For 30 years, French accountant Andre Bamberski, (76), and father to Kalinka devoted his life and hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring her killer to justice. In the end, he took the law into his own hands, hiring two men to kidnap her killer from his home in Germany and deposit him restrained, bleeding and gagged outside the prosecutor’s office in Mulhouse, France. I suppose he felt it was time.
The convicted killer, Dieter Krombach, (75), was Kalinka’s stepfather and a well-respected doctor in Lindau, Germany at the time of her death in 1982, which appeared to be from asphyxiation . From the beginning, suspicion fell on Krombach who was the last to see her alive and who admitted to injecting her with substances the day of her death that may have caused her become unconscious and suffocate on her vomit.
Kalinka’s autopsy was performed by Drs. Höhmann and Dohmann with observers, many believe Krombach was one of those. The report found that there was “fresh blood around the teenager’s vagina, which had been torn, and a white substance inside her. There were several injection marks on her arms, right leg and thorax. And there was undigested food in her stomach,” according to the Guardian. Toxicology tests weren’t done until years later and a “white substance” observed by many, in the vagina was never tested, but in a draconian turn of events, Kalinka’s sex organs were removed during the autopsy and have never been seen since. On a separate note, Krombach was convicted of raping a 16-year old girl in 1996. Others have come forward with similar stories.
In 1993, a decade after Kalinka’s death, her stepfather was tried in a French court in abstentia. He was found guilty and sentence to 15 years in jail, but the courts didn’t file an international warrant and Germany had not been forthcoming with the many for the past decade anyway.
Which brings us to the 2011 kidnapping of Dieter Krombach. Once he was dropped at the prosecutor’s door, Krombach began yelling about being kidnapped. In the meantime, an anonymous call had come, letting them know who the man was and remind them of his fugitive/wanted status. Krombach was taken into custody and is serving his 15-year sentence.
In Jun, a French court gave Bamberski a one year suspended sentence for his role in the kidnapping.
