On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto's elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. Otto, a doctor who sometimes goes by the name Rainer and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, had cared for her for years since she suffered a stroke. He woke to the sound of her short breath, tried to sit her upright, and watched as she smiled, drew one last deep breath, and lay still.
Otto sank into his chair, frozen in shock. He was 66, and his brother and father had died years before. He had no friends. He mourned in solitude, lighting candles and setting metal plates at the four corners of her bed. Once the rite was complete, he called a funeral home. As a doctor, he could issue his own mother's death certificate. After he hung up, Otto waited. It was the last calm moment he would experience for many months.
A knock at the door
Otto waited beside his mother all night and into the next afternoon before he heard a knock. Rather than doctors, the two men in the hallway were police officers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns. They inspected his mother's body while Otto sat in his office. Forty-five minutes later, a tall, stylish woman approached and introduced herself as a coroner from the Munich Institute of Forensic Medicine. Otto knew that a coroner is only sent to the scenes of suspicious deaths. He found her elegant attire unprofessional and her bedside manner lacking. As she went about her work, he offered his recollections from his mother's final hours and an account of her long illness. Otto informed the coroner that he was a doctor, but it seemed to him that she was uninterested. She turned to the police officers and, without explanation, told them that this was a matter for law enforcement, before leaving.
More armed police officers arrived and searched the rooms. A commissioner told Otto to gather his things, as they needed to conduct their work uninterrupted. Sleep-deprived and grief-stricken, Otto was ushered on to the street and ordered not to return. He drifted along Munich's wide, lamplit streets. As darkness fell, he felt that he “didn’t understand the world any more”. He checked into a hotel, but later that night wandered back to his flat and found the door sealed with police tape. He broke the seal, entered the dark rooms, and found his mother was gone. He returned a second time at about 2am, and this time police officers spotted him and put him in the back of a police car. He was taken to the Institute of Forensic Medicine, where doctors extracted samples from him: hair, urine and blood. Then he was taken to the police station and found himself alone in a tiny, windowless cell.
The next morning, two officers questioned him. How did he care for Doria? Why did he document her condition so precisely? Had he given his mother a concentrated saline injection? Only then did Otto understand: the police believed he had murdered his mother. After two nights in jail, or possibly three, Otto was released and allowed to return to his flat. He had not yet been formally charged with any crime.
A dark theory takes shape
Otto wrote to the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, Prof Matthias Graw, to ask if his team had discovered anything suspicious while inspecting Doria's body. He offered to send Graw all of his day-to-day notes on Doria's health and suggested, boldly, that they co-author a paper about the cause of her death. Graw never answered Otto's emails, and Otto fell into a depression. He began blaming himself for his mother's death. Doria was his whole world. Before the pandemic he used to take her into the city centre each night, where she was a favourite among the buskers for her generous tips. In her younger years, Doria had been an avid traveller, and Otto had taken her, in a wheelchair, on one last holiday to Italy.
In January 2021, the authorities dropped their investigation into his mother's death, and Otto was cleared of any wrongdoing. But he still couldn't get over her death. He checked himself into a psychiatric treatment centre. Through therapy and exercise, he slowly regained his strength. Meanwhile, he had received a copy of the results of his mother's toxicological report, signed by Graw and two of his institute's specialists. It was mid-summer, after Otto had moved back into his apartment, when he finally sat down with Doria's medical files and the report. With two PhDs and decades of experience in medicine and chemistry, Otto knew how to interpret lab reports. He said that something seemed off. He spotted a chemical compound commonly associated with exposure to cold in her bloodstream. An impossible, unspeakable idea crept into his mind: could his mother have somehow still been alive when she was taken away and stowed in the mortuary's freezer? The report also mentioned unusual traces of colchicine, a poison contained in the autumn crocus flower.
