Bernhard Bacheran had asked the Press Section of the State Attorney’s office to cut out and paste all the news clippings pertaining to the Kusian case. At home, he always drew the short straw in the fight for subscriptions and most of the time he didn’t buy the paper on the way to work since he could have everything for free at the office. The story was covered in detail although it never rose to the main topic. He found the biggest headline in the Abend of January 9, 1950: Nurse indicted in a double murder – Did the Charlottenburg surgical nurse dismember her victims? The Abend, which in spite of its name came out in the morning, not the evening, considered itself a tabloid, still it had published a thorough and very factual report. What caught Bacheran’s attention was the last sentence: ‘The police have not been able to ascertain the origin of all the things found in the apartment. They suspect that Elisabeth Kusian may have committed more crimes. A cynic might hope that, thanks to Kusian, Berlin would be able to boast its own world class serial killer again. The Tagesspiegel’s January 10, 1950 headline was somewhat more sensational, particularly for a ‘serious’ newspaper: Nurse serial killer? – Heinous death of Hermann Seidelmann and Doris Merten under investigation. Most of the article was written in a straightforward style – but the third paragraph, entitled A cry in the night reminded Bacheran of an Edgar Wallace piece: It was one of the last nights of December – no one can remember the exact date - when a piercing cry tore the tenants of 154a Kantstrasse from their sleep. Many remained awake for ten, twenty minutes. But all was quiet after that cry and the tenants went back to sleep. The last two sentences of the report were more interesting: The Homicide division of Friesenstrasse Police Department headquarters will ask the State attorney’s Office to order a transfer to the Western sector. This transfer is expected to go through since the crimes were committed in West Berlin. In its January 11, 1950 issue, the Tagesspiegel reported on Kusian’s confession with a passport size photo. The headline read: She breaks down at the sight of the victim’s tie. Bacheran was surprised since Helga had presented the events quite differently. According to her they had concentrated more on the murder of Doris Merten than on Seidelmann’s and they had broken down Kusian’s defenses by confronting her with her lover in chains. Mm… all in all they had questioned the nurse for 37 hours. The questions were always the same. “Where were you on the night of December 3rd” “Don’t you remember? It was a Saturday.” “I don’t know,” Mrs Kusian kept answering. “You were seen at Zoo station,” the officers bluffed. ‘Why don’t you admit you were there?” According to the paper, it was the sight of the tie that had finally broken her. G.J. Prinz, the author of the article demonstrated his very remarkable gifts in a section entitled The Murderer describes Seidelmann’s death. She collected the blood as it flowed from the body in a bowl and later emptied it into the toilet bowl. Then she dismembered the corpse, she packed the severed limbs in a rucksack and a suitcase and carried them into the ruins, where they were later to be found. A fairly sober description, but what the Berliner Zeitung, the Eastern sector newspaper, wrote in its January 11, 1950 issue was very dry: Elisabeth Kusian confesses to the double murder – Two bloody crimes solved/thanks to good team work, the headline went. Of course the article could not refrain from scoring a point against the Western police: After Mrs. Merten’s husband reported her missing, Mrs. Kusian showed up at the Friesenstrasse Police Headquarters to counter any possible suspicion. Unfortunately Mrs. Kusian was then allowed to go free. Right, Bacheran thought: who could be more stupid than the police? But luckily the comrades from Vopo were there and they rushed to the rescue.
He sneezed hard. The weather was an awful mixture of cold and wet, and his feet were soaked. His old shoes soaked up water like a sieve. Two days before five centimeters of fresh snow had fallen so that in many places the streetcar and S-Bahn switches were impossible to operate and this had created increased delays. Now though, a mild wind blew in from Southwest Europe and everywhere the snow and the ice were melting. He sneezed over and over again. It was high time he bought a car. Maybe he could ask his mother and aunt for a small loan. Driving through the country with Helga – what a wonderful dream. And maybe that would be the last little thing that would convince her to move to the West… Ford had lowered its prices just recently and the TAUNUS Special cost only 6,285 Mark. If only…
Just as he was thinking of Helga she called him. “That’s what I call thought transmission.”
