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Conviction Left-hand-path / Satanist / occult Left-hand-path and Satanist movements Bochum, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · 2002

Germany: couple convicted of a killing staged as a sacrifice to Satan

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Record class

Context only

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

self-described 'satanic vampires'; no authority over the victim

Organization

No organization assigned

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

NOT AN AUTHORITY-ABUSE CASE. The victim was a friend, not an adherent. Recorded as victim-directed ritual: the staging was the crime's declared purpose, established in the trial record.

  • Violent occult ideology or sacrifice
  • Ritual, oath, or initiation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2002-01-31 · conviction and sentence with psychiatric confinement

    Landgericht Bochum, Germany. Daniel and Manuela Ruda were convicted by the Bochum regional court in 2002 of the July 2000 murder of Frank Hackert, a friend killed with a hammer and sixty-six stab wounds in what they described as a sacrifice to Satan; a pentagram was carved into his chest and blood drunk from a bowl. Daniel received fifteen years and Manuela thirteen, both with indefinite psychiatric confinement.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • the killing staged as a sacrifice to Satan
  • a pentagram carved into the victim's chest and blood drunk from a bowl

Cited record

Sources

national newspaper court reporting verdict and sentencing report The Irish Times: 'Satanist couple jailed for killing'.

International report of the verdict and sentences.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/satanist-couple-jailed-for-killing-1.1048757 Corpus classification: national-newspaper-court-reporting; evidentiary role: verdict-and-sentencing-report. SHA-256 0552d5cb787b5bebcc5cc951964198b65034af46b1587d19167165b558cef960
Retrieval
2026-07-20 · Preserved
Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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