World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 15 - David Heiss - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-September 18, 2008, Frankfurt, Germany. A 21-year-old man boarded a plane via Amsterdam
to the U.K. He had one thing on his mind -- murder. -He's got gardening gloves with him.
He's got a weapon with him. This is premeditated. This is planned. It is very execution-like in style.
-David Heiss had become fixated with a woman he met over the Internet. -His obsession was escalating by the day.
Any suggestion that he could be dumped was something that would have driven him literally off the edge.
-In order for Heiss to be with the woman he loved, he had to eliminate the one man he thought stood in his way --
her 20-year-old boyfriend, Matthew. -He's gonna go from a completely law-abiding citizen
to a first-degree killer in one second. -Heiss stabbed the defenseless man in his own flat 86 times
in a cruel and frenzied attack and then calmly boarded a plane back to Germany. -The scene -- I can remember it vividly.
It was a -- it was an horrific sight. I've been to lots of scenes of horrific crimes,
and this one was particularly bad. -Fueled by jealousy and rage, the obsessive online gamer turned into a deadly stalker
who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. All of this makes David Heiss one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Nottingham, England, 2008. The city was in shock after news broke out that a 20-year-old man, Matthew,
was stabbed to death in his flat. The killer was a German National, 21-year-old David Heiss,
who had become obsessed with Matthew's girlfriend, Joanna. -David Heiss was absolutely fixated on Joanna.
Now, he didn't want her to have a relationship with. He wanted to own her. He wanted to possess her.
And he would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. -After persistently harassing Joanna for months
and not getting his own way, Heiss had come to a fateful decision. -Heiss kills in the name of love,
and in doing so, destroys a relationship of actual love. -It would take the efforts of police forces
from two different countries to help catch the young killer. Tony Heydon was a Detective Chief Inspector
for the Homicide Unit at the Nottinghamshire Police Force. -He'd been in the U.K. for 16 hours.
Incredible when you think about somebody that had never been involved in the police,
never committed a crime, had got no friends. Everything he'd ever done was on the Internet,
playing war games. It was just incredible. -Heiss was eventually arrested at his home
in the district of Limburg an der Lahn in Germany. Police Chief Inspectors Uwe Quirmbach
and Rachid Bouarroudj worked on the case. -[ Speaking German ] -It was all over the press.
It was reported across the whole of Germany, both in the local and national media.
-[ Speaking German ] -I would characterize this kind of killing as brutal. We found out that Matthew had been killed with 86 stab wounds.
From my experience, this was a very brutal and cruel act. -David Heiss deserves not one moment sympathy.
He was a callous, evil man who killed, for no good reason, an entirely innocent young man.
-This killer's story begins in 1987. David Heiss was born on June the 19th to a Bolivian mother
and a German father in Frankfurt, West Germany. He was the eldest of two children.
-Affluent. He had quite a leafy, suburban upbringing, but he was unhappy. -Heiss's childhood is quite a turbulent one,
so his parents separated when he was 6, and his mother went on to remarry. -After his parents divorced, it was decided that Heiss would
live with his grandparents near Limburg an der Lahn. -And he was effectively brought up by his grandmother
and grandfather, to whom he was close. -I think he feels like he's the outcast, and when you have those -- those interruptions,
those disruptions in the attachment that somebody has with their parents, their primary caregivers,
that starts to have an impact on the relationships that they have with other people.
-Heiss's mother remarried and went on to have more children. -I think here we've got an individual
who feels like he never really sort of fits in. His mother's formed a new family unit,
so I think there's always that feeling of being an outsider, of being awkward, of not having a sense of belonging in the family.
-His mother, a nurse, still lived in the town, but he barely spoke to her, and his father was even more distant from him.
-As a result, Heiss became insular and isolated. -Heiss is put out to pastures, and the message in there to the child is very simple.
Love can't be counted. The closest thing to you can just set you aside and go on to a new life as if it's nothing.