She was very businesslike. “I wanted to inform you, Mr. Bacheran, that Mrs. Kusian slit her wrists in the women’s prison here.”
Bernhard shuddered, he imagined the scene. “And …?” Should he feel relieved if she…? Or should one pity her even if she had twice killed…?
“No, no, we saved her at the last moment, before she had lost all her blood.”
“Well then the Press and all the Berliners can now hope for a beautiful trial.”
“Don’t be so cynical!”
“I just want the best for everyone. And such a horror story is a great thing for everybody. Apart from the two victims and the people involved.”
“You should really go live in America.”
“Only with you Helga, only with you.”
“Only over my dead body.”
“Severed or in one piece?”
“Stop, I’m going to hang up right now.”
“Not before we make a date to go to the movies.”
“What’s playing?”
“Wait, I have a huge stack of newspapers here.” Bernhard started leafing through the papers but he didn’t find much. “At the Studio on Kurfürstendam, there’s Happiness lost with Yvonne Printemps… Nah… we don’t want that. At the Kurbel they’re showing The Fan… I don’t know. Oh, here at the Bonbonniere: Slow Poison. Something about sexual diseases, oh! God no. But in any case we couldn’t go in together anyway. Wait, listen to this: Warning! Because this film explores this theme in an unusually graphic way, it is being shown separately to men and women so as to avoid any feeling of embarrassment. What do you think…?”
“If you’re not embarrassed, I would rather go to the theater.”
“Othello is playing at the Hebel theater and The Devil’s General at the Schlosspark Theater…”
“Both please.”
“At the same time or one after the other?”
“At the same time.”
“Then I would have to cut you up…”
This brought them back to the Kusian case. In the evening at home it was also a hot topic at the dinner table with his mother and his aunt. Especially for Anne Marie Bacheran who would spring eloquently to Elisabeth Kusian’s defense.
“The whole thing is part of the dark machinations of the Volks Police. There’s only one word for it: brainwashing. They probably extracted a confession through psychological pressure. Why? In order to demonstrate how decadent the West is: ‘Look, in the West, even nurses are mass murderers.’”
“Mother, all the evidence points to Kusian.”
“But it can all be distorted to make her look guilty. Everything we hold dear, they want to drag through the mud. For all the East cares. Think of all the assistance our nurses provided during the nightly bombing raids and at the very end in the fight for Berlin.”
“No one is questioning that, Mother.”
“But they are. A colleague of mine told me that Elisabeth Kusian had been wounded by a Russian grenade as she was tending to wounded soldiers. Such a woman should be given a medal, not made to stand before the law.”
“These two things are completely separate,” Bernhard insisted.
“No they’re not.”
During the next few days he discovered that people in West Berlin did not want to believe that Kusian was a murderer. Der Abend had obtained a couple of lines she had written and, without revealing her name, sent them to a graphologist, asking for their expert opinion. The January 13, 1950 issue reported the results in an article entitled “The Murderer’s Handwriting”. A person of sober intelligence, egotistic, forceful, practical. A certain lack of imagination, lack of feminine empathy, not a feminine type. Subject to an inferiority complex. Very reserved, silent and secretive. Sensitive. Deficient outlook on the world. Naïve, almost childlike attitude to her environment. According to the opinion of the graphologist, after he had been told whose handwriting he had examined… he would not have thought the person capable of murder. Bernhard thought it all very unscientific and it reminded him more of a horoscope.
