Das Gesetz von Murphy und ein Fall von Erwürgen

Zusammenfassung

Das Gesetz von Murphy (Bloch 1977) besagt etwa: „Alles was irgendwie schiefgehen kann, wird auch schiefgehen“. Dieses Phänomen ist bestimmt jedem in irgendeiner Variation aus dem Alltag aus eigener Erfahrung gut bekannt. Das folgende Beispiel zeigt wie fatal es, in einem extremen Fall, den Ablauf der Ermittlungen auch in der Gerichtsmedizin beeinflussen kann. Der zunächst als Mord angezeigte Tod einer 46jährigen Frau wurde beim Lokalaugenschein von den Kriminalbeamten als plötzlicher unerwarteter Todesfall aus natürlicher Ursache angesehen und gelangte zur Obduktion erst nach einer Woche. Nach erneutem Verdacht auf ein Tötungsdelikt bei der Sektion wurde der Verlauf der Ermittlungen durch weitere Pannen erschwert, die dazu beitrugen, daß der Fall erst ein Jahr später im Zusammenhang mit einem weiteren Mord durch denselben Täter endgültig gelöst werden konnte.

Summary

The principle that whatever can possibly go wrong will go wrong is probably well known to everyone from daily life and became generally known as Murphy’s law in 1949 (Bloch 1977). The following case illustrates how disastrous this phenomenon may become, if it interferes with medico-legal investigations of cause of death: A 46-year-old waitress was found dead in her bed in a normal sleeping position and, for reasons unknown to us, the death was reported to the police as murder. The detectives who went to investigate the scene of the crime did not find anything suspicious, but because of the sudden unexpected death, a medico-legal autopsy was ordered. Murphy’s law would have it that the post-mortem was first performed 1 week later. At external examination, the classical signs of strangulation were quite obvious and the police were again notified and came to photograph the findings before the autopsy was performed. However, it was found out later that there had been no film in the camera. The histological samples taken at the autopsy were all destroyed by decomposition because the containers had been erroneously filled with distilled water instead of formalin. Due to the multiple failures during the investigation, the unknown circumstances of death and a possible competitive cause of death found at the autopsy (evidence of heart disease plus 1.7 ‰ BAC) the case at first remained obscure. One year later, another victim was found strangled and the murderer was caught immediately thereafter. He confessed to have also strangled the victim’s mother, the waitress in question. Although it is quite evident that the occurrence of such extreme cases can be minimized by painstaking methods of work, it is probable that like misprints they will also survive this computer era.