animals".
In his several-hour statement of reasons for his judgment, Kaufmann also addressed the accused directly, who seemed controlled and calm. "This is of course a very bitter moment for you and a very high penalty," said Kaufmann. But there were also exceptionally serious crimes that he had committed. The lawyer, who has long specialized in abuse proceedings, explained: "In all the years - that's 25 years - there has never been a procedure as dramatic (...) as this one."