Otto began researching the Institute of Forensic Medicine. He started with its director, Prof Matthias Graw, and discovered that decades earlier, when Graw was a doctoral student at the University of Hamburg, he had written his dissertation on colchicine – the same poison found in Doria's blood. A dark theory took shape in his mind: what if the institute had tried to frame him, to cover up the fact that they had actually killed his mother? He did not go to the police – who, he reasoned, must work closely with the head of the institute. He would take the matter into his own hands. He wrote to the institute and requested access to his mother's remains. Once more, his letter received no reply.
The plagiarism hunter
By mid-February 2022, Otto had on his desk a book dated 1982, titled Colchicine – 100 Years of Research. One of its chapters was nearly identical to Graw's dissertation, published five years later. Otto was convinced that he had the evidence he needed to bring Graw down. At the end of February 2022, a man named Stefan Weber was sitting in his office on the outskirts of Salzburg when an intriguing email landed in his inbox. The message claimed that Graw, the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Munich and one of the most respected forensic scientists in Germany, had plagiarised his doctoral thesis.
Weber, 56, is the German-speaking world's most-feared plagiarism hunter. His investigations have previously targeted Austria's former labour and family minister Christine Aschbacher, who stepped down after Weber claimed her master's thesis showed “never-before-seen depths of gobbledegook, nonsense and plagiarism”, and the German politician Annalena Baerbock, whose once-promising bid for the chancellorship was torpedoed when he investigated her book. The New York Times has called Weber the “undisputed terror of academics, politicians, [and] celebrities”. Weber dresses in black and conducts his affairs with extreme scrupulousness. He receives numerous requests for investigations each month, mostly from law firms and private individuals. Weber told me he charges up to €350 an hour for his work. He frequently pillories both public figures and obscure academics on his blog, where he also rails against “the Wokistan ideology” and has written: “Rightwing extremist must be understood as a title of honour!”
The email, sent by one Otto Z, claimed that Graw's entire career was “built on deception”. From Otto's description, the colchicine book would have been an easy source to pilfer. It had been published in East Germany at the height of the cold war, which meant that it most likely wasn't known to western academics when Graw published his dissertation. It was also, in plagiarism-hunter parlance, “grey literature”: informal material that isn't peer-reviewed and therefore lies outside the reach of digital research platforms. Weber accepted the case and, with the help of an assistant, got to work. At the library, the elderly archivist told him they didn't carry the book. After consulting her databases, she informed him that no other library in the world did, either. But she found a single copy on eBay, for $220, and soon Weber held the book in his hands: a bright red hardcover.
When Weber sat down to read it, he discovered that the red book told an incredible story nearly lost to history. It was a record of an academic symposium held in 1981 at a hospital in the small Romanian city of Târgu Neamţ. Present were eminent experts on colchicine – biologists, pharmacists, zoologists – who gathered to present their work. More surprising than any discovery presented at the symposium, however, was the guest list. Experts came from both sides of the iron curtain. At least two Americans were present: zoologist John Julius Biesele and obesity researcher Jules Hirsch. Perhaps the explanation had something to do with the symposium's host, Elena Ceaușescu, the eccentric and ruthless wife of Nicolae Ceaușescu, then-dictator of Romania. Adding a bizarre twist to Weber's investigation, Mrs Ceaușescu was, herself, an infamous academic cheat. Despite only completing elementary school, she believed that she was “born a great chemist”, and coerced the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest into awarding her a PhD in chemistry. When Romania's Soviet-backed regime collapsed in 1989, Elena Ceaușescu, along with her husband, was executed by firing squad.
After cross-referencing the red book and Graw's dissertation, Weber and his assistant concluded that nearly 80% of Graw's work was not original. Two of his thesis's central chapters and many whole sections were word-for-word copies, with images and tables reproduced wholesale. On 6 June 2022, Weber finally filed his report. In the 70-page document, which he sent to several media outlets, he claimed that Graw had plagiarised deliberately and with intent to deceive. “The case smells of severe scientific misconduct,” he declared in his blog. “The head of a forensic medicine institute … obviously has a corpse in the basement himself.”
