A 25-year-old woman and her 26-year-old acquaintance were both convicted and sentenced to life in prison by a German court on Thursday in a case dubbed the “doppelganger murder” by the German press.
The woman had searched for victims online who looked like her, arranged to meet the 23-year-old victim and then killed her with the help of a 26-year-old man she knew.
The apparent aim of the woman’s deadly scheme was to fake her own death in order to escape her family and start a new life.
“This is a disturbing act,” presiding judge Konrad Kliegl said in announcing the verdict on Thursday in the southern German city of Ingolstadt.
The main defendant, a 25-year-old German-Iraqi woman, was ruled to have committed a particularly serious murder, a decision which means she is very unlikely to be released from prison on probation in 15 years, as is typical.
The woman had also instructed a man to kill her brother-in-law, the court found. The crime did not take place, but the woman was nevertheless convicted of attempted incitement to murder.