Roger Henry sent a link to this Australian story, which is just plain weird:
It was a macabre crime that horrified Germany: a farmer, battered to death and dismembered by his own family, his body apparently fed to his pigs and dogs.
A killing without a corpse, since all traces had been gobbled up in the farmyard.
Yesterday, thought, nine years after Rudi Rupp disappeared, a Bavarian court opened a retrial of his supposed killers after the discovery of his intact body in the River Danube. The case has sent shockwaves through the German judicial system, which since the Second World War has prided itself on its probity and professionalism.
Mr Rupp, a 52-year-old Bavarian pig farmer, allegedly returned home from the pub one autumn night in 2001 and was hit over the head with a large wooden beam by Mathias Eisenhofer, 17, the lover of Mr Rupp’s daughter Manuela, 16. He was beaten almost to death and taken to the cellar where Manuela noticed that her father’s leg was still twitching. Eisenhofer then hit the farmer’s skull with a sharp-edged hammer. Manuela joined in. Another daughter, Andrea, 15, watched, as did the farmer’s wife Hermine.
Why would they make up such a gruesome story? It doesn’t appear to make any sense. The whole thing is so weird that I’d be tempted to check that it wasn’t an early April news story.