The investigation unravels
Graw was on holiday in northern Norway when word reached him. On 20 June 2022, a reporter from Der Spiegel contacted the University of Munich's Institute of Forensic Medicine, asking if Graw would like to comment on allegations that he had plagiarised his thesis. Graw, a stern man of 66, told me through his lawyer that he remembered being baffled by the call. He explained that he had gone on holiday and left his laptop behind in Munich, about 1,500 miles away. Soon after, the legal department of Graw's employer, the University of Munich, called Graw to say that they could not support or represent him, as they had to maintain impartiality until the end of the investigation.
Der Spiegel broke the story on 1 July 2022 with an article headlined: “Serious plagiarism allegations against Munich forensic pathologist”. The Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted Weber saying that Graw should be suspended while the allegations were investigated. Then came the tabloid Bild, which reported that several lawyers were calling for all the institute's reports published under Graw's directorship – thousands – to be reviewed, and the cases re-examined, potentially causing an “earthquake in the Munich judiciary”. There were calls for Graw to resign. The German government asked him to step down from his position as vice-president of the Society for Forensic Medicine. Finally, Graw's alma mater, the University of Hamburg, opened an inquiry. If its investigation corroborated Weber's report, Graw's doctorate would be rescinded. He would lose his office, tenure and pension.
While Weber waited for the results of the Hamburg inquest, in late August he was surprised to read a follow-up story in Bild. Without alerting Weber, Otto had granted the paper an interview in which he claimed that Graw had stolen a gold tooth from his mother during the autopsy. In the article, Otto also claimed that his mother, Doria, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor – which immediately evoked a parallel between the gold tooth theft and the Nazi concentration camps. It was Weber's policy never to investigate his clients' motives. But reading the article, he began to wonder whether Otto's interest in Graw might go beyond academic integrity.
Three months after opening their investigation, the University of Hamburg's panel of ombudsmen finished their internal inquiry. Graw's detractors expected his disgrace to be complete. But the story was to take a new, unexpected twist. The university team did not agree with the conclusions of Weber's report accusing Graw of plagiarism. In fact, they pointed the finger in an entirely new direction. In the university's view, it wasn't Graw's dissertation that was fraudulent. The panel had examined the red book on colchicine, which Graw had supposedly plagiarised for his thesis. And in their expert opinion, it was the red book that was fake.
Weber was stunned. He began looking into the university inquiry's claims. First, it stated that the publisher's address listed on the copyright page didn't correspond to any real location in the former German Democratic Republic. Second, a certain technical term was translated awkwardly into English. And third, the text cited a 1983 source, which was impossible for a book printed in 1982 and based on a 1981 conference. This evidence struck Weber as weak. It could all be the result of sloppy socialist-era publishing, rather than proof of a forgery. Still, Weber felt his abilities as an investigator had been called into question, and he set out to crush the accusations. He began by contacting Otto, who had first sent him a pdf scan of the red book, before Weber's librarian found a print copy on sale on eBay. He asked where exactly he had first found the red book. Previously, Otto had explained that he had seen it cited in a patent, then happened upon the volume he had in his possession at a Serbian flea market. Weber asked, which flea market? And could he provide the patent where it was cited?
Otto, who had previously been helpful in all of his interactions with Weber, became evasive, then angry. Without answering Weber's questions, he insisted that the University of Hamburg had performed a sham investigation designed to clear Graw's name. Then, turning conspiratorial, he flooded Weber's inbox with hundreds of pages of documents chronicling his mother's death and his reasons for believing that Graw had mishandled her remains. Weber tried to make sense of Otto's behaviour by working through the twists in the story on his blog. “If [this is a] forgery, then all this is as unlikely as researchers finding out tomorrow that the Earth is flat,” he wrote on 6 October 2022. Weber saw only two options: either the academic elite had conspired to protect Graw by conducting a shoddy investigation, or Otto had forged the book with the intention of using Weber as a pawn in a shockingly elaborate scheme to sabotage Graw. He announced that if the latter was true, he would renounce plagiarism hunting for ever.
