Axel Bergstedt

Axel Bergstedt (born 1962) is a German conductor and composer, convicted of the murder of his wife in 1996. He currently lives in Brazil.

Bergstedt had a successful musical career in Germany, having made the compositions of the children's musical Ronia.

In 1994, after an argument, he killed his wife with an ax and buried her body in the garden of their house in Rahlstedt. He told the police that she was missing; the investigation, however, led to the discovery of the corpse. Brought to jury, he was sentenced to imprisonment for eight years, in 1996. Bergstedt, who was considered the "good man of Bern" by the local community, was discovered to have struck his wife Heike (then 29 years old) eight times with an ax after throwing her to the ground and suffocating her. The couple had two daughters (Juliane and Rebecca, then eight and three years old, respectively). To corroborate the farce that he had created, Bergstedt told police that his wife had escaped with 300,000 marks from the Bach-Orchesters box office where he acted - accusing her of being a thief, as well as a bad mother - since the children were not aware of the crime he had committed, shortly before Christmas.

In 2001, he obtained an exit permission to visit his parents. However, he fled and, not being found, was wanted by Interpol. He was then imprisoned in Cariacica, Espirito Santo, Brazil. For almost a year Bergstedt had been on the international wanted list, and had disguised himself as a Lutheran pastor, preaching in Brazil. There, he had remarried and appeared to lead a normal life; after being detained for more than a year, he was finally extradited in 2003. He was found by the German police of the Fahnder des Landeskriminalamts (Office of Criminal Investigation), who, after monitoring him as a pastor and preaching in Brazil, were finally handed over to the local authorities. After legal proceedings, he was deported in a Lufthansa flight back to the Holstenglacis Detention Center (in the Neustadt district of Hamburg) on February 28 of that year to fulfill the rest of the sentence, after being photographed and fingerprinted again; the investigators could not ascertain how he managed to escape to Brazil.

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