On March 6, 1981, Marianne Bachmeier walked into a courtroom in Lübeck, Germany with purpose in every step.
Then, suddenly, she pulled a loaded pistol from her purse and opened fire on 35-year-old sex offender Klaus Grabowski.
He had been accused of kidnapping, abusing, and murdering Marianne’s 7-year-old daughter, Anna Bachmeier.
Seconds later, Grabowski took his final breath on the courtroom floor — seven of Marianne’s bullets had struck him. The vengeful mother was immediately arrested, showing no trace of remorse. Forty years later, “Revenge mom” still lives on in public memory — and her sentence continues to divide the nation.
The loss of a child is the ultimate tragedy, often described as the worst experience a parent can endure.
On May 5, 1980, Marianne Bachmeier’s life changed forever. In the 1980s, she was a struggling single mother running a pub in Lübeck, northern Germany. Her own youth had been marked by misery and trauma. Her father had been a member of the Waffen-SS, one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous organizations.
Growing up, she was raped several times by different men. At just 16, Marianne became pregnant. As a teenager unable to raise a baby alone, she gave the infant up for adoption. At 18, she became pregnant again — and once more placed the child with an adoption agency.
In 1973, Marianne gave birth to her third child, her daughter Anna. Still a single mother, she raised Anna on her own.
According to sources, Anna was a “happy, open-minded child,” but tragedy soon struck. In May 1980, Anna and Marianne had an argument. The little girl decided to skip school and walk to a friend’s house instead. On her way there, she was kidnapped by 35-year-old Klaus Grabowski, a local butcher.
Grabowski kept Anna trapped in his apartment for hours, abused her, and eventually strangled her to death. After killing her, he packed her body into a box and hid it along a canal bank.
He later returned to bury the body, only to be arrested that same evening at his favorite pub in Lübeck after his fiancée turned him in. Grabowski was already a convicted sex offender who had previously served time for assaulting two girls.
While in prison in 1976, he had voluntarily undergone castration. Two years later, he began hormone treatment to reverse the procedure so he could have a sexual relationship with his fiancée.
Grabowski immediately confessed to Anna’s murder but denied sexually abusing her. During his trial, he went even further, claiming that Anna had tried to seduce and extort him.
He blamed his victim for his crime, insisting he killed the little girl only because she wanted money and threatened to accuse him of inappropriate touching.
The court did not believe his explanation.
But his disturbing claims pushed Marianne into a state of rage, grief, and helplessness. On March 6, 1981, the third day of the trial, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
Somehow, she managed to smuggle a gun into the courtroom, bypassing security and guards. Shortly after entering, she pulled the loaded weapon from her handbag, aimed at her daughter’s killer, and emptied the magazine. Seven of eight bullets hit their target, and Grabowski collapsed instantly. He died on the spot.
Immediately after the shooting, Marianne dropped her Beretta M1934. Her voice echoed through the courtroom:
“He killed my daughter… I wanted to shoot him in the face, but I shot him in the back… I hope he’s dead.”
According to two police officers, she also called Grabowski a “pig” after firing.
She was arrested on the spot and initially charged with murder. During her 1982 trial, Marianne claimed she shot Grabowski in a dreamlike state after imagining her daughter in the courtroom.
But experts testified that her accuracy required practice, suggesting she had planned the shooting in advance.
Doctors also examined her and asked for a handwriting sample. Marianne wrote: “I did it for you, Anna.” She decorated the note with seven hearts — widely interpreted as a tribute to each year of Anna’s life.
If convicted, Marianne faced life in prison.
Her act of vigilantism drew massive media attention — not only in Germany but worldwide. She was dubbed “Revenge mom,” and many believed she should be acquitted.
The grieving mother who avenged her daughter’s death was widely praised and received an outpouring of sympathy and support, despite the vigilante justice she carried out. At first, the media portrayed her as a saint. But journalists soon dug into her past. They revealed that Marianne had given up her first two children for adoption. The fact that she spent much of her time at the bar where she worked was another detail that began to tarnish the image of a self-sacrificing mother.
In 1983, Marianne was convicted of premeditated manslaughter and unlawful possession of a firearm. She was sentenced to six years in prison but released after three.
Her sentence deeply divided the public, as shown by a survey from the Allensbach Institute: 28 percent thought six years was appropriate, 27 percent believed it was too harsh, and 25 percent felt it was too lenient.
After her release, Marianne emigrated to Nigeria and married a German teacher. In 1990, she divorced and moved to Sicily, Italy. Eventually, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and returned to Lübeck, her hometown.
Her act of revenge remained a topic of discussion in Germany; newspapers continued writing about it well into the 1990s.
In 1994, 13 years after the shooting, she gave a rare interview on German radio.
“I think there is a very big difference if I kill a little girl because I’m afraid I then have to go to prison for my life. And then also the ‘how,’ so that I stand behind the girl and strangle her… which is taken literally from his statement: ‘I heard something come out of her nose, I was fixated, then I could not stand the sight of her body any longer,’” she said.
In a 1995 interview with the Das Erste TV channel, Marianne admitted she had shot Grabowski after careful consideration — to stop him from spreading more lies about Anna.
On September 17, 1996, Marianne died in a hospital in Lübeck. She had hoped to spend her final days in her former home in Sicily but never made it there.
She was later buried beside her beloved daughter in a Lübeck cemetery.
Marianne’s fate — and her act of vigilante justice — remains debated. Many defended her actions and saw them as a fitting punishment for a sex offender with a history of abusing children.
Others argued that Marianne was wrong to take the law into her own hands and should have left the verdict to the court.
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