At 10:32 p.m. on October 25, 1987,
Miami Beach Police Officer Kelley Reid saw a red Thunderbird rental car stop at what she
believed was a traffic light at Indian Creek Dr. and 67th St. She then noticed that driver
was signaling for her. The driver was Dieter Riechmann. Officer Reid walked up to his car.
As she approached, she heard him say, "Help me, my girl." When she looked inside
the car, she found a woman sitting in the passenger front seat. The woman, Kersten
Kischnick, had been shot once, on the right side of her head just behind and above her
right ear.
Mr. Riechmann and Ms. Kischnick
were German tourists who had been vacationing in America for nearly a month. They had
traveled throughout the Southeast, but had recently returned to Miami to catch their
flight back to Germany. They had been life-long companions for nearly 13 years. Ms.
Kischnick worked as a prostitute in Germany where prostitution was and is legal.
On the evening of October 25,
1987, Mr. Riechmann and Ms. Kischnick had dinner at a Bayside restaurant in Miami. They
shared twelve drinks during dinner. According to Mr. Riechmann, they got lost on their way
back to their Miami Beach hotel. Mr. Riechmann decided to stop and ask someone on the
street for directions. With the passenger side window lowered, Mr. Riechmann pulled the
car up next to a black man to ask for directions. The man said just a moment, walked to
another car, and then returned with something in his hand. Mr. Riechmann got scared. As
hit the accelerator to leave, he heard an explosion. He soon realized that Kersten had
been shot when he heard her making wheezing sounds. When he reached around to hold her
head, he discovered that his hand was covered in blood.
Mr. Riechmann drove wildly through
the streets of Miami looking for a police officer. When he finally found one in Miami
Beach, he tried to relate his story in broken English. At 11:30 p.m., he was placed in a
holding cell for several hours. When he was removed from the holding cell, he was told the
police had made a mistake. The police then accompanied him to his hotel room where they
seized three guns, shoes, his passport, and the blood-stained clothes he had worn in the
car.
During the next four days, Mr.
Riechmann was asked to retell his account over and over. He was driven around by police
and asked if he could identify the spot where the shooting happened. He was unable to
recognize the exact location, but said the area of 63rd and Biscayne Blvd. looked
familiar. On October 29th, police secretly taped a four-to-five hour interview with Mr.
Riechmann. At the conclusion of this interview, Mr. Riechmann was arrested by ATF agents
on federal gun charges. The charges alleged that Mr. Riechmann had violated federal law
when he purchased the guns that police seized from his hotel room. Mr. Riechmann remained
in custody until his federal trial.
The federal gun charges went to
trial December 27, 1987. At the end of the government’s case, the judge dismissed two
of the three counts for lack of evidence. The jury acquitted Mr. Riechmann on the third
charge. When Mr. Riechmann walked out of the federal courtroom on December 30th, Miami
Beach detectives were waiting for him. He was arrested and charged with the murder of Ms.
Kischnick.
The murder charges were prosecuted
by Kevin DiGregory and Beth Sreenan of the Dade County State Attorney’s Office. A
month-long trial began on July 13, 1988. Mr. Riechmann was represented by Edward Carhart.
The State’s case was based on
three parts: First, the State introduced evidence that Mr. Riechmann was the beneficiary
of several life insurance policies on Ms. Kischnick. The State argued that these policies
gave Mr. Riechmann a motive. Second, the State introduced forensic evidence that it said
implicated Mr. Riechmann. His hands showed traces of gunpowder residue (both of them in
equal amounts, not the expected result unless two hands are used to fired the gun). After
testing a blanket that was found in the car three times, State examiners finally got a
positive result for the presence of presumptive blood on the blanket on which Mr.
Riechmann was sitting at the time he asserted Ms. Kischnick was shot (although the defense
contested not only the validity of the result, but also the probable contamination of the
crime scene on the night of the shooting). And finally, the State relied on a jailhouse
informant who not only claimed to be a former KGB agent, but also that Mr. Riechmann had
made incriminating statements and had behaved in an incriminating fashion while they were
incarcerated together. The glue that held the State’s case together was a vicious
attack on Mr. Riechmann’s character because his girlfriend was a prostitute. This
undermined his testimony when he was called to testify during the defense case.
After the jury returned a guilty
verdict, a jubilant Beth Sreenan in a taped media interview expressed her surprise and
pleasure at the verdict. The State then got a death recommendation from the jury. The
judge imposed a sentence of death, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the death
sentence during Mr. Riechmann’s direct appeal to that court.
At a post-conviction hearing held
in 1996, Mr. Riechmann’s collateral counsel presented two witnesses who had observed
the shooting. According to these witnesses, the area where the shooting happened was
frequented by drug dealers who waited for people to stop and make drug buys. They saw a
car with two white occupants stop. And they saw a black man named Mark approach the car
with a gun. They heard a shot as the car sped away. This was the same area Mr. Riechmann
told police looked familiar.
The judge in 1996 did not overturn
Mr. Riechmann’s conviction because he found these two witnesses not credible enough
without more corroboration. The judge did find, however, that the original trial judge had
engaged in improper ex parte communication with one of the prosecutors while imposing the
death sentence and the prosecutors had improperly withheld 37 German witness statements
from the defense. As a result, Mr. Riechmann’s death sentence was vacated, and a
re-sentencing was ordered. On appeal to the Florida Supreme Court, the denial of a new
trial and the decision granting a re-sentencing were both affirmed.
Meanwhile, a German journalist,
Peter Mueller, began to investigate the case. On August 25, 1998, Mr. Mueller interviewed
a person by the name of Mark Dugen. During the interview, Mr. Dugen described how a large
rental car with two white occupants had stopped on 63rd Street, near Biscayne Blvd. Mr.
Dugen was in the neighborhood selling drugs. Mr. Dugen assumed the occupants of the car
wanted to purchase drugs, so he approached the car. He noticed that the occupants were
wearing lots of jewelry. They "got like really nervous and got like really freaked
out." Mr. Dugen decided to rob them. He pulled a gun out. He fired a shot and the car
sped away. On December 10, 1998, Peter Mueller’s radio broadcast of the Dugen
interview was published on German radio.
Mr. Mueller continued his
investigation even after broadcasting Mr. Dugen’s confession to this murder. In 2000,
he was able to locate the jailhouse informant who had claimed to be a former KGB agent,
Walter Smykowski. In November of 2000, Mr. Mueller conducted a video interview of Mr.
Smykowski in which Mr. Smykowski admitted that his testimony at Mr. Riechmann’s trial
was false.
Thereafter, Mr. Mueller prepared a
television documentary of his investigation of the Riechmann case. It was broadcast on
German television.
Mr. Riechmann has filed a motion
for a new trial relying in part upon the German radio and television broadcasts and the
new information uncovered by Mr. Mueller.
