August 6, 2025 • 10 mins
Marianne Bachmeier committed a shocking act of violence in court in Germany in 1981 to avenge the murder of her young daughter. Many people understood.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, I'm open to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave.
So this is a good old fashioned short stuff, the
oh Man.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Edition Vigilante Justice. Thank you to Perplexity and YouTube and
how Stuff Works and Morbidology for the information on the
kind of shocking story of mary Anne Bachmeyer.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, so, Maryann Bachmeier. You say vigilanti, you usually think
guys in the Old West, right now. Maryon Bachmeyer was
a woman in Germany and Lubeck, I believe, Germany in
the nineteen eighties who carried out essentially an execution in
the middle of open court to kill the murder of
(00:48):
her daughter. And if you want to start talking about
moral quandaries and ethical twists, this is about as good
as it gets.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, as bad as it gets on May fifth, night
eight And you know, trigger warning because this involves sexual
violence and violence against a child, which is the worst
thing you can imagine. But her daughter Anna was abducted
at the age of seven by a man named Klaus Grobowski.
He was a thirty five year old butcher. He was
(01:18):
out on probation. He had a history of crimes against
children and sexual offenses, and little Anna got in an
argument with her mother apparently that morning skipped school, and
Grabowski lured her to his apartment because he said that
he had cats that she could play with.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
He sexually assaulted her over the.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Course of several hours and then strangled her to death,
put her body in a cardboard box and disposed of
it in a canal. And that is the most awful
part of the story. So I'm glad that parts over with.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, for sure. And mary Anne was a single mom,
did you say that? No, So Grobowski was actually turned
in by his fiance, and like you said, he was
out on probation. He'd actually been chemically castrated before and
his chemical castration was reversed when he met his fiance
while he was in prison, and so he was caught
(02:16):
fairly quickly, I believe, and he was put on trial
for the murder of Anna. And during this trial, and
within the first I think couple of days, his defense
was I didn't sexually abuse her. She said that she
was going to tell her mom that I did sexually
abuse her if I didn't give her money. So that's
(02:38):
why I killed her, And that caused mary Anne Bachmeyer
to absolutely snap. Not only was her young seven year
old daughter sexually assaulted and murdered, now she was being
slandered in open court by the guy who murdered her.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, and gaslet. The whole country is being gaslet by
this guy. So on day three of the trial, she
comes into court and she has smuggled in a gun,
a small caliber of twenty two barretta pistol, and she
shot him very calmly, apparently, walked over, fired eight shots
(03:13):
at him. I saw seven and other places, but both
places I saw that she hit him six times, killed
him on the spot. And the court was going nuts, obviously,
but apparently she was very calm through the whole thing
with her demeanor, said things like I wanted to kill him,
he killed my daughter. I wanted to shoot him in
the face, but I shot him in the back. I
(03:33):
hope he dies.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, and her just calmly saying this stuff too, while
the rest of the court's going crazy. I mean that's
movie type stuff, you know, Yeah, for sure. So I
say we take a little break and come back and
talk about how people felt about this Vigilanti execution in Germany.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
After this, all right, So the vigilanti killing has happened
(04:18):
in court in front of everybody, so like, you know,
kind of no doubt what happened. As to her guilt goes.
Details emerged about, you know, her past, and you know,
how what kind of a mother she was. Some people
at some point like questioned her grief a little bit
criticized her parenting, but most people, a lot of people
(04:39):
were like, heck, yeah, you know, you avenged the death
of your daughter. They're in plain view and you took
care of things very quickly and efficiently. And one hundred
thousand dollars deutsch mars were raised for her legal defense
because of that right.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
And I have to say I looked into it. It's
pretty gross. The people who are like, oh, I don't know.
I questioned her moral character. She had a kid. She
had two kids out of wedlock, one at sixteen, one
at eighteen, and she adopted both of them off right
after they were born because she was sixteen and then eighteen,
when she was twenty three, she had Anna. She made
(05:14):
the decision to raise her on her own as a
single mom. And then so that was like her like
her past that people were like, oh, I don't know
about that. And then her behavior after Anna died. She
apparently married and spent a lot of time at work.
