After a years-long tyrannical reign over his workplace’s communal fridge, Germany’s infamous lunch criminal will never again poison another one of his co-workers’ sandwiches.
For years at a manufacturing business in the German town of Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock, people had been falling mysteriously ill. Therefore, when a man by the name of Klaus Radke discovered a suspicious substance on his ham-and-cheese sandwich, he notified the company’s management, who in turn notified police. Lo and behold, a surveillance camera caught a 57-year-old machinist, identified simply as Klaus O., sprinkling a suspicious powder on a colleague’s sandwich. In May 2018, German authorities arrested Klaus and searched his house, which was found to contain massive amounts of chemicals like mercury and lead.
On Thursday, a Bielefeld judge found Klaus O. guilty of the attempted murder, and handed him a sentence that’s rare for the country: life in prison.
As to why the machinist wanted to see his co-workers suffer is unclear. Per the New York Times, Klaus didn’t utter a single word during the trial, but prosecutors believe that he simply wanted to see his co-workers become ill. And suffer, they did: the first colleague Klaus poisoned, a 23-year-old man who was training at the manufacturing company, fell into a mysterious coma, and his two other victims are living with serious kidney damage.
When asked during the trial why he didn’t guard his backpack or lunch, the man who noticed the poison on his sandwich that sparked the investigation said that “nobody believes that a colleague does something like that.”
He continued: “Everyone trusts in each other.”
And we thought stealing your co-workers’ lunch was the most sinister thing you could do.
