Thirty years and one kidnapping later, a father finally brought justice to his daughter. André Bamberski did what two countries combined couldn’t, and proved that some verdicts must be delivered by the human heart itself.
14-year-old Kalinka Bamberski was spending the summer of 1982 with her mother, Danièle Gonnin, and stepfather, Dieter Krombach, at their home in Lindau, Germany. But one morning in July, she was found dead in her bed. Upon interrogation, Krombach told police he had only given her cobalt-iron injections to “help her tan.” Authorities quickly ruled it a tragic accident, but her father, living in France, never believed it.
Bamberski only received a copy of the autopsy report three years later and pressed for another investigation. She had a superficial vaginal tear, fresh bloody stains around the genitals, and a whitish substance in her vagina at the time of death (via Guardian). All pointing towards a sexual assault. While additional investigations were ordered, German prosecutors refused to reopen the case, citing insufficient evidence.
France convicted Krombach in absentia in 1995, sentencing him to fifteen years, but Germany declined to extradite him. And for nearly three decades, Bamberski lived with that silence.
The kidnapping and subsequent trial
Then, on an October morning in 2009, a new chapter began the way thrillers usually end. German police found Krombach missing from his home. Hours later, French authorities discovered him dumped in Mulhouse. He was beaten and chained to a fence. The kidnappers had dragged him across the border and left him exactly where the French courts had wanted him for years.
Within days, it was clear that Bamberski had planned the whole thing, and he didn’t deny it. “If I’d not gone ahead with it, justice would never have been reached,” he said. (via Independent) For orchestrating the abduction, Bamberski received a suspended one-year sentence.
Surprisingly, the kidnapper refused to accept payment from Bamberski and remarked that if Kalinka were his daughter, Krombach would’ve had “a short trial – tidy, short, quick.”
Then, in 2011, Krombach finally stood trial in France. The court found him guilty of intentional violence leading to involuntary death and sentenced him to 15 years in prison on Oct. 22, 2011. For the first time, Bamberski could sleep peacefully, but “It was tinged with a great sadness,” he said.
“For someone to effectively kill someone through poisoning, the minimum sentence should be either a life sentence or 30 years. So it saddens me that he wasn’t given the sentence that he deserved.”
Krombach’s previous crimes
Way before he had killed Kalinka, Krombach was investigated on suspicion of killing his wife in the 1970s. Then, 15 years into Bamberski’s struggle for justice, Krombach was arrested in Germany for drugging and raping a 16-year-old female patient. But for this, he only received a two-year suspended sentence and lost his medical license. Yet, Krombach continued to practice medicine and was sentenced to 28 months in prison as a result.
When the murderer was finally tried in France, a German woman testified to having an affair with Krombach when she was 16 years old. Several other women came forward and revealed that Krombach had sexually abused them as teenagers, using the same cobalt-iron injections.
Sadly, the monster was released from prison in February 2020 for health reasons. He died seven months later, on Sept. 12, in an old-age home in Germany.