This creates a desperate sense of insecurity. -I think very early on in those early years,
we're starting to see the seed sown for a disruptive adulthood, for somebody who's gonna have difficulties with relationships,
but it becomes an awful lot worse than that. -Estranged from his parents, Heiss also struggled to make friends.
-He was an isolated child. He took refuge, as so many adolescents do now, in the Net, in his bedroom, his computer.
-The teen would spend up to eight hours a day on the Internet and developed a passion for online gaming.
His social interaction was limited to other gamers. -Here's somebody who doesn't have great relationships
with his peers, so he seeks solace online. He makes friendships with people in the virtual world,
and the virtual world is very different from the real one because you've got a lack of social cues.
You've got that lack of kind of eye contact, of seeing a person face-to-face, and I think this is something
that actually suited him down to the ground. -At school, Heiss excelled academically,
but he couldn't afford to go to University. -It was a fact that rankled him. I think he felt, from a very early age,
"That's what I was due. I want to be at University." He was clearly clever enough, but it wasn't possible.
-Age 19, he decided to join the military, but after just two weeks, he was discharged for not being mentally suitable.
Instead, Heiss took up an apprenticeship at a textile dye production company. -And in itself, that,
coupled with his extraordinarily isolated childhood, turned him into an introverted, unhappy, complicated boy
who had never come to terms with any kind of relationship. -And things would only get worse for the troubled teen
when his grandfather died in 2007. -All that he'd held dear seemed to be about to be taken away from him,
and he desperately wanted something else to hang onto, as well. And that is when Matthew and Joanna entered Heiss's life.
-At this time, Heiss joins an online war-gaming forum called AW Bunker. It was here that he met Joanna, an environmental-science student
who lived in Nottingham with her boyfriend, Matthew, a former physics student. Both were fellow gamers who'd also met online.
Later that year, the gaming forum AW Bunker closed, so Joanna and Matthew set up another one
called WarsCentral.com. -Joanna is known on the site as JoJo. Matthew's known as Shade.
There were others whom he contacts regularly. Increasingly, Heiss's world contracts so,
in fact, it simply is on that war-games site. -Joanna, Matthew, and another individual
had taken on the management of a war-games forum. And they managed that forum so that people
who were involved in certain games could speak to her and Matthew as experts around how to progress in the game.
-And he becomes obsessed -- and there's no other word for it. He becomes inhabited by his fellow gamers.
-With his newfound virtual friends, Heiss, whose nickname was Eagle the Lightning, joined the new forum.
He'd taken a particular liking to Joanna. -The fact that she had got ginger hair,
he felt that that made her more intelligent, so he had this massive respect for her
and became besotted by her. She was a manager of a forum, and that put Joanna up on a pedestal.
-He was able to find somebody who's really enmeshed in his private world. And he not only found a woman who was living in that world,
which is relatively rare, he found a woman who was living in that world as the world's creator.
And that's what I suspect made Heiss believe that she was for him, almost the perfect match.
-It would be the start of an obsessive relationship that would eventually turn deadly.
Although she had a boyfriend, Heiss had begun to stalk Joanna by going through her Facebook account
and online journals. -He was sending her private messages, which she rebuffed. "Don't do that sort of thing.
I don't need that sort of attention. I'm in a relationship with Matthew." And he wouldn't give up.
-Here we've got somebody who is completely isolated. And normally, when we're forming relationships with people,
romantic relationships, we talk to our friends about it. We talk to our family about it.
And they act as a bit of a check on our behavior, and they might say, "Oh, I think you're pushing things
a little bit too fast here. You might want to slow down." That kind of thing. He doesn't have that kind of social filter on his behavior.
-Heiss's obsession with Joanna was escalating. Even though he'd never met her in person, in May that year,
he declared his love for her. -Heiss had become totally obsessed with Joanna and confessed,
"I love you, JoJo, more than anything else in my life." And he went on, "I shouldn't, but I can't help it,
and to be honest, it's a great feeling." A great feeling, someone you've never met,
you only know on a war-games site? It is the most extraordinary thing to say. You know, he has no emotions for reality.
