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The so-called masked man had denied in court in France that he had killed little Jonathan. (archive picture)
Bild: dpa
In the trial for the murder of the boy Jonathan in 2004, a French court has sentenced the German serial offender Martin N. to life imprisonment. He had denied the crime until the end.
In a trial in France, the so-called Masked Man, who had already been convicted of three counts of child murder in Germany, was sentenced to life imprisonment for a further murder. The court in Nantes in western France found the 55-year-old German serial offender Martin N. guilty of the murder of the then ten-year-old Jonathan in April 2004, as the newspapers "Le Parisien", "Le Figaro" and other French media reported from the courtroom. With the verdict, the court complied with the prosecution's demand, which emphasized in its plea that the murder "bears the signature" of the defendant.
Jonathan was abducted from a school hostel in Saint-Brevin-les-Pins in western France. His body was discovered a few weeks later undressed in a pond around 30 kilometers away. During the trial, the accused, who comes from Bremen, clearly denied involvement in the death of the French boy on several occasions. "I didn't do it", he testified. His defense had pleaded for acquittal due to a lack of concrete evidence that the accused had even been in France and committed the crime.
In Germany, the "masked man" had abused young boys for almost 20 years and murdered three of them at the ages of 8, 9 and 13. Between 1992 and 2001, the teacher crept to the beds of dozens of victims in northern Germany at night wearing a mask. After a long criminal investigation, a former victim finally led the police on the trail of the man, who was arrested in Hamburg-Wilstorf in 2011. In 2012, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Stade district court. He confessed to most of his crimes at his trial.
For a long time, the man led a double life without anyone suspecting anything. During the day, he looked after his charges as a supervisor at vacation camps and in homes. At night, he transformed himself into the "masked man" - as he became known because he hid his face behind a dark balaclava when committing crimes.
The decisive tip-off finally came from one of the perpetrator's abuse victims. The witness contacted the police after another appeal for information in 2011. He remembered that a supervisor at a youth camp had asked him about his living situation in a conspicuous manner - a few months later, he was abused by a masked man in 1995.
As the case of little Jonathan showed parallels to the series of crimes in northern Germany, French investigators had also been looking into whether the German could be responsible for the crime in Brittany since 2008. However, no concrete evidence such as DNA traces were found.
However, a witness observed a car with a German license plate near a pond in the evening, which apparently wanted to unload something there, but then drove away. And in 2017, a fellow inmate reported that Martin N. had confessed to killing a child in France.
04.06.2026, 22:24
