For You, Anna

Marianne Bachmeier ran a pub in Lübeck, in northern Germany, and raised her daughter Anna around it. On May 5, 1980, Anna skipped school and spent the day at a friend’s house. On the way home she met Klaus Grabowski, a thirty-five-year-old butcher who lived nearby. He had convictions for abusing two young girls, an earlier probation term for attacking a six-year-old, and had been surgically castrated in 1976, then later given hormone treatment that reversed the effect.

Grabowski held Anna at his flat for hours, then strangled her with a pair of tights, put her body in a cardboard box and left it on a canal bank outside the city. He admitted killing her at his trial but claimed the seven-year-old had tried to blackmail him, which the courtroom spent its first days arguing about. On March 6, 1981, the third day, Marianne stood up in the public gallery, drew a Beretta 70 pistol and fired at his back.

Grabowski died there in the dock. In March 1983 Marianne was convicted of manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm and given six years; she was released in 1985 after serving roughly three. She later lived in Nigeria and then Sicily, where she worked in hospice care, and returned to Germany with pancreatic cancer. She died on September 17, 1996, at forty-six, and was buried beside Anna.