It simply exists on the screen in front of him. This is a young man who has lost contact with reality.
-He becomes fixated with Joanna, and these are behaviors that really are quite abnormal and out of the ordinary.
He's doing this quite early on. He has no kind of concept of the pacing of a relationship,
of the norms and the values that inform how we actually come to construct relationships.
So I think at this point, Joanna's warning signs were probably going off a little bit.
-Heiss continued to harass Joanna, and his messages became more intrusive and obsessive.
-It's perfectly normal for a human being to bond tightly. What happens to the stalker is they bond too narrowly,
too tightly, too quickly, too completely, and that becomes a pathological bond. And that's -- that's what happened for Heiss.
Because Heiss bonds with somebody and falls in love, not knowing who they are. He falls in love with, what he bonds to
is his fantasy about who she is and what she is. And what's his fantasy? It's his perfect match.
Two people who can game forever, if we can just get rid of that one little problem.
But she's in love with somebody else and living with somebody else. -Joanna continued to dismiss Heiss's messages and told him
that she was in a happy relationship with Matthew. This only antagonized Heiss, and his fantasies became more sinister.
And on the 10th of June, he sent a fellow gamer an ominous message. -That is Matthew, Joanna, and David Heiss.
It was an eerie, indeed, almost creepy thing to say. -Heiss had now become frustrated with the virtual world.
He needed to see Joanna in the flesh. Having got her address from another forum member,
on the 21st of June, he made his way to England. -Heiss can control his enthusiasm no longer.
He has to meet Joanna. Having discovered where they live -- in a flat above a pub in Nottingham,
he goes to visit them. Uninvited, simply turns up on their doorstep. -Heiss just popped out of the side and said,
"You know, hello, I'm David." There had been no discussion around him coming to see them.
None of the other gamers had ever come to see them within the U.K. So for someone to come from Germany
was really, really extraordinary. -He wants to basically follow through that fantasy
of a relationship with her that he has in his head and make that a reality. -A day before he arrived,
Joanna had received a text message from a friend to tell her that Heiss had intended to visit them,
but they were still surprised by the unannounced visit. -Joanna already knew that this was not right.
She really, really didn't like it, but Matthew invited Heiss into their flat. They sat, watched football,
and they enjoyed their time together. During that time, Joanna was ringing local hostels
to try and find somewhere for Heiss to stay and couldn't. Couldn't find anywhere, so they decided to let Heiss
stay in their flat, which really again unnerved Joanna. -They're obviously slightly astonished
that this man should turn up on their doorstep uninvited, but they take pity on him, and he sleeps on the floor.
-The sleeping arrangements were far from ideal, especially for Joanna. -She relayed a story that, as Matthew slept,
she lay wide awake. And every time she would look at Heiss lying on the floor in a sleeping bag, he was staring at her.
So, really, really difficult time for them. -Feeling uneasy about their uninvited guest,
the next morning, the couple found alternative lodgings for Heiss. -In the coming days, they did see him,
but Joanna was adamant that she didn't want to see him too much, so she sent Heiss off around the country
to go and visit some of the other gamers. She thought that was a good idea. And then there was chats behind Heiss's back, on the forum,
which then Heiss then found out about, which escalated the issue, so that's when it really began to break down.
-I think Joanna rejecting Heiss is something that he would not have anticipated.
I think he's got this very fixed idea of how that relationship is going to go, and I think he is quite knocked back,
quite surprised when this isn't a reality. -At that time, Matthew began to understand what had been happening
because he'd obviously had a conversation with Joanna. He had a conversation with the gamers.
They all thought that, when they met Heiss, that he was a bit strange. He didn't want to talk about the games.
He wanted to talk about Joanna. So when he arrived back in Nottingham, they really wanted him to go back home.
-After spending three weeks in the U.K., Heiss finally returned to Germany. Meanwhile, Matthew, now fed up with the unwanted attention
from Heiss, made his feelings clear with a damning post on the gaming forum. -Matthew decided to write a document called
"The 19 Reasons Why I Hate David Heiss." It was all the things that Matthew had either discovered
or felt that he hated about him, and Heiss really, really didn't like that. -Furious at Matthew's post, Heiss told a fellow gamer
that he had a strong desire to grab his head and smash it against a wall several times.
