Twenty Years for the Wrong Man? - Linzer Gasse

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Linzer Gasse has been the road to Linz and Vienna since Roman times, a street of gunsmiths, innkeepers and organ builders that today bustles with boutiques beneath the plain facade of St. Sebastian's Church and its celebrated cemetery. Behind one of its upper windows, on 5 November 1980, police found 23-year-old Heidemarie Mayrhofer dead in her bed, strangled with a two-metre electrical cable, with no sign of a struggle and a book-shaped cash box emptied. Suspicion fell on her 29-year-old pimp Manfred B., known as Mandi, who was convicted of murder in 1981 in a trial built purely on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to 20 years. He was released from Garsten prison in 1997 and never stopped protesting his innocence. Decades later, a routine fingerprint database check matched the unknown print from the cash box to a Dutch man who had been a 16-year-old apprentice cook in Salzburg in 1980, and forensic analysis of the original cable revealed DNA from an unknown man that was not Manfred B.'s. Even so, on 16 April 2012 a three-judge panel of the Salzburg Regional Court refused to reopen the case. Manfred B. died in December 2014, still officially the killer of Heidemarie Mayrhofer.

Fatti principali

• 1980 year — On 5 November, 23-year-old Heidemarie Mayrhofer was found strangled with a two-metre electrical cable in a Linzergasse apartment, with no trace of a struggle.
• 20 years in prison — The sentence handed to her 29-year-old pimp Manfred B. in 1981, on circumstantial evidence alone; released from Garsten in 1997, he protested his innocence until his death in December 2014.
• 2012 year — On 16 April a three-judge panel of the Salzburg Regional Court refused to reopen the case, despite unknown male DNA on the murder cable and a fingerprint matched to a Dutch man.

📍 Wolf-Dietrich-Straße 3, 5020, Salzburg

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