But there was a different kind of hunger, insatiable and omnipresent: From the age of eleven, he was immersed more and more deeply in the world of Japanese cartoons, mangas and anime. He spent up to eight hours a day between the iPad and the laptop, often in parallel on both devices, and at some point the realities began to overlap.
“I have a good relationship with my father”His own father suddenly seemed “as cute and cuddly as a panda bear”, “but also dangerous”. His father hit him about two or three times a year, with his hand, with his belt, on the head, on the hand or on the back. When Robert K. was little, younger than eight, he slept in the living room with his father. Later, when he was 14, he suddenly stood next to his bed once during the night. And there were those voices again. Kill him with a knife, they would have ordered him. At the same time, says Robert K., he had “a good relationship” with his father and he “loved him most” in the family.
© APA / hallmarkAnd there is also Antonia. But this Antonia, she is only present in the inner world of Robert K. A friend like straight out of the Mangacomic: she had long, blonde-gold hair, red-green eyes with large pupils, and mostly she wore jeans and white Converse shoes. The most important thing in his life was she and she was with him every day – until she was finally murdered.
But even outside in real life there is a girl who means something to Robert K., let’s call her Elisabeth here. She goes to the same school and they met and made friends during the ski week, she told the police. “Robert told me that he liked me and could imagine more.” But he had a manner that “intimidated” her.
On March 25, 2018 – a Sunday, about a month and a half before Hadishat’s murder – he contacted her via Whatsapp, they met for a long walk outside in Nussdorf, where the city ends and the vineyards begin. “He had a strange sarcasm that day, he told me about zombies, and death was a topic a couple of times. Robert philosophized with me what it would be like to die.”
© Private “He said he didn’t kill her because there were too many police at the meeting point.”How about if you die? What if the voices gave him an order again? A friend of Robert K. remembers: He, Robert, told him that the only reason he had gone to Nussdorf with Elisabeth was to kill her there with a knife. “He said he didn’t kill her because there were too many police at the meeting point.” At that time, says his friend, he still thought it was “stupid talk” – until Robert K. showed him a bread knife with a long, serrated blade, which he had neatly wrapped in a kitchen towel, and showed him .123helpme
“With Robert K., due to his years of intensive media consumption and his preoccupation with fantasy, manga and anime stories, there has been a massive increase in stimulus, which () can also explain hearing the voices.” The “hallucinatory phenomena” could be classified as “preliminary symptoms” of “childhood schizophrenia”, diagnosed the youth psychiatrist.
He bought a schnitzel roll and chocolate candy on May 11, 2018, then he was home and watched a video for the game “Escapist” on the iPad. After Hadishat had finished eating her stracciatella ice cream, she sat down on the couch with him. The video, recalls Robert K., was exciting. It was about the escape from a prison. He felt Hadishat’s body heat. Then he heard voices again. And then he picked up the knife.
But how should society, how should the judiciary deal with someone like Robert K.? He has to be locked up, that much seems clear – but does he also have the right to precise therapy? “Yes,” says psychiatrist Reinhard Haller, who is Austria’s most respected court expert in his field. But does he have legitimate prospects for precise therapy? “No,” says Haller.
Robert K. was declared sane on the Thursday of the previous week at the Vienna Regional Criminal Court. But this decision is anything but unproblematic: A youth psychiatric final report on behalf of the court on 150 pages on the diagnosis of “combined personality disorder with narcissistic, schizoid and callous-unemotional traits” comes up. And yet, according to the expertise, Robert K. was sane at the time of the crime, and that is all that matters. But that’s just the top report. A specialist in adolescent neuropsychiatry had initially classified Robert K. as insane in a 166-page report, and an adult psychiatrist as sane on 98 pages. What now?
“We have a mass of highly qualified expert reports, all of which diagnose Robert K. with severe disorders, but contradict each other in crucial nuances,” says the renowned Viennese lawyer Florian Höllwarth. Basically, according to Höllwarth, it is a highly complex expert debate. “And then a lay jury will finally vote on what the most well-known specialists disagree about.”
“It’s like having three foremen explaining how to build a house.”Höllwarth is practically at the center of the debate, because he was one of Robert K.’s defenders at the trial last Thursday. Regarding the jury’s verdict, he says, “It’s like having three foremen explaining how to build a house – but that doesn’t mean that you can build it properly yourself afterwards.”
Höllwarth demands that it is not the people’s opinion that should count in court, only the strict rule of law. Well-known legal theorists also see jury courts as “historical foreign bodies in our judicial system”. And expert Doyen Haller says: “In cases like that of Robert K., there should be a final report before the judgment that decides on the sanity.”
Robert K. was therefore declared sane and sentenced to twelve years in prison for murder. “Even if he receives medical care in prison, he has been put on the judicial track, not the psychiatric one. If he had been declared insane, the focus would be on therapy, not punishment,” explains Haller. Because in freedom, which is underpinned by consistent predictions of danger, someone like him will probably no longer be dismissed either way. “Well,” says Haller, “it’s basically about how humanly you treat him.” Do deadly inner voices deserve a voice of humanity?
“Sleep now and release me”During his pre-trial detention, Robert K. is also examined at the Kepler University Hospital Linz. A monitor is used to watch him circling his bed, sitting down on the floor in a corner and answering his inner voices in loud self-talk. “Sleep well, sleep, girl, sleep,” he says. “Now go to sleep and release me.”
