50 years since the “crime of the century” in Tenerife

The agents who arrived on the morning of Friday 18 December 1970 on the first floor of the building located at 37 calle Jesús de Nazareno in the heart of the capital of Tenerife, could not believe their eyes.

Before them, a horrifying scene: the dismembered bodies of three women scattered around the house. Dagmar, 41, her daughters Petra, 15 and Marina, 17, had been brutally murdered by Frank Alexander, the victims’ son and brother, 16, with the help of his father, Harald, 39.

The triple crime was committed 48 hours earlier after Frank saw the “eyes of the devil” in his mother. The offspring interpreted her smile as a gesture of disrespect and reacted like an angry demon. He grabbed a hammer and began to beat her senseless. Minutes later he would finish her off.

As Dagmar lay dying, her husband, who witnessed the events, quietly played the organ. Later, Frank would end the lives of Petra and Marina, brutally beaten them with “masonry material”, without, according to the forensic reports and autopsies, them putting up any resistance.

Organ Mutilation

Father and son went further in their spiral of madness and completed their task by mutilating the deceased organs after opening them up. To do this they used a pair of pruning shears and several razor blades.

Sabine, Petra’s twin sister, survived the massacre by working in the office of Dr Walter Trenkle in La Laguna, a well-known German family doctor.

Once the orgy of blood was over, Frank and Harald took a shower, changed their clothes and got into a taxi which took them to Los Rodeos airport with the intention of returning to Hamburg, from where they had arrived in Tenerife in April of that year. However the destruction of their documents, including their passports, as a ritual that freed them from their old life, prevented them from flying to their destination. They then went to Los Cristianos, where they spent the night in a hostel.

The next day, they went to La Laguna to confess to Sabine the triple parricide. She reacted with astonishing calmness, embracing both of them said Dr Trenkle, who witnessed the conversation before he warned the police, who proceeded to arrest the father and son a few minutes later.

Prophet of god

In his first statement to the police, Harald said that the victims “had been freed through sacrifice” by his son Frank, whom he considered the “prophet of God on earth”. In fact, the teenager was treated as a “messiah” by the family. His mother and sisters were obedient to him and his father, who indulged him in all his requirements and desires, including sexual ones, a belief formed years ago in Germany after the father’s affiliation with the Lorber Society, a school of thought based on elements of an esoteric nature that seeks “divine sonship” through “spiritual rebirth” and which led him to believe that he was “chosen”.

The family came to Tenerife because “God had dictated it to them”, through an interlocutor who turned out to be a psychiatrist from Hamburg who recommended they live in Palm-Mar, a coastal area near Los Cristianos, where Harald came to buy a piece of land after receiving an inheritance.

His neighbours defined the tenants on the first floor of the building as “normal people who treated others cordially”, although they were struck by some chants that were heard periodically.

During the trial, held in March 1972 in the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz, Frank Alexander was always out of sorts, making grimaces and gestures that were typical of an unbalanced person, while Harald seemed to be vacant as if he were not there. Both remained silent and did not answer any questions during the hearing.

The two forensic experts, doctors Serrano and Velasco Escasi, stated that the father suffered from a mental illness of the “chronic delirious schizophrenic type”, while they attributed to his son a “psychic contagion” or an “induced disorder”.

The defence, represented by the lawyer José Luis Gómez García, argued that the father suffered from mental disorders due to religious influence and requested confinement in a psychiatric hospital. Instead, the prosecutor requested the death penalty for the father and 20 years imprisonment for the son for each of his victims.

Finally, the court exempted the defendants from the crimes. “We acquit the defendants of the crimes of patricide and murder, as they are not responsible by being mentally ill and we order them to be placed in one of the establishments for the mentally ill, from which they may not leave without the prior authorisation of this Court”, indicated the sentence issued on 26 March 1972.

Father and son were transferred to the Carabanchel Penitentiary Psychiatric Care Centre in Madrid, where they remained for 23 years. Taking advantage of one of their paroles, they did not return to the ward and totally disappeared. Some sources indicated that they travelled back to Germany. Nothing more was known about Sabine.