User:Paris1127/Murder of Dagmar Fuhrich

The Murder of Dagmar Fuhrich, an 11-year-old ballet student, occurred on 12 March 1963 at the Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) in Vienna, Austria. Shortly before a performance of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre began, as Fuhrich made her way to rehearsal, Josef Weinwurm, posing as a doctor, lured her into a changing room shower stall, where he stabbed her 34 times. Weinwurm was arrested 3 months later after a series of attempted stabbings in Vienna, but he would confess his role in the Fuhrich murder and be sentenced to life in prison for the crime, with one day per month to be spent in solitary confinement until 1975, dying in Stein Prison in 2004, Austria's longest-serving prisoner.

On 5 March 1963, one week before the murder, Josef Weinwurm was released from Göllersdorf Prison after serving a sentence for various property crimes he had committed over the previous years. On 8 March, seemingly adrift in Vienna, Weinwurm discovered the washroom inside the opera house, where he observed two cleaning women shower without their knowledge.

Four days later, he ran into Dagmar Fuhrich on the second floor of the Staatsoper, as she made her way to a ballet class. Weinwurm convinced her to come with him into the changing room and stabbed her 34 times. Fuhrich's body was discovered a short time later by a hairdresser. The police weren't immediately called (despite there being a station close to the opera) as staff attempted to contact various managers and the artistic director attempted to reach the opera director, Herbert von Karajan, who was in St. Moritz. Opera personnel finally reported the death when one of them walked across the street to the police station, 45 minutes after the body's discovery, right as the overture to Die Walküre began. The performance was allowed to continue, filling the opera house with 14,000 people whose alibis the police would have to check. Solving the crime was a top priority of Vienna's police chief, Josef Holaubek, the Staatsoper being one of Vienna's most prominent cultural institutions. Fuhrich was buried in Vienna's Grinzing Cemetery on 22 March, in a ceremony attended by dignitaries including von Karajan and actor André Mattoni.

Weinwurm was on a train to Salzburg at the time Fuhrich's body had been discovered, later going to Munich before returning to Vienna. By summer, three women had been attacked by an assailant brandishing a knife: 1 in the OP-Kino cinema, 1 in the Stadtpark, and 1 in the Augustinerkirche. On 6 August 1963, Weinwurm was arrested after attempting to steal a purse from a woman on the Tuchlauben, a high-end shopping street. The victim had cried for help, and a policeman managed to capture her attacker, 33-year-old Josef Weinwurm, who it was discovered had a record for theft. Under interrogation,