Weber cleared his schedule and turned his attention to the red book. He looked through old GDR phone books for the name of the translator – but no person under that name seemed to live in East Berlin at the time. Weber brought the book to an antiquarian, who claimed that the volume's cloth bookmark was unusual for that era of East German publishing. A graphic designer informed him that the book's primary font, Scotch Modern, was only released in 2008. Finally, Weber tracked down the photographer responsible for a key photo of the autumn crocus, who told him that he had uploaded the picture to Wikimedia Commons in 2005. Weber realised he had been duped. On 13 October, he publicly apologised and revoked his accusations against Graw in a blog post that called the affair “a disaster for plagiarism research”. Then, in a new blog post titled Chronology of a Failed Character Assassination, he set out to document how the book had been produced.
Graw was perfectly sure he had not copied his PhD dissertation, but in a recent phone call, he told me how unsettling the accusations had been: “One thing was clear: the plagiarism hunters had been commissioned by someone, but the question was who, and why?” He spent months trying to calm people in his circles, convincing them he'd done nothing wrong. When he received a pdf of the red book he was supposed to have plagiarised, he was struck by how many glaring errors it contained – and how many people had overlooked them. During this time, Otto had initiated a series of civil proceedings against Graw, accusing him of copyright infringement. In August 2022, Graw read the interview with Otto in Bild, in which Otto further accused him of stealing a gold tooth from his dead mother. It was then he realised that Otto, the bereaved son, was behind the plot to destroy his career. In October, Graw filed a criminal complaint against Otto, asking for a police investigation of the whole affair.
The plot exposed
On 8 November 2022, police burst into Otto's apartment. Officers found extensive literature on colchicine and several of Graw's scientific papers. They seized correspondence and data-storage devices containing sprawling documents in which the name “Graw” appeared more than 28,000 times. Otto's laptop contained folders named Graw and Dissertation, and images of the autumn crocus flower. Investigators also found correspondence with a Pakistani ghostwriter and a contract with a Serbian printer. Out of these disparate ingredients, it seemed, Otto had carefully assembled the red book.
As investigators pored over Otto's records, a picture emerged of his past, his mother's final days and his strange, obsessive quest for revenge. Though he had lied about practically everything else, Otto was, in fact, a doctor – albeit one with a chequered clinical history. After practising in the US, Switzerland and Germany, he settled in the UK, but concerns raised by a pharmacist about “bizarre” prescriptions he'd written had prompted a review by Lambeth primary care trust and an investigation by the General Medical Council. In 2010, he had been barred from practising medicine in the UK, but by then, he had returned to Munich to focus on just one patient: his mother.
Otto believed that movement was key to improving Doria's health. He insisted that Doria walk every day, even when she was so exhausted she could barely get out of bed. He brought her down into the streets and observed as she hobbled along the pavement. He told me that he would leave marks on the buildings to track her progress, and took her to her favourite park bench. “Come on, Ma!” he remembered saying to cheer her on. “Just another three metres!” For years, he monitored her day and night, noting signs of progress or deterioration. Every day, he inspected her urine and weighed her faeces to make sure she was getting enough nutrition.
After Doria died, Otto called the funeral home, asking for her to be picked up as late as legally possible, 36 hours after her death. When the company asked for a death certificate, Otto issued one himself, noting “rigor mortis” as a sign of death. It was then that the funeral company got suspicious and alerted the police, who sent a patrol unit and a coroner. When the coroner arrived, Otto's erratic behaviour and desire to share his copious records of his mother's health made her suspicious, too. “Extremely odd behaviour of the son; questionable medical treatment; extremely poor condition of care,” she noted in her report. Noting “indications of an unnatural death”, she ordered an autopsy. The examiners' prevailing theory was that Otto had accidentally killed his mother with an overdose of insulin, then covered up his mistake by administering a glucose injection to stabilise her vitals.
