The Car Park Confessions - Urania Observatory
In the summer of 1991 a 29 year old woman was stabbed to death in the Urania car park beneath this observatory tower; seven years later a jailed arsonist, known only as Caroline H., confessed and got life, then withdrew every word and still insists she never killed anyone.
Sobre este lugar
The slender tower with the silver dome is the Urania Observatory, opened in 1907 as Switzerland's first public observatory and Zurich's first concrete building, with a 12 ton Carl Zeiss telescope that still shows the moon to visitors. Just down Uraniastrasse, an entrance cut into the Lindenhof hill leads into the Urania car park, the scene of one of Zurich's most unsettling cases. In the summer of 1991 a 29 year old woman walking to her car was stabbed to death there, and with no witnesses and no usable traces the case went cold. In August 1998 a young woman held for around forty arson attacks across central Switzerland told interrogators of nightmares about bloody stabbings, then confessed to this killing and to a second one in the Chinese Garden in 1997. She had been only 18 in 1991. Zurich's High Court sentenced her to life plus indefinite detention on 18 December 2001, although almost nothing but her own words linked her to either scene. In 2004 she withdrew her confessions, and she still says she committed many offences but no killings. Convicted murderer or false confessor? The court has spoken, but the question has never quite gone away.
Datos clave
- 1991 year — A 29 year old woman was stabbed to death in the Urania car park on her way to her car; the case stayed unsolved for seven years.
- 40 fires — Around forty arson attacks across central Switzerland put Caroline H. in custody, where in 1998 she confessed to two killings.
- 2004 year — The year she withdrew the confessions that convicted her; she still says she committed many offences, but no killings.