After that the interest in Kusian faded – until the trial, and then it took on gigantic proportions. But that only started 12 months later. Only the Berliner Zeitung dealt with it one more time on January 13, 1950, mainly to ‘fulfill their political duties.’ Bacheran was not the only one to think so. The headline ran: Cooperation is possible in Berlin – What Berliners learned from the Kusian investigation. The article strongly highlighted the cooperation between East and West. If this cooperation fails, or if it is met with a refusal on the part of West Berlin authorities, as has often happened before, or if it is rejected out of hand for political reasons, then the people suffer the consequences and get the short end of the stick. Who has to suffer? Not the ‘Officials’, not the ‘Politicians’, no, the millions of workers who dwell inside our divided city have to suffer. We must take their welfare or their suffering to heart, we must strive to make their lives better. And that is why Berlin must be reunited and become one city again. Until then all public institutions must do their best to work together and lay the foundations of a new and fruitful life in the German capital city. That such cooperation is perfectly possible had been demonstrated by the Kusian case. How well put! Bacheran admired the East Berliners for their masterly political agitation. Translated into plain language the report was saying: Men and women of the Western sector of Berlin, choose to be a part of the GDR – only then will you live a perfectly happy life.
As for the Kusian case: On February 8, 1950, Elisabeth Kusian was transferred to the West. The official report of the West Berlin Police Department MI/3 stated the following: After discussions and subsequent agreement per telephone, nurse Elisabeth Kusian, née Richter, born 8/5/1914 in Bornsheim/Thuringia, living at 154a Kantstrasse in Berlin/Charlottenburg, apprehended on 1/6/1950 by the Criminal Police of the Eastern sector, was handed over today at 9:05 AM at the Sector border at Sandkrug Bridge/lnvalidenstrasse (…) Files together with a small suitcase containing Elisabeth Kusian’s personal effects were also delivered. Transfer to investigating unit in 12a Alt Moabit prison.
She would soon see Bernhard Bacheran in that prison, once again. Dr. Weimann, Inspector Menzel and two other officers met in a conference room to discuss Kusian. Their colleagues from East Berlin had sent the minutes of the interrogation but Menzel and the State Attorney’s Office in West Berlin were inclined to regard them as worthless. For them the GDR was an illegal state – consequently, something that their officials had put on paper would not stand in court in the Western justice system. And so the investigation into Seidelmann’s and Merten’s deaths and Kusian’s interrogation were restarted, almost from scratch.
Elisabeth Kusian was brought in. She was dressed in grey blue prison garb and held her head down. Guards led her to the left side of a long conference table and she was told to sit down. She sat there looking like a lost child and Bacheran thought to himself ‘Woe unto her’, just as his father would have said in his old fashioned way. The phalanx of men were arrayed on the opposite side of the table. Menzel, as head of the Homicide Division, was the first to speak.
“Do you feel able to answer our questions, Mrs. Kusian? How are you?”
“I’m well, thank you.” Her voice was low and she kept her shoulders hunched up as if she wanted to hide her head and her face.
Menzel introduced the men who were present. When she heard the name Weimann, she lifted her head for the first time. Her large dark eyes were shining feverishly. The Chief Medical Examiner, who sat next to Bacheran, whispered to him that her face was somehow known to him. “The prominent cheekbones, the full sensual lips…” Bacheran was surprised.
“Now, Mrs. Kusian, be kind enough to tell us about yourself and about your life.” Menzel wanted to establish contact with her and get her to speak freely at first.
“Yes… I was born on May 8, 1914 in Thuringia.” And so she went on quietly and willingly, in a soft voice. She spoke in something of a sing-song. There was not a single jarring note, everything was smoothed out. Bacheran took notes: a hard life on the farm when she was young. A loveless marriage soon followed by divorce. Three children, sent to a home after the separation. Living in one furnished room after another. Men. Constant money problems.
Then Menzel cut in again. “This brings us up to the Christmas holiday. You want to make your dear Kurt a present, a typewriter in particular, and you don’t have the money. That’s when you come across Mr. Seidelmann from Saxony…”
Kusian stiffened immediately. She sat rigidly erect. She froze, hard as a rock. “I already described all that to the Eastern Police. I do not wish to go over those events again.”
