Kalinka Bamberski, 14, was found dead on July 10, 1982 in Lindau, Germany. Closer returns to this mysterious case.
July 10, 1982. The day after a scorching day, Kalinka Bamberski, 14, was found dead in her home in Lindau, Germany. Her stepfather, Dieter Krombach, a renowned doctor in the region, tried to resuscitate her with injections, in vain. The teenager is dead. “I took her in my arms, she was all cold, the right side of her face all cyanotic“, will tell his mother, Danielle Gonnin, years later to the Express.
Questioned by the police, Krombach explains that he gave him, the day before, an injection of iron and cobalt to “help him tan”. The teenager, who had spent the day in the swimming pool with her brother, would indeed have complained of not having taken enough colors. For Krombach, the diagnosis is simple: Kalinka died of sunstroke after spending too much time in direct sunlight…
But the autopsy refutes this theory. While examining the teenager’s body, the medical examiner discovered traces of blood and whitish substances on her genitals. Her vulva is also torn, and her esophagus covered with food debris. Did the teenager vomit? And above all, was she assaulted? Against all expectation, the coroner does not pronounce on the causes of death. A month later, on August 17, 1982, the case was closed by the Kempten public prosecutor’s office.
The buried truth
This is without counting on Kalinka’s father. In France, where he resides after leaving custody of his daughter to his ex-wife, André Bamberski is asking for a new investigation to be opened. The teenager’s body was exhumed in 1985, but what the coroners discovered sends shivers down the spine: after the autopsy of the body in Germany, Kalinka’s genitals were removed. It is therefore impossible to carry out new examinations. Nevertheless, an important clue is found on the girl’s arm: an injection site. Very visible, this suggests that the injection was performed shortly before death, and not several hours before. Dieter Krombach’s version is then seriously undermined…
In 1993, the fourth indictment chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal considered that there were “sufficient loads” to accuse Krombach of manslaughter. The German was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment on March 9, 1995, but the absence of an international arrest warrant allowed him to escape this sentence. However, across the Rhine, the doctor in whom everyone had confidence made talk about him. In 1996, Laura Stehle, one of his 16-year-old patients, accused the doctor of having anesthetized her before raping her. Identified by his seminal fluid, Dieter Krombach has no choice but to plead guilty. He was then given a two-year suspended prison sentence, lost the right to exercise any medical activity and above all, aroused in André Bamberski, Kalinka’s father, a deep desire for revenge…
“He is a father who never stopped fighting”
On October 18, 2009, twenty-seven years after Kalinka’s assassination, Dieter Krombach was found gagged, tied up and injured in the head on a sidewalk in Mulhouse, France. The man claims to have been kidnapped in Germany, near Lake Constance. Hard to believe, and yet. Precisely in Mulhouse at the time of the facts, André Bamberski is arrested and admits having ordered the kidnapping. He explains that he got tired of the inefficiency of the German justice and asked three men to take matters into their own hands. “He’s a father who never stopped fighting. He knew where his daughter’s killer lived and I had an idea to help him. I did it right away”entrusts one of them in the documentary My Daughter’s Killerreleased on Netflix on July 12.
Tried for kidnapping, Bamberski will be sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence in 2014. He will nevertheless obtain what he fought so hard for. En October 2011, Dieter Krombach was found guilty of Kalinka’s murder and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment for “willful violence resulting in death without the intention of giving it”. Released in 2019 for medical reasons, he died on September 12, 2020, at the age of 85. He never confessed to what happened the night of July 10, 1982.