She worked in a pub, and that was enough for
people to be like, I don't know about this lady.
(05:34):
I was okay with her murdering this guy in open court,
but she's spending time at a pub and I've lost
faith in her.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, exactly, which surprises me. For Germany, because they loved
their beer.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, I should also say this is West Germany, and
I don't know if Germans has referred to it historically
like that still or if they prefer people just say Germany,
because this is nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty one and
it was definitely still West Germany that we're talking about.
So if you're German, right in and let.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Us know, Yeah, yeah, for sure. So she initially had
a murder charge put on her. They eventually convicted her
of manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm. That always
cracks me up when a tiny little offense is tacked
on a six year prison sentence.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
She served three and got out.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
People thought that that was a fairly lenient sentence for
obvious reasons. And if you talk about a pretty evenly
split survey. There was a survey about a year later
in eighty three by the Allensbach Institute, and twenty eight
percent felt the sentence was just right, twenty seven percent
thought it was too harsh, twenty five percent thought she
got off too lightly, and twenty percent weren't sure. So
(06:45):
it's very evenly pretty much evenly divided as to how
people felt about her even serving those three years.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, and plus it also sparked a lot of debates
about other stuff too, in particular whether or not the
German or German court system was a little too lenient
with repeat offenders. Remember h Grabowski was out on bail
or on probation. I'm sorry, So that was a big,
(07:12):
a big discussion. And also, like you know what, like
what right does a person like that have, Do you
have like a moral right to murder somebody who did
that to your child? And then also does that right
extend to your if somebody did that to your husband
or your wife or your brother, Like is it just
specifically is it really narrow that only a mother could
(07:34):
do that only for her young child, only under circumstances
like this. This is the stuff that the people of
Germany were talking about at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
She served those three years, was released in June of
eighty five, and obviously wanted to sort of get away
from all that. She withdrew from the public eye. Pretty
you know, pretty smart move and moved to Nigeria. She
married a tea, moved to Nigeria. She was there through
the nineties, but got divorced after a few years, and
then after her divorce, went to Sicily and developed pancreatic cancer,
(08:11):
a terminal case of cancer. So that eventually got her
to go back to Germany. Such that she was, you know,
in the mid nineties, like occasionally interviewed and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Again because she was back there.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
In the mid nineties, she was interviewed for a television
show where I don't know why she felt like she
needed to admit this because everyone knew what happened, but
sort of was like, yeah, I did this, I meant
to do it, and just passed away about a year
later in nineteen ninety six, at the young age of
forty six from cancer.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah. I think what she was saying too was that
she finally admitted that it was premeditated, because that's not
the case against her. Hinged on. Was it something that
she had planned out.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
And you brought the gun into course?
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah, yeah, but was it planned rather than that? And
like the prosecution apparently had firearms experts that were like,
she hit this guy six out of seven or eight.
However many shots she fired times like you actually would
have to have firearms training the average person would do
to for that number of hits. So like people were saying, like,
she definitely thought about this planet it out, prepared for it,
(09:13):
and she finally admitted in nineteen ninety five that she did.
And she had a really hard life man dead at
forty six of pancreatic cancer. And I also read that
she herself also had been sexually abused as a child too,
So she had a really hard, hard to add life.
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, I feel for h for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
She was late to rest beside her daughter there in
burg Tor Cemetery in Lubek, Germany.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
YEP.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
So if you're in Lubec, Germany and you want to
go pay your respects to marry Anne or Anna or both,
you can.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Do that, that's right.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
And this certainly is something so people talk about over there, especially,
you know, as far as all the kind of things
we were saying, and certainly we're not weighing in on
that here far as vigilanti justice goes. But the world
was probably a better place without that guy walking around.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Probably hard to disagree with that, Chuck, and I think
before we say anything else. Short stuff is that.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
One stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm open to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, sitting in for Dave.