Menzel’s tone became hard. “The statements you made on the Eastern side don’t all fit together. I strongly advise you to tell us the whole thing over again.”
Bacheran wondered what he would do in Kusian’s shoes. He would probably remain silent, wouldn’t say another word. And let himself be taken away. She wasn’t in any event going to be tortured if she refused to speak. But she did speak. After a few minutes of silence, hesitatingly and visibly against her will. Why then? Because she had been brought up like that, because she had grown up in a world where the person who had the authority over you asked the questions and you answered. Just so. Otherwise, you got hit, locked in the cellar with no food, grounded for a week.
She started with December 3rd and made a brief description of the louche milieu at Bahnhof Zoo station. “Black marketers, prostitutes, bums… Money changers, East for West.”
“And what were you there for?”
“Nothing. I was just passing through on my way out of the S-Bahn to go home.”
“And yet you let Mr. Seidelmann come on to you?”
“Yes, because I needed East marks.”
“What for?”
“I had to pay for the typewriter in the East.”
“Menzel glanced down at his notes.” Seidelmann had 1800 East D-mark on him. And you saw that money…?”
“I exchanged 30 West-mark for 180 East D-mark from him.”
“You needed a further 75 East D-mark but you didn’t have enough West-mark. And you told him…” Menzel kept up the pressure on her.
“Yes. Then he asked me where I lived. And he wrote down my address. He would come by in the evening, around 8 PM, if that was convenient.”
Bacheran could just see it: Hardenberger Platz, the portly showman from Voigtland writing ‘Beautiful woman at zoo’ on his pack of cigarettes, thinking more of exchanging caresses than marks. A little fun before returning home, living it up, doing what provincials had always expected of Berlin, the city of sin.
“The doorbell rang around eight,” Kusian said. My landlady went to the door on the landing. Whether I said that I was expecting someone, or whether she came with me to the door, I don’t remember anymore.”
Bacheran threw his hands in the air, figuratively speaking: God, could a person be so addlebrained as to murder a man in the room she rented when her landlady had seen the victim! He almost regretted that he wasn’t Kusian’s defense attorney. He could have demonstrated the absurdity of the murder accusation: ‘Your Honor, the defendant is a highly intelligent woman, not an imbecile! Only an imbecile could have planned and executed a crime in such circumstances.’
Menzel proceeded to establish the detailed circumstances of the events. “What were you wearing?”
The question seemed harmless but it struck deep into Kusian’s heart, she looked down and was obviously ashamed. “I was still wearing my nurse’s uniform…”
Menzel could have given her a little time. He did not. Maybe her growing sense of shame might have given birth to some kind of feeling of regret. Instead he struck hard, too fast. “Tell me, Mrs. Kusian, did you tie the noose you used to kill Seidelmann before he arrived?”
Elisabeth Kusian jumped up angrily. “I refuse to say another word!” Her chair fell over and the back banged the floor hard. Her dark eyes were shining and her voice became shrill as she screamed at the inspector. “I signed a confession with the East German Police, I will not repeat it… I cannot…” she lurched sideways and had to lean against the wall. All strength seemed to have left her body. It shook with her painful sobbing. Bacheran felt a strong impulse to go to her and put his arms around her shoulders and comfort her. He suppressed the urge. Are you crazy, she murdered two people! You’re not Jesus.
Puzzled, Menzel looked over at Dr. Weimann. He was a doctor and… “Is that a nervous breakdown?” he whispered. “Is she no longer fit to answer questions?”
Dr. Weimann got up, went around the long conference table and put his right hand on Kusian’s shoulder to soother her. Her sobs slowly subsided. Bacheran thought he knew what the Medical Examiner’s purpose was at that moment: to find out whether she had staged this outburst in order to gain time and avoid falling into Menzel’s trap. If she admitted to having prepared the noose in advance, then she had committed a cold blooded heinous crime and risked a life sentence. If the judges decided that she had acted without premeditation then the sentence would be far more lenient. But maybe it was not a calculated break down, maybe it was the memory of the terrible events of December 3rd that had made her lose control.
