A man said to have butchered his wife and packed the pieces into a suitcase gruesomely Googled how to dissolve meat in acid, a court has heard.
Accused Walter Baumann, 46, searched in one day alone ‘effects of acids on living tissues’ and ‘what acid breaks down skin’, said prosecutors.
On the same day – the court in Bremen in Lower Saxony, in north-western Germany, was told – he also searched for ‘what acid dissolves meat’ and ‘free-standing bathtub’.
In all, the court heard, Bremen made more than 400 grim searches in the month leading up to his 32-year-old wife Ekaterina Baumann’s disappearance.
Prosecutors believe Walter killed her at their home before chopping her up, stashing her body parts in a suitcase, and dumping the case in a river.
The case containing most of her remains was pulled from the River Weser near Bremerhaven on 1st March 2022 and Baumann was arrested for her murder.
Prosecutors read out a list of grim online searches which apparently show how he allegedly planned to dope his wife, kill her, and get rid of her body.
On 22nd and 23rd of January 2022, his Google included ‘sleeping pills’, ‘barbiturates’ and ‘diazepam’.
Other searches included ‘prison sentence: mother administers son overdose sleeping pills’ and ‘tablet overdose when dangerous’.
On 26th January, the term ‘valium too concentrated’ was googled, then two days later he searched ’diazepam per kilogramme of body weight’, prosecutors said.
Baumann claimed he only searched these terms because he was afraid that his wife wanted to poison him.
He told the court: “I was afraid that my wife wanted to poison me.”
He added: “I was afraid of the consequences for my wife if she poisoned me.”
But experts conducting post-mortem examinations on his wife’s remains reportedly found diazepam, one of the drugs searched by Baumann.
Then on 27th January, Baumann reportedly searched ‘lie detector police’, ‘lie detector results accepted by German courts’ and ‘suspected of a crime’.
On 3rd February, he is said to have searched ‘stun gun’.
He provided the court with no other explanations for these searches.
Earlier reports told how Walter had proposed to Russian-born Ekaterina just one week after meeting her for the first time on holiday in Turkey in 2009.
The two had married in Bremerhaven in 2010 and their daughter Viktoria had been born in 2017.
Friends earlier told German media that after the birth, “Viktoria was his little princess, his wife was worth nothing to him anymore.”
The trial is ongoing.
