The defendant speaks at length of her "departure". On a Saturday in August last year, the now 56-year-old woman packed a travel bag because she wanted to go to Switzerland, as she tells the district court of Hanau. The purpose of the trip was clear. Before she died, the woman wanted to see the mountains she liked so much. She wanted to go to Switzerland to die. She says this clearly several times in the courtroom. In the time before she had collected sleeping pills, on the journey to the Alps she wanted to choose a place to die.
Jan Schiefenhövel
Editor at the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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She finally discovered such a place near the source of the Rhine in Graubünden, as the defendant says. "After leaving, I had only one thing on my mind, I only had my suicide in mind." When asked by presiding judge Mirko Schulte what the thoughts of death would have meant for her, Petra R. answered: "I can tell you that, it's just peace."
In the end, the long-prepared suicide did not happen because the woman had been arrested beforehand. Because she is accused of the attempted murder of several people who had been her neighbors until her departure. Before the defendant left for Switzerland, the public prosecutor's office was convinced that she set fire to the former forester's lodge on the edge of a district of Gelnhausen in the middle of the night, where they lived as one of three tenants. Prosecutor Jana Gladeck sees this as an insidious act. No one was killed in the fire because all residents were able to escape into the open. However, the fire completely destroyed the house and caused damage of more than two million euros, as the owner stated in the courtroom.
Riding instructor with depression
There, the defendant talks at length about her life, in which she worked as an independent riding instructor in various riding stables. Already from adolescence she had suffered from depression, which she herself had "swept under the carpet" for a long time. After a nervous breakdown at the age of 40, she resumed the physically demanding work, but this caused her grief. Other riding instructors see a horse only as sports equipment and in a correspondingly bad condition many of the mounts, the back pressed through, are only lame able to take steps. "That was always harder for me to bear. I've lost respect for myself." The thought that man was destroying nature tormented her.
In the years before the fire, she had begun to take more and more alcohol in addition to painkillers for the complaints from work, most recently two bottles of wine in one evening. She can't remember the fire, she says. The judge accuses her of having searched the Internet not only for methods for suicide, but also for information on the subject of fire. For example, she entered into a search engine which liquid was well suited for fanning and what punishment for arson was threatened. The defendant cannot explain this.
The motive for the alleged act remains a mystery. As the landlord reports, there was neither a dispute with him nor between the tenants. Another perpetrator is also out of the question, no one has a reason for an act of revenge. When the landlord's wife is finally questioned as the last witness of the day of the trial, she reports that Petra R. did not want to let her into the apartment, neither for the installation of smoke detectors, nor for the installation of measuring devices for heating costs. First excuses came, then a voice message, the tenant could not let her in, as the apartment looked. When it was said that one had to go in, there was no reaction. A week later, there was a fire.