Dr. Weimann tried his best to uncover the layers in Kusian’s soul, like a surgeon operating on the stomach cavity. “Do you want to tell us, maybe, how you dismembered the corpses.”
Bacheran knew what he was trying to do: get her to talk about her dream, or fantasy, of being a surgeon and operating. She had told her lover Kurt Muschan and her colleagues that she was the widow of a surgeon, that she herself had a medical degree or, at the very least, that she, a woman, had begun to study medicine. As the skill with which she had separated the limbs from the victims’ torsos clearly demonstrated, she would have been quite gifted for such a career. This was not just cold blooded imposture. And she didn’t lie because she wanted to make herself sound important. No, her lies were part of the structure she needed in order to cope with her life. To survive, she had to imagine herself as a surgeon, at least part of the time, and at those moments, she truly believed that she was one. Afterwards, she was thrown back into the cruel reality of her life.
“Now?” Dr. Weimann was still waiting for an answer.
“I already explained that in the East.” She sounded tired, even exhausted.
Dr. Weimann’s next question carried within it a hint of hidden admiration. “Is it true that all you used was a kitchen knife?” He stressed the word ‘all’.
But she didn’t take the bait. “I already answered that question too.” She pressed her hands to her face as if to keep her mouth tightly shut.
“Mrs. Kusian, I autopsied both corpses,” Weimann continued. “And I was really surprised…”
She took her hands off her face and turned expectantly towards the doctor. “Yes…?”
“You performed an exemplary hip disjunction.”
“Oh…” Her eyebrows went up and Bacheran thought she blossomed all of a sudden. She offered no resistance when he led her back to her chair which he set back upright. She sank down on the fake green leather upholstery. She took a deep breath, they heard a long sigh and she shut her eyes and let the famous pathologist’s words echo in her mind. It was almost like an apology when she answered that she did not, in fact, have any experience in surgery.
“Did you maybe inject yourself with morphine before you started on this unusual work?” Dr. Weimann continued.
She nodded in grateful assent. “Doctor, you are on the right path…”
But the doctor did not pursue his questioning, he froze, as if something had hit him. A thought must have struck his mind and thrown him off balance. But which one? Finally, he managed to articulate what had so disturbed him: “Mrs. Kusian, it just struck me, I think I recognize you: Did you perhaps attend the presentations I made at Robert-Koch Hospital?”
“Yes, of course I did!” she exclaimed in a joyful tone of voice.
“Were you also present at my slide show presentation on the subject of forced strangulation. On throttling and other methods?”
She eyed him suspiciously and thought for a long time. Then she shook her head and answered in a strangely artificial, low tone of voice: “At the time of the terrible events, I wasn’t at all aware of that.”
Bacheran thought that was a clear yes. So it meant that in effect Dr. Weimann, the Chief Medical Examiner, who helped the police solve crimes and assisted the law in its search for the truth, had inadvertently played a significant role in the education of a murderer. A distressing thought.
The thought, at any rate, left the professor speechless. And since Menzel and his colleagues were looking down on their note pads taking notes, it was left to Bacheran to keep the exchange with Kusian on the front burner so to speak. “We know that you have a good heart, that you have a lot of feminine warmth… and we simply cannot imagine how on December 3rd you would have been able to sit calmly in your room waiting for Mr. Seidelmann, intent on…robbing him of his money…”
“When I came back from work I injected some morphine, two cubic centimeters, not in the muscle but subcutaneously, in my thigh… When Seidelmann arrived I was tired because of the M. He noticed it and asked what was wrong with me. In order to suppress the effect of the morphine I then took some Pervitin. How many tablets I can’t say. But I did succeed, mostly, in suppressing the M effect…”
Dr. Weimann had regained his composure by then and was able to take over. “As the visit went on, did you take anything more?”
