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One evening, when driving home from work, Hoffmann (Klaus Löwitsch) spots sexy 18 year old neighbour girl Anneliese (Ingrid Steeger), as she clumsily tries to keep her bicycle on the road riding home from a party rather drunk. He offers to take her with him but suggests for her to wash up in a nearby pond beforehands as she has fallen over quite a few times already. Thing is, once he sees her in her underwear, he gets excited enough to rape her, then kills her when she threatens to expose him. Returning home afterwards several hours late, Hoffmann finds Anneliese's parents (Herbert Mensching, Margot Rupp) sick with worries, but shows them the cold shoulder, and even his own worried wife (Judy Winter) and kids (Katharina Seyfert, Pierre Franckh) don't get a halfway compassionate reaction out of him. Inspector Derrick (Horst Tappert) and his assistant Harry (Fritz Wepper) investigate of course, and soon home in on Hoffmann, as he's caught in lie after lie, his car has been spotted near where the body is found, and there's also the thing about Anneliese's missing bicycle ... and suddenly Derrick and Hoffmann find themselves in a race to track down the damn thing (even if rationally speaking it's no proof for anything, it's already missing and only if it's found with Hoffmann would prove him guilty). Hoffmann beats Derrick to finding the bicycle, but then hides it rather clumsily ... but it doesn't matter for the story down the road anyways, as now Derrick sets a trap for Hoffmann, he has Anneliese's sister (Doris Arden) ride down the same road as Anneliese on the day of her death when he knows Hoffmann is taking that road, and the sight of that spooks Hoffmann out so much that he has a fatal accident ...

Watching this episode, one can't help but be impressed by Klaus Löwitsch's performance as a man consumed by guilt - and in the light of that it's really a shame that his character is so badly written, he sticks out as the culprit like a sore thumb (and not only to the audience who knows the killer's identity anyway). And it's really the writing that lets this episode down, its premise doesn't wholly convince, it fails to create any real tension, and it loses itself in unnatural dialogue and characters just acting unnaturally. And quite a bit of the story seems to be just a rehash of Derrick's debut episode Waldweg, down to the trap set for the murderer. But still a worthwhile episode, if for Löwitsch's performance alone.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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