When a famously gentle Green campaigner and his partner were found shot dead in their home, why did German police close the case within 24 hours with a ruling of a murder-suicide and refuse to investigate further despite all the evidence to the contrary?

Location: Bonn, Germany
Date: 1 October, 1992

Gert Bastian was born in Munich in 1923 and was aged just 19 when he joined up to fight for Germany during WW2 in 1941.

He fought on the Russian front, getting wounded with a bullet in his right arm and grenade fragments in his head. Having recovered, he was then hit by American machine gun fire while fighting in France. Despite his injuries, he rose quickly within the ranks of the Wehrmacht, but always claimed he knew nothing of Third Reich’s atrocities, a claim which didn’t ring true for everyone.

The Russian Front was where the Final Solution began. Millions died… the special units were put in to round up the Jews and gypsies. Now an ambitious, rapidly promoted, decorated officer can’t say he didn’t know.

Sara Parkin, author of “The Life and Death of Petra Kelly”

After the war, Bastian spent some time trying to run his own business before re-joining the West German Armed Forces in 1956, and by 1980, he had reached the rank of Major General.

He retired as a NATO general in 1980 in protest at the decision to put first-strike nuclear weapons in Germany, and was one of the joint founders of a group called Generals for Peace in 1981.

He met Petra Kelly around this time and together, they co-founded the Green Party. Kelly was a feisty and tireless campaigner for peace and environmental issues and was the face of Germany’s anti-nuclear movement in the 1980s. From March 1983 to Feb 1987 Bastian was an elected member of Green Party in the Federal German Parliament.

According to friends Kelly and Bastian had a very close relationship and lived together for more than 10 years, despite Bastian still being married.

On 19 October 1992, having been alerted by Kelly’s grandmother and Bastian’s wife who hadn’t seen the couple for a few weeks, a concierge entered their house on the outskirts of Bonn.

He found Bastian (age 79) sprawled in the hallway, a gun lying by his hand, and Kelly (age 44) dead on the bed with a single gunshot wound to her left temple. They had lain undiscovered for three weeks.

After a brief investigation, Bonn police closed the case within 24 hours of the bodies being discovered. Despite international pressure, they have refused to reopen it.

The official police report stated that Bastian shot Kelly in her sleep with his old service weapon and then killed himself. The weapon found at the scene was a Derringer special, which only holds 2 bullets.

Kelly was shot in the head at point-blank range and killed instantly. Bastian had been shot downward from above into the middle of his forehead.

No accurate time of death could be established because of decomposition caused by the delay finding the corpses. Initially, the police declared the deaths a double suicide, but they later changed this to murder-suicide.

The police stated that powder burns on Bastian’s hand discounted the possibility of a third person as the killer. Also, the bedroom walls, where Kelly died, were decorated with an unbroken bloodstain pattern, showing that no third person could have been in the room.

But despite this, there are a lot of questions about this conclusion.

THE DOUBLE SUICIDE THEORY

Initially, the police stated the deaths were a double suicide. However there is no evidence to support this theory. Kelly was known to be anxious, clingy, and completely dependent on Bastian. She said to a friend:

I’m destroying Gert’s life and I can’t do without him

Petra Kelly

However, none of her friends believed she was suicidal. Things were undoubtedly tough for the couple. They had money worries and both had health issues, but things were also looking up.

At time of her death Kelly had been nominated for the Andrew Sakharov Award which had a prize of $100k. If she won, she planned to open a human rights office in Germany. This was a woman with ambitious plans for the future.

SO WHAT ABOUT MURDER SUICIDE?

Why would Bastian kill the woman he loved and was so devoted to? Friends said the couple were so inseparable that people referred to them with one name, calling them PetrandGert, and they repeatedly told people they couldn’t live without one another.

Could Bastian have been suicidal? The couple had little money, no office space, and he was still recovering from being hit by a taxi in the Spring which friends said made him feel frail and aware of his own mortality.

He spoke about feeling depressed about rise of violence and National sentiments in Germany at the time, as well as the breakup of Yugoslavia. He wrote in a letter that the current political situation was starting to remind him of the Germany of his youth.

One theory was that Bastian had worked for the East German Security Police (the Stasi) and that his files were about to be released, revealing that he had spied on Kelly during their relationship.

He denied any contact with the Stasi, but the belief is that he may have killed Kelly and then himself to prevent her from finding out about this betrayal.

Gunter Bohnsack, who spent 26 years working for the Stasi, made this statement in 1994 in the Independent newspaper.

Generals for Peace was conceived, organised and financed by the Stasi… This created a real power that was in line with Moscow’s ideas… and we always controlled this through our intelligence services in Moscow and East Berlin.

Gunter Bohnsack

THE MURDER THEORY

So, why do so many people believe this was murder? There is a myriad of different conspiracy theories about the couple’s death being double murder, whether by neo-Nazis or government agents, a nuclear power coalition, the Stasi, KGB or even the Chinese Mafia. You rub a lot of people up the wrong way as a political activist, so this isn’t impossible.

However, there were no signs of struggle or disarray in the house and only Bastian and Kelly’s fingerprints were found at the crime scene. But since three weeks passed between their murder and discovery, there was plenty of time to clean up any crime scene.

So, what points towards this being a double-murder?

The alarm system to the house had been turned off, and the front door keys were lying on the floor near the entrance. Something which wasn’t typical. Also, the upstairs second-floor balcony door was unlocked, although police found no signs of forced entry or unidentified footprints.

Bastian had powder burns on his hand, but these can be planted. Also, the way he supposedly shot himself is strange. Shooting yourself in the forehead from above rather than in the temple or through mouth is a very unusual method of killing yourself.

There was an unfinished letter in the electric typewriter that Gert had been typing, stopping halfway through a word, which suggested an interruption or possibly an intruder. The electric typewriter was also left on and was still humming loudly when the bodies of the couple were discovered weeks later.

This suggests a possible scenario that Bastian was interrupted whilst typing by a loud bang upstairs (Kelly being shot whilst asleep after an intruder entered via the balcony). As his knee still gave him trouble after his accident, it would take some time for him to get upstairs, where he met the killer in the hallway outside the bedroom. The killer shot him in the forehead, and then staged the scene as a murder-suicide.

Sources
Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1994
The Life and Death of Petra Kelly by Sara Parkin
MotherJones.com
Limb by Limb Magazine
Murderpedia.com

Image source https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastian.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petra_Kelly.jpg