“Only coffee and Pervitin. You know that: had I injected more morphine I wouldn’t have been able to carry it out.”
Bacheran noticed how she was trying to establish a dialog between peers… not realizing how in doing so she was implicating herself more and more deeply. Menzel’s next question struck her as a highly unwarranted disturbance.
“Mrs. Kusian, how did you come to the idea of killing Mr. Seidelmann? What happened in your mind?”
She gave him an angry look, as if to say: what else do you want from me? Leave it alone, enough! “I cannot give you any explanation for it. I cannot and I do not want to. I’ve already incriminated so many people… I want to take responsibility for everything…”
Bacheran was struck by those words. Was she trying to imply that she had signed a false confession over in the Eastern sector, that she had not in fact committed both crimes? Her calling, as a nurse, was to help people and so in this case too, she was helping someone and was prepared to take the blame for them? Out of love maybe? That could mean only one thing: that Kurt Muschan was the killer… Nonsense, or at least, highly improbable. But was anything truly impossible in this world?
Inspector Menzel was not interested in metaphysics, he preferred to fly close to the ground: he pursued his line of thought.
“Mrs. Kusian, you are an attractive woman. Seidelmann visited your apartment to change money but one can assume that he was also attracted to you as a woman. Did he make a pass at you?”
Kusian looked at him coldly. “No. That does not have to happen every time a man comes to my apartment.” She then started to describe the encounter in detail. “He had taken his coat off because it was raining hard outside. We changed the money. He saw the newspaper rack with some magazines and asked me if he could leaf through them. I went to the kitchen and put some water on to boil, then I went to the bathroom to freshen up. I brought him some coffee…”
“Did you put something in the coffee?” Menzel wanted to know.
Kusian protested loudly. “No! Who do you think I am?! He was very interested in the magazines. ‘We don’t have anything like this in the East.’ He enjoyed the coffee. He told me that he had spent the previous night in train stations. He thought: ‘Now, for the first time, I can say that I really know Berlin.’ Then he wanted to know if I went out a lot. And he told me about the Casablanca Club… I got up, I wanted to turn the radio on but it didn’t work too well. The rest of the time I sat on the lounge chair…”
“Did you also listen to the news?” Menzel asked. Bacheran figured that he was trying to find out on what day Seidelmann had been at her place and whether she was saying the truth.
But she didn’t let herself be pinned down. “I came and went a lot. I don’t know if there were news in the meantime. No, there was only music.”
Menzel turned around to a table behind him on which the evidence was arrayed. He opened a bag, took out a neatly coiled clothes line and put it on the table in front of Kusian. She looked at it impassively. “You cut a section of this line each time to kill and you used it on Mr. Seidelmann and Mrs. Merten.”
“Yes.”
“When you killed Seidelmann did you make a noose with the line and did you pull it tight?”
“Yes.”
“How long did you hold it around his neck? Did he clutch at his neck to pull the noose away?”
“That I don’t know.”
“Did he scream?”
“No, absolutely not,” Kusian said in a tone of regret and she described her victim’s death as she would have described the natural death of one her many patients. “I had walked up to him from the back and I flipped the noose over his head. Seidelmann jumped up from his chair. He turned around to face me. But a few seconds later he had already lost consciousness. And then he died…”
“Wait a minute, it couldn’t be that fast! How long did it take until Seidelmann fell to the floor?”