On the 31st of July, 2008, just 13 days after he left the U.K., Heiss decided to head to England once again.
-It clearly incensed Heiss enough that he borrowed his uncle's car in Frankfurt,
and then drove all the way to Nottingham. It's sort of over 600 miles, and it was unannounced, again, nobody knew about it.
-However, things didn't quite go to plan. In the early hours of August 1st, Heiss crashed his car on the M11 in Cambridgeshire
after colliding with a truck. ♪♪ -He then got up in the morning from hospital with a minor arm injury
and got on the train and came to Nottingham. And then Joanna saw him on the street.
It absolutely freaked her out. She was frightened and ran into the flat and told Matthew.
You know, that really escalated things, and I think at that point, Matthew and Joanna
clearly thought this was -- this was getting out of hand. -The couple made the decision to block Heiss from their forum.
-Heiss's obsession had begun to completely terrify Joanna. She blanked all contact with him,
and indeed, told him to see a psychiatrist. She'd realized that this apparently harmless German
was actually potentially dangerous, but she did the one thing that was probably destined
to tip Heiss over the edge. And that was to abandon him. -For somebody like Heiss that was clearly a loner,
clearly somebody who didn't have friends, was clearly reliant on the chat room and the gaming site all day, all night,
to be told to get out of the room, you can't be part of the conversation, was clearly, clearly something that he didn't like,
and that escalated his anger. -Other members followed suit, which infuriated Heiss
and aggravated him further. -Heiss had threatened to come to England and kill himself in front of Joanna.
Heiss had been fallen out with all the other gamers. They'd been calling him names
and telling him that he was strange. There was clearly a real hatred within this group.
Heiss against everybody else, but in particular, Joanna and Matthew. -Despite this, Heiss continued to declare
his undying love for Joanna. -His obsession was escalating by the day, by the week.
Any suggestion that he could be dumped by them was something that would have driven him
literally off the edge. It would have been another abandonment, which ran like a thread through David Heiss's life.
It was part of what made him the killer that he was to become. -Heiss was now at breaking point,
and his unpredictable and obsessive behavior would only escalate. He was determined to kill Matthew.
-I think Heiss sees the world in a very black-and-white way. He wants a relationship with Joanna.
Matthew is a barrier to that relationship. Therefore, I must remove that barrier.
And it really is quite chilling the way in which he goes about this. -On the 18th of September, Heiss made his third trip
to England in less than three months. -Heiss takes another trip to Nottingham. He flies from Frankfurt to Birmingham Airport,
and then takes the train from Birmingham to Nottingham. -The 21-year-old office worker had come well-prepared
to put his murderous plan into action. -He'd brought with him enough clothing to keep him warm
'cause he knew that he was gonna have to sleep outdoors. He'd brought a sleeping bag.
We have some CCTV footage of him coming to the tram station and becoming really, really confused
because they'd stopped running because he'd arrived too late. So that kind of messed with him a little bit,
so then he had to walk all the way through Nottingham. -At approximately 1:00 a.m.,
David Heiss made his way to Joanna and Matthew's flat. -We've got images of him putting his bag down,
walking up the road, hiding his bag coming back. Spending a lot of time just thinking what he was gonna do.
-He doesn't knock on the door. He sleeps outside the flat beside an air-conditioning unit,
which was presumably giving out some heat. It's not the depths of winter, but it still was cold.
-Joanna and Matthew had no idea that Heiss was back in the country and just meters away from them.
-When Joanna got up in the morning in order to go to work, she kissed Matthew goodbye, and she walked out.
-And he specifically waits for Joanna to go out to work in the morning. He watches her leave.
He's now decided that the only way he can have her is if he kills her boyfriend, Matthew.
-With Joanna now out of sight, Heiss made his way up to their flat. -He's got gardening gloves with him.