So this is a good old fashioned short stuff, the
oh Man.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Edition Vigilante Justice. Thank you to Perplexity and YouTube and
how Stuff Works and Morbidology for the information on the
kind of shocking story of mary Anne Bachmeyer.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, so, Maryann Bachmeier. You say vigilanti, you usually think
guys in the Old West, right now. Maryon Bachmeyer was
a woman in Germany and Lubeck, I believe, Germany in
the nineteen eighties who carried out essentially an execution in
the middle of open court to kill the murder of
(00:48):
her daughter. And if you want to start talking about
moral quandaries and ethical twists, this is about as good
as it gets.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah, as bad as it gets on May fifth, night
eight And you know, trigger warning because this involves sexual
violence and violence against a child, which is the worst
thing you can imagine. But her daughter Anna was abducted
at the age of seven by a man named Klaus Grobowski.
He was a thirty five year old butcher. He was
(01:18):
out on probation. He had a history of crimes against
children and sexual offenses, and little Anna got in an
argument with her mother apparently that morning skipped school, and
Grabowski lured her to his apartment because he said that
he had cats that she could play with.
Speaker 3 (01:36):
He sexually assaulted her over the.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Course of several hours and then strangled her to death,
put her body in a cardboard box and disposed of
it in a canal. And that is the most awful
part of the story. So I'm glad that parts over with.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
Yeah, for sure. And mary Anne was a single mom,
did you say that? No, So Grobowski was actually turned
in by his fiance, and like you said, he was
out on probation. He'd actually been chemically castrated before and
his chemical castration was reversed when he met his fiance
while he was in prison, and so he was caught
(02:16):
fairly quickly, I believe, and he was put on trial
for the murder of Anna. And during this trial, and
within the first I think couple of days, his defense
was I didn't sexually abuse her. She said that she
was going to tell her mom that I did sexually
abuse her if I didn't give her money. So that's
(02:38):
why I killed her, And that caused mary Anne Bachmeyer
to absolutely snap. Not only was her young seven year
old daughter sexually assaulted and murdered, now she was being
slandered in open court by the guy who murdered her.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
Yeah, and gaslet. The whole country is being gaslet by
this guy. So on day three of the trial, she
comes into court and she has smuggled in a gun,
a small caliber of twenty two barretta pistol, and she
shot him very calmly, apparently, walked over, fired eight shots
(03:13):
at him. I saw seven and other places, but both
places I saw that she hit him six times, killed
him on the spot. And the court was going nuts, obviously,
but apparently she was very calm through the whole thing
with her demeanor, said things like I wanted to kill him,
he killed my daughter. I wanted to shoot him in
the face, but I shot him in the back. I
(03:33):
hope he dies.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yeah, and her just calmly saying this stuff too, while
the rest of the court's going crazy. I mean that's
movie type stuff, you know, Yeah, for sure. So I
say we take a little break and come back and
talk about how people felt about this Vigilanti execution in Germany.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
After this, all right, So the vigilanti killing has happened
(04:18):
in court in front of everybody, so like, you know,
kind of no doubt what happened. As to her guilt goes.
Details emerged about, you know, her past, and you know,
how what kind of a mother she was. Some people
at some point like questioned her grief a little bit
criticized her parenting, but most people, a lot of people
(04:39):
were like, heck, yeah, you know, you avenged the death
of your daughter. They're in plain view and you took
care of things very quickly and efficiently. And one hundred
thousand dollars deutsch mars were raised for her legal defense
because of that right.
Speaker 1 (04:52):
And I have to say I looked into it. It's
pretty gross. The people who are like, oh, I don't know.
I questioned her moral character. She had a kid. She
had two kids out of wedlock, one at sixteen, one
at eighteen, and she adopted both of them off right
after they were born because she was sixteen and then eighteen,
when she was twenty three, she had Anna. She made
(05:14):
the decision to raise her on her own as a
single mom. And then so that was like her like
her past that people were like, oh, I don't know
about that. And then her behavior after Anna died. She
apparently married and spent a lot of time at work.
