Was Donald Stellwag Guilty Of The 1991 Bank Robbery?
On the 19th of December 1991, a man walked into a bank in Nuremberg and calmly but coldly pointed his gun at the nearest teller. Following the robber’s instructions, the bank teller transferred banknotes of various currencies into a bag and handed it over to the man, who quickly fled the scene. Having arrived at the place in a taxi, the man said nothing to the driver until she wanted to follow a certain route, but he was afraid of being caught by the police. Since the bank workers had informed the police immediately after the robber had left, the authorities were already on the move. Now pointing his gun at the taxi driver, the robber forced her to drive fast through opposing traffic and then finally got out of the taxi at one point.
Soon after this incident, the police started their investigation, and not much time was needed to find out more about their suspect. The bank had security cameras all over, which had caught the man dressed in black and wearing a pair of dark sunglasses. The bank teller, as well as some of the customers who were present at the place, all remembered the physical appearance of the man because of his distinct features. The robber was quite tall and overweight, even seemingly obese, and this became the identification point of the police search initially. Within some time, a police officer seemed to recognize their suspect as someone he already knew, a man named Donald Stellwag. Although the physical appearance of the man caught on the security camera did match that of Stellwag, the latter instantly denied having any connection to the crime in Nuremberg. The man kept claiming that he was far away from the city of Nuremberg on that day and even had an alibi that he was with his friends at the house of one of them in the state of Saxony. The man even made it clear that he had been suffering from tumors in his pituitary gland in the brain, which made it very difficult for him to physically move around.
But as Stellwag was arrested by the police and further investigations were held, things started to turn against him. The bank teller and the witnesses who had seen the bank robber on that day all agreed and also testified in court that he was indeed the man who had looted the bank. The defendant’s argument was that he was only being misidentified due to his height and overweight stature, which made it seem like he was the perpetrator. Also noteworthy was the fact that Stellwag was not placed in a lineup with others with similar physicality, but he was made to stand alone in a room when the witnesses identified him from the outside. The taxi driver who had driven the robber to and from the bank had also identified Stellwag as the same man, and she was even very confident of this since she had seen him from a very close distance. Despite these testimonies, there was also some missing evidence too, like the fact that Stellwag’s fingerprints did not match those found at the crime scene. It was clear from the camera footage that the robber had not been wearing gloves during the act, and he had therefore left a lot of fingerprints on the bank counter and also on the door of the taxi. However, the fingerprints did not match those of Donald Stellwag.
It was primarily because of these inconclusive findings in the case with regard to evidence that the investigators decided to go for an anthropological report. This meant that an expert would be called in to minutely study photographs of the perpetrator and those taken of Donald Stellwag and determine whether the two men were the same. The basis of such a test is anthropological clues, such as the width of one’s skull structure or the shape of their facial features, and so on. It was the result of this test that was used to draw a conclusive decision by the court. After spending almost two years in prison during the investigation, Stellwag’s court trial was started, and the judges decided that he was indeed guilty of the bank robbery. The reasoning provided was that of the expert who had conducted the anthropological test, as he had testified in court that the ears of the suspect and those of Stellwag totally matched, meaning that the two men were one and the same. Although Donald still maintained that he was innocent, the court sentenced him to nine years in prison for the bank robbery.
During the nine long years that he spent behind bars, including the two years he had spent earlier during the investigation, Stellwag claims to have been kept in complete isolation. He claimed that this was because the authorities wanted him to confess to the crime. Since Stellwag had not yet confessed to the crime of robbery, there was no question of integrating him back into society, and therefore he was kept in solitary confinement. It was only after the man was released from prison in 2001, having served his complete sentence, that a shocking truth was revealed. A number of other banks had also been robbed in just the same manner as that in Nuremberg, meaning that the perpetrator came to the place in a taxi, held up the teller to give him all the money, and then left in a taxi again. All of this had happened while Stellwag was in prison, and soon enough, the real perpetrator was caught when he had bragged to an associate about his acts. After all these years, the real bank robber was caught and punished by the court, while Stellwag was acquitted of the charges. However, the man had already served his prison sentence, meaning that Donald Stellwag had actually been wronged by the state and the authorities, who had punished him for a crime he had not committed.
Stellwag became a known face around this time, as he was regularly called on talk shows and interviews as a man wronged directly by the state. The authorities decided to compensate him for the nine years he had to spend in prison, but the money paid to the man was ultimately too meager. In a very unusual case in the history of law in Germany, Stellwag then sued the expert who had testified that he was the bank robber according to his examination. The court also ruled in favor of Stellwag, deciding that the expert was to pay a sum of 150,000 euros as personal compensation for Stellwag. The man was smart enough to make use of this publicity to earn money, too, as he partnered up with a beer company and wore clothes with their branding to the TV interviews. Along with the money Stellwag was getting for the interviews themselves, he also earned through these marketing and advertising methods. All was finally going well for the man until another fateful day in 2010 when he was arrested over suspicions of being involved in another robbery, this time of gold.