He's got a weapon with him. This is premeditated. This is planned. This is something that he intends to do.
It is very execution-like in style. -Heiss then knocked on the door. -The moment that Matthew opens the door,
David Heiss launches himself at him, stabbing him repeatedly. And indeed, stabbing him relentlessly with the knife
that he's brought specifically for the purpose. -In a cruel and frenzied attack,
Heiss chased Matthew around the small flat. -Matthew had gone into the fetal position behind the closed door,
and then managed to escape and go running down the corridor and into the lounge.
You could see evidence of where he had banged into items, such as doors or cupboards, and where the blood was smeared.
And then he was pursued across into the corner of his bedroom-cum-lounge. -David Heiss had viciously stabbed Matthew
a total of 86 times. -So this is something that is way more than you need to do to end a person's life.
He didn't just want to kill Matthew. He wanted to completely obliterate him and have complete control.
He was very incensed that this barrier was in the way to getting the thing that he wanted,
which was a relationship with Joanna. So killing him wasn't enough. -To stab somebody 86 times actually takes time.
It takes energy. It takes effort. It tells you that somebody really, really means to cause that person very serious harm.
We would normally describe this sort of murder as a sustained assault. This is not a moment of madness.
This is planned. It's calculated. -It's an explosion of cathartic rage. He has been between him and his true love
from the day that they met. -Despite his horrific injuries, Matthew managed to leave a clue
to his killer at the scene of the crime. -To Matthew's eternal credit, he managed in his last moments
to write the first three letters of David Heiss's name in his own blood on his computer console.
He wrote "DAV," presumably hoping that someone would recognize what that meant and lead the police to David Heiss.
-In one sense, the fact that he was still conscious enough, still willing enough to try and identify his assailant
to write the first three letters of his name on a monitor shows how strong he was.
But at the same time, it tells us that he was conscious. He knew what he was doing
throughout the whole of that attack. -Tragically, Matthew died from his horrific injuries.
His murderer then proceeded to cover up his callous crime. -He had made two suicide notes.
One for him and one written for Matthew. And the one written for Matthew included personal details
that he got out of Matthew using certain historical events, using certain people's names in a note.
-But given the horrific scene before him, Heiss realized he could no longer make Matthew's murder look like suicide.
-He is also premeditated enough to realize that he's probably gonna better make the whole affair
look like a burglary gone wrong. So he ransacks the flat to conceal the fact that it's actually
a particularly directed attack at Matthew. -Intent on making the attack look like a burglary,
CCTV footage captured Heiss carrying items that he'd stolen from the flat and dumping them in a nearby Dumpster.
But there was something odd about the way he walked. -One of the things that I've never really understood is that
Heiss had not brought any spare shoes. His shoes were covered in blood, so he had to borrow some shoes of Matthew's.
Matthew's shoes were very small. Heiss was a size 11, so as he's walking up and down the road,
he's actually pigeon-toed, and you can see that. He'd also in the frenzied attack on Matthew stabbed himself
and cut his leg, so he was bleeding. -With Matthew lying dead in his flat, Heiss casually made his way to Birmingham Airport
to catch the 1:20 p.m. flight back to Germany. -Most people, when they've committed a murder,
are so horrified at what they've done, it really knocks them back. They don't quite realize beforehand,
even if it's something that they've planned, the enormity of what they've done. And that they're unable to function normally.
So the fact that Heiss can do this shows me that he is a very cold and a very calculating individual.
-He's in the country for less than 16 hours. In that 16 hours, he kills Matthew and leaves him in the flat in Nottingham.
-That evening, having not heard from Matthew all day, Joanna anxiously made her way back home from work
and made the horrific discovery in her flat. -She rang three 9s and spent a long time on the phone
relaying the fact that she'd found Matthew deceased. And you know, Joanna was in a really bad state,
but she was taken to the local police station in Nottingham. -The next morning, Tony Heydon
went to examine the murder scene. -It was an horrific sight. I've been to, unfortunately,
lots of scenes of horrific crimes, and this one was particularly bad. There was blood on the outside of the front door to the flat.