In the weeks after the coroner issued her report, Otto launched legal action against her, including for invoicing irregularities, but his suit was dismissed. Police opened a manslaughter investigation against Otto for the death of his mother, but dropped the case after the autopsy. Graw told me he didn't perform the autopsy himself. His name was on the report merely as the institute's director. The report found no conclusive evidence that Doria's death was unnatural. During those long, uncertain months, Otto became tormented by trying to recover his mother's corpse and discovering the exact cause of death – wondering whether it was due to a mistake he had made. He wrote to Matthias Graw to suggest they co-author a paper on the conditions that led to Doria's passing, and recommended they perform an invasive brain exam, called a histology, which he later described in court as entailing “a circular cut with a butcher's knife, then pulling the skin off and going at it with a saw”.
Graw said he never received the letter, but if he had, he wouldn't have responded to Otto for the same reason that Otto was kept in the dark about the examinations of his mother's body – the ongoing criminal investigation forbade any contact with a suspect. Otto seems to have become obsessed with Graw, the keeper of his mother's remains, and his fixation gradually twisted into a conviction that he was hiding something sinister. Barred access to Graw, Otto sought to learn everything he could about the man and find a fatal flaw. He fixated on Graw's dissertation on the poison colchicine, hoping to undermine the foundation of the doctor's entire career. He launched a flurry of bizarre proceedings against him, claiming that the doctor had failed to recognise inconsistencies in the colchicine levels in his mother's blood, and accusing him of using the “flesh of the Jewish woman Mrs Z” for experiments.
Trial and aftermath
On 1 March 2024, the Munich public prosecutor concluded its investigation and charged Otto with document forgery, copyright infringement and multiple counts of defamation and fraud. The case came to trial in early 2025. The prosecution argued that Otto had attempted to “completely obliterate the livelihood” of Graw by commissioning the creation of the red book, inventing the 1981 conference on which it was based, and listing the book on eBay in order to fool Stefan Weber into carrying out his plan. Carbon dating corroborated these claims – the paper on which the book was printed was produced no earlier than 2015. When the furore failed to cost Graw his job, the prosecution claimed, Otto had fed the press the gold tooth accusation. During the trial, Otto repeatedly claimed that his mother was a Holocaust survivor. Reporters for Die Zeit, the weekly magazine that published an extensive article on the case, contacted every organisation that documents survivors of the camps, and concluded that her name does not appear in the records.
On 6 March 2025, Otto was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The court cited his “almost unprecedented criminal energy”. Otto appealed against the court's decision. When convicted, he was offered a suspended sentence if he confessed, but he maintained his innocence, claiming he and his mother were the victims of a string of bureaucratic errors, then a conspiracy to cover them up. Finally, in July 2026, he confessed to commissioning the red book and agreed to pay €210,000 in damages to Graw. He received a two-year suspended sentence.
When I spoke to Graw recently, he told me he was satisfied with the outcome and hoped for peace and quiet now. But he was still coming to terms with the case, which had consumed the past few years of his life. He remained baffled by Otto's motive in targeting him – he hadn't performed the autopsy or started the investigation, and his institute's report was the reason why Otto had been exonerated. He lamented that Otto had never explained, or apologised. He complained that “some of the media had no interest in investigating the allegations and carried stories before giving me a chance to respond”. And while, as a scientist, he was bound to test hypotheses before publishing them, “plagiarism hunters didn’t even check whether the source was genuine at all”. (Despite his vow, Stefan Weber has not retired from plagiarism hunting, but he has sworn to never again work with “grey literature”.)
At trial, questions were raised about Otto's mental health, but he refused to submit to psychiatric evaluation. According to experts called by the court, the assiduous attention to detail with which he carried out his forgery seems to rule out a full psychotic breakdown or a schizophrenic episode, but he may have experienced temporary delusions brought on by grief. Otto dismisses mental illness allegations as attempts to discredit him. He told me he has bought a house in Serbia to transform it into a memorial dedicated to his mother. With the slow, reverent precision with which he does everything, he has been attempting to retrace the steps of Doria's entire life. In this memorial exhibition, he said, he will show she was a Holocaust survivor, and detail the true sequence of events that led to her death.