She worked in a pub, and that was enough for
people to be like, I don't know about this lady.
(05:34):
I was okay with her murdering this guy in open court,
but she's spending time at a pub and I've lost
faith in her.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Yeah, exactly, which surprises me. For Germany, because they loved
their beer.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Yeah, I should also say this is West Germany, and
I don't know if Germans has referred to it historically
like that still or if they prefer people just say Germany,
because this is nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty one and
it was definitely still West Germany that we're talking about.
So if you're German, right in and let.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Us know, Yeah, yeah, for sure. So she initially had
a murder charge put on her. They eventually convicted her
of manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm. That always
cracks me up when a tiny little offense is tacked
on a six year prison sentence.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
She served three and got out.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
People thought that that was a fairly lenient sentence for
obvious reasons. And if you talk about a pretty evenly
split survey. There was a survey about a year later
in eighty three by the Allensbach Institute, and twenty eight
percent felt the sentence was just right, twenty seven percent
thought it was too harsh, twenty five percent thought she
got off too lightly, and twenty percent weren't sure. So
(06:45):
it's very evenly pretty much evenly divided as to how
people felt about her even serving those three years.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Yeah, and plus it also sparked a lot of debates
about other stuff too, in particular whether or not the
German or German court system was a little too lenient
with repeat offenders. Remember h Grabowski was out on bail
or on probation. I'm sorry, So that was a big,
(07:12):
a big discussion. And also, like you know what, like
what right does a person like that have, Do you
have like a moral right to murder somebody who did
that to your child? And then also does that right
extend to your if somebody did that to your husband
or your wife or your brother, Like is it just
specifically is it really narrow that only a mother could
(07:34):
do that only for her young child, only under circumstances
like this. This is the stuff that the people of
Germany were talking about at the time.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
She served those three years, was released in June of
eighty five, and obviously wanted to sort of get away
from all that. She withdrew from the public eye. Pretty
you know, pretty smart move and moved to Nigeria. She
married a tea, moved to Nigeria. She was there through
the nineties, but got divorced after a few years, and
then after her divorce, went to Sicily and developed pancreatic cancer,
(08:11):
a terminal case of cancer. So that eventually got her
to go back to Germany. Such that she was, you know,
in the mid nineties, like occasionally interviewed and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
Again because she was back there.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
In the mid nineties, she was interviewed for a television
show where I don't know why she felt like she
needed to admit this because everyone knew what happened, but
sort of was like, yeah, I did this, I meant
to do it, and just passed away about a year
later in nineteen ninety six, at the young age of
forty six from cancer.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Yeah. I think what she was saying too was that
she finally admitted that it was premeditated, because that's not
the case against her. Hinged on. Was it something that
she had planned out.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
And you brought the gun into course?
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Yeah, yeah, but was it planned rather than that? And
like the prosecution apparently had firearms experts that were like,
she hit this guy six out of seven or eight.
However many shots she fired times like you actually would
have to have firearms training the average person would do
to for that number of hits. So like people were saying, like,
she definitely thought about this planet it out, prepared for it,
(09:13):
and she finally admitted in nineteen ninety five that she did.
And she had a really hard life man dead at
forty six of pancreatic cancer. And I also read that
she herself also had been sexually abused as a child too,
So she had a really hard, hard to add life.
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
Yeah, I feel for h for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
She was late to rest beside her daughter there in
burg Tor Cemetery in Lubek, Germany.
Speaker 3 (09:39):
YEP.
Speaker 1 (09:40):
So if you're in Lubec, Germany and you want to
go pay your respects to marry Anne or Anna or both,
you can.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
Do that, that's right.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
And this certainly is something so people talk about over there, especially,
you know, as far as all the kind of things
we were saying, and certainly we're not weighing in on
that here far as vigilanti justice goes. But the world
was probably a better place without that guy walking around.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Probably hard to disagree with that, Chuck, and I think
before we say anything else. Short stuff is that.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
One stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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