It was absolute carnage. It was clearly evident from the scene that Matthew had been attacked,
and then attacked again and again and had been chased through the flat. It was just a terrible thing to see.
-With no witnesses, the police were keen to find out who could have committed such a vicious attack on Matthew.
-Well, Joanna was vital. She had a story to tell, and it was imperative that we got to the basic information very, very quickly.
And she relayed certain information to us that really set that investigation going.
She told us about the fact that Matthew had got no enemies. He -- he wasn't involved in anybody
that had got criminal links, all those sort of things. So very quickly steered us towards the problems
that she was having in her life at that time. And they were all centered around David Heiss
and all of the harassment and all of the issues that her and Matthew had been experiencing for months.
-The police gathered CCTV evidence, which showed Heiss in the Nottingham area the day of the murder.
-It was one of those where things, like, dropped into place pretty -- pretty quickly.
It was an extraordinary case for lots of reasons, but actually identifying Heiss as the main suspect
was, for us, a relatively easy thing to do. Gathering the evidence of what he did was extremely difficult.
-As the news broke of Matthew's murder, fear had spread amongst the local community.
-We had lots of problems in the student fraternity. We had officers involved in trying to reassure the student community
that it wasn't an attack on them. We had to look at the general community in Nottingham
and the fear that this particular crime may have created by trying to reassure them
that we had an idea of who it was that had committed the offense. The difficulty was, was where was he?
What might he do next? And we had a real concern about the other gamers that were involved in this investigation, as well.
-Heiss had thought he had committed the perfect murder, but he was now the police's main suspect.
They just needed to find him. The police were now looking into the killer's background.
-Well, we started to make some investigations around Heiss and where he was from.
The only thing that we'd got from some of the gamers was that he maybe lived near Frankfurt,
and we didn't have any other information. -After talking to other gamers, the police discovered
that Heiss was apparently online the morning that Matthew was murdered. -He had managed to convince his sister
that he was going away overnight to a party, and that he needed somebody to manage his online account,
and then got his sister to log on to the computer. We were really concerned about that.
Had we got this right? -Even though he'd killed Matthew, Heiss continued to act innocent to the other gamers.
-When he was back in Germany, he began to say, "How is Matthew?" And "Has anybody heard from Matthew?"
"Well, Matthew is dead." -However, the police were still convinced that Heiss was their main suspect,
but since he was an online gamer, they had no idea where to find him. Then there was a breakthrough in the case.
Information came through about the car crash that Heiss was involved in back in August.
-The fact that the police had attended that crash and what had happened was that some items had been sent
to Heiss from the car by the Travel Aid. It's like European version of the recovery service in the U.K.
And that gave us a couple of addresses that linked to Heiss. So we were then able to go to the courts in the U.K.
We give them enough information that suggests we should arrest this individual. -With a European arrest warrant, the police went through Europol
and made contact with the German authorities. Uwe Quirmbach and Rachid Bouarroudj
were assigned to the case. -[ Speaking German ] -After receiving a formal request,
we carried out the background checks. The only thing we knew was that he was a young man
that lived in the District of Limburg-Weilburg. He didn't show up in any police records, so we found nothing.
It was a total blank slate for us. -Heiss, unaware that he was being investigated,
decided to send Joanna a message on Facebook, four days after he'd murdered her boyfriend.
-He wrote a note which said, "I'm sorry for causing you so much trouble. I hope you won't lose all your hope.
We will be there for you." That gives you an indication of the distortion of Heiss's mind.
"We will be there for you"? No, I think what he really meant was, "I will be there for you."
What he really hoped is that Joanna would fall into his arms. That she'd somehow be won over
by the fact that he'd eliminated her boyfriend. -This is a very clumsy attempt at trying to worm
his way back into her affections. And this really does, again, show his complete lack of judgment,
his complete lack of awareness, of social norms, of ways to behave when somebody has died.