Kusian was silent. Menzel showed her the statement she had made to the Eastern Criminal Police. Bacheran had read it and he could have shot the scene in a film:
Kusian knows from Dr. Weimann’s slide show that throttling can provoke death extremely fast if the cord is pulled against the nerve reflex zone. But at the crucial moment she hesitates a little. A last inhibition against killing. Seidelmann is still able to turn around. She’s not prepared for that. He looks his murderer in the eyes. She sees infinite surprise in them. They plead for mercy. Then he resists, he fights for his life. He threatens to wreck all her plans, to jeopardize her life’s happiness. She hates him for that. If he dies he can’t speak, if he remains alive, he will go to the police – and she’ll end up in jail. She will be able to dismember the corpse and dispose of it. There are dozens of bombed out houses on every street. Seidelmann is now her enemy. She has to get rid of him if she wants to survive. She is, in any case, an athletic woman. But now, hatred and fear lend her superhuman strength. She holds the noose tight until Seidelmann loses consciousness, she lights a cigarette, sticks it in her mouth and examines him carefully. Will he draw a few more breaths, could he regain consciousness by any chance? No. She kneels next to him and feels his pulse. This is what she does every day, it’s routine. No doubt: he is dead. Now she starts to go through his pockets looking for money.
Kusian meanwhile had decided to talk and after a few empty phrases took up her story exactly at the point Bacheran had reached in his thoughts. “There I found a wallet, dark leather I think. In it there were a 50 mark West bill and 135 DM East. I put the money in my handbag. There was also an identity card in the wallet. I burnt it together with the wallet in the stove.”
“Did you look at the identity card?”
“No. I didn’t want to know the name of the man I had killed.”
Bacheran could not suppress a soft “Mm…” since it was unthinkable that the man had not introduced himself when he came into the apartment. Obviously, Kusian was trying to repress the memory of what she had done. What Dr. Weimann whispered to him confirmed his idea.
“You see, Bacheran, this is typical of the murderer’s mind as I know it. On the one hand, he wants to prevent the discovery of his crime and so admits to himself that he has killed, but on the other hand, he tries as hard as possible to deny to his other, better self, that he has committed a crime.”
Bacheran acquiesced. “Yes: ‘it wasn’t me, it’s not possible, it can’t be me.’”
“From the moment they discard the victim’s body, they start distancing themselves from the crime and pushing the memory further and further down into the deepest zones of their consciousness. It’s easier to do that when you don’t know the victim’s name.”
“Quiet please,” Menzel admonished them: Kusian was describing how she had managed to carry the body out of her room.
Bacheran took notes: K has two backpacks in her room; her husband had used them to bring her coal. Plus two cardboard boxes. No large suitcase. She throws a blanket over the dead man and goes to her friend Anni Gruschwitz’s to borrow one. She has none, so she borrows one from one of her neighbors. Later in Kantstrasse she goes to work. X number of times she goes down the corridor to the kitchen and the bathroom with a bucket full of water, and the Stöhr ladies don’t notice anything. By 3 AM she’s gotten rid of the traces of blood and has packed the dismembered corpse into the suitcase and the two backpacks. Menzel asks: “Did you plan where you would dispose of the body parts?” Answer: “I thought of nothing in advance, I didn’t think at all. You don’t know how the mind of a person who takes morphine and Pervitin works.” She carries the heavy suitcase and one backpack to the S-Bahn and rides from Zoo to Friedrichstrasse. Walks across Weidendammer bridge. Has to put the suitcase down several times. Right and left, ruins. But each time she tries to throw the body parts in, somebody is coming up the street. Afraid of being noticed. Friedrichstrasse turns into Chausseestrasse. Kusian goes right, in the direction of Stettiner Station. Does not know these parts. Finally she throws the head and the limbs into the cellar of a bombed out house and rides back home with the empty bags. Throws the second backpack over her shoulders and carries it to the U-Bahn station at Knie. She deposits the torso in the rubble on Schillerstrasse. It’s almost dawn.
“Did you purposefully divide the body parts between the Eastern and Western sectors?” Menzel still wanted to know.
“No, I didn’t think of that.”
“All right. That’s it for today. Tomorrow we’ll talk about the Merten case. Thank you, Mrs. Kusian, thank you all. Enjoy your lunch.”