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”When real life and imagination slowly begin to overlap, Robert K. is still a child. When inner voices tell him to kill a little girl, he is 16 and already seriously ill, all the experts agree. But how much guilt is he to be blamed? And who should decide?
Robert K. can only remember very fragmentary details of the details. According to the prosecution, it is clear: on May 11, 2018, sometime between 2 and 3 p.m., the sixteen-year-old gets up from the living room sofa and goes into the kitchen.
© APA / hallmarkThere he fishes for a bread knife in one of the shops, the blade is about six inches long and jagged, the handle black. Robert K. hides the knife in his back pocket. Then he goes to the bathroom where Hadishat, the seven-year-old girl next door, is standing.
“She didn’t cry or scream, she just asked what we would do now.”“She neither cried nor screamed, she just asked what we would do now,” Robert K. later told the police. He did not answer her. He supported the girl’s head with his left hand, with his right he drew the knife and stabbed it sideways towards the neck.
© APA / hallmarkThen he goes out to the balcony to fetch three black plastic bags, pulls on the gloves that he had previously only used to do pull-ups on the clothes rail in the yard. Then he puts on his white Adidas sneakers, carries the girl’s remains packed into the courtyard and hides them in one of the dumpsters.
But why only? The country is stunned, and for weeks the “murder of girls in municipal housing” dominated the chronic headlines. The perpetrator, the so-called “Hadishat killer”, whose family, like those of the victim, comes from Chechnya, receives a bounty of 50,000 euros. He is taken to various secret places by the police, and his family is also hidden for fear of acts of revenge.
© PrivateJust why? Robert K. made a comprehensive confession at the first interrogation, but he could not provide any logical motive. He liked to have liked Hadishat, who was friends with his twelve-year-old brother and who went in and out of her parents’ communal apartment in Vienna-Döbling as a matter of course. And he brought her a stracciatella ice cream from the kitchen just a few minutes before he looked for the knife right there.
“As far as I can remember, I was kind of angry, but I don’t know why,” says Robert K. three days after the crime. But about a month later, in the second questioning of the accused, he says: “On that day I heard voices that ordered me to take the individual steps of the crime at that time.” Is this teenager a cold-blooded murderer or is he seriously ill? Or both?
On the Thursday of the previous week he was not sentenced to twelve years in prison for murder. In addition, the jury found that he was sane at the time of the crime. At first glance, a comprehensible judgment. But it is precisely this judgment that is now causing sharp criticism in legal and expert circles – because it relentlessly reveals a fundamental problem in our case law. But one after the other.
© PrivateWhen he was two years old, Robert K. came to Austria with his parents from Chechnya, his father used to be a surgeon and his mother a teacher. Here he only finds work as an airport employee, she as a saleswoman, but the son should get a good education, become a doctor or lawyer. The first-born, the parents, Robert’s younger brother, two cats: the common community apartment measures just 71 square meters – but Robert attends a Catholic private high school in Döbling.
He likes English, hates math, reads “The great Gatsby” and “The Count of Monte Christo”, listens to Bushido and Eminem. No drugs, just alcohol every now and then. Later, he told the youth psychiatrist while in custody, he would have wanted to join the armed forces one day, this order, these clear structures, he liked all of this very much. Because nothing else is clearly structured in its inner workings.
“Robert has two faces”“Robert has two faces,” said one of his friends to the police. “One face was friendly, quiet, more introverted, the other face was cold, destructive.” Robert K. says he has been hearing voices since he was eight. God, angels, demons. “It’s very easy for me to have something blurred between reality and fantasy because I have so much in my head,” he confides in the psychiatrist. Voices, voices, voices.
“I was shaking the whole time and couldn’t concentrate at all”He was also almost permanently afraid, and anxiety caused by these voices had been for years. “I was shaking and stuttering the whole time and couldn’t concentrate at all,” says Robert K., describing a childhood episode, “but my mother suspected that these were mood swings.” That was just because of the food, she said, and that he had to eat more because he was too thin.
© Franz Gruber / KURIER / picturedesk.comBut there was a different kind of hunger, insatiable and omnipresent: From the age of eleven, he was immersed more and more deeply in the world of Japanese cartoons, mangas and anime. He spent up to eight hours a day between the iPad and the laptop, often in parallel on both devices, and at some point the realities began to overlap.
“I have a good relationship with my father”His own father suddenly seemed “as cute and cuddly as a panda bear”, “but also dangerous”. His father hit him about two or three times a year, with his hand, with his belt, on the head, on the hand or on the back. When Robert K. was little, younger than eight, he slept in the living room with his father. Later, when he was 14, he suddenly stood next to his bed once during the night. And there were those voices again. Kill him with a knife, they would have ordered him. At the same time, says Robert K., he had “a good relationship” with his father and he “loved him most” in the family.
© APA / hallmarkAnd there is also Antonia. But this Antonia, she is only present in the inner world of Robert K. A friend like straight out of the Mangacomic: she had long, blonde-gold hair, red-green eyes with large pupils, and mostly she wore jeans and white Converse shoes. The most important thing in his life was she and she was with him every day – until she was finally murdered.
But even outside in real life there is a girl who means something to Robert K., let’s call her Elisabeth here. She goes to the same school and they met and made friends during the ski week, she told the police. “Robert told me that he liked me and could imagine more.” But he had a manner that “intimidated” her.