-It reflects a complete inability to see the world from -- from the perspective of the victim.
-Meanwhile, the German authorities now had an address for Heiss. And on the 24th of September, he was finally arrested.
-[ Speaking German ] -David Heiss was arrested by the Special Unit, and he didn't resist arrest.
He was brought to our office, and my colleague, Quirmbach, and I went over the case with him.
We made him aware that he was accused of committing a murder in Nottingham, to which he immediately responded by saying,
"I was in Nottingham, and I'm glad that I was arrested because I wanted to break away from it all."
-It was strange. There are offenders who don't say a single thing, but I got the impression from him that he was relieved
that he could talk to someone about it. He almost got the whole thing off his chest.
-Heiss continued to open up to the German detectives. -After we informed him about his situation,
he told us that he didn't need a solicitor, and he wanted to tell us what happened.
We started the interrogation around 10:00 p.m., and we finished around 3:00 a.m.
During that time, he told us how he met Joanna and Matthew over the Internet, and how he fell in love with Joanna.
He said that he'd visited Joanna twice in Nottingham, and the third time he went over was mainly
because he wanted to punish Matthew for the bad things he had written about him on the Internet.
We asked him whether, at the time, he had the intention to kill him. He said no, he wanted to punish him,
but he had taken the knife with him. -Heiss then gave his version of what happened that fateful day.
-He told us that he had waited until Joanna had left for work that morning, and then went up to the flat.
Matthew opened the door, and there was a fight. He hit Matthew to the ground with the first punch,
and then added countless stabs with the knife during the fight. That was how David Heiss described it.
During the investigation, David gave clear details about everything. He had to stop two or three times because he started to cry.
They were genuine tears because he had just realized exactly what he had done. -Heiss hadn't admitted a murder.
He'd admitted that he'd killed Matthew, but suggested that he went there to talk to Matthew,
and Matthew had attacked him, and he had to stab him in order to defend himself.
-Tony, along with a German-speaking detective, flew out to Frankfurt on the 25th of September.
-The German officers received us extremely well. They took us to Heiss's house, and they showed me what they had found.
Below his bed was a suitcase. Within the suitcase was blood-stained clothing. Lots and lots of information that clearly reassured me
that we'd got the right individual. -The items found in Heiss's room reveal the true state of mind of the killer.
-So, Heiss actually hung onto some items that were related to Matthew's murder, so he hung onto the bloody clothes.
He hung onto a fake suicide note, and often, killers will do this, especially if this killing holds specific significance to them.
It's something that has been important for them, for their sense of power, for their sense of status.
And often, they will revisit these items, and they will relive that moment when they were all-powerful,
when they'd got control back. -He kept them as a trophy to remind himself that he had dispatched his love rival.
But what is absolutely undeniable is that Heiss, who'd got rid of the weapon, found it impossible to get rid of the clothes he wore.
Now, that says a lot about his delight in the killing of Matthew. -On the 25th of November, it was agreed
that David Heiss would be extradited to England, and he was charged for murdering Matthew.
His trial was set for April 2009 at Nottingham Crown Court. None of Heiss's family attended.
-As far as we could tell, he never had any contact with his parents whilst he was in custody in England.
It seemed really unusual to us for parents not to want to contact their son. I can't give you a reason why, even if I wanted to.
-Details of what happened on the morning of the 19th of September were presented to the jury.
-The critical element there was that the crime-scene examination was meticulous.
It showed exactly where the stabbing started and where it finished, and we were able to show how Matthew defended himself.
He'd got knife wounds across his hand where he'd grab the knife. Matthew was a strong,
determined young man that fought for his life like anybody would. But he -- he tried his utmost.
He ran away. He fought back. He grabbed the knife. He did all he could to save his own life,
but he was just overpowered and clearly very surprised. -Heiss claimed that he'd only gone to confront the couple
after they'd started to abuse him on the gaming forum, and that he'd attacked in self-defense.
-A feeble argument, to put it politely. If you've killed someone in self-defense,
the first thing you would do is run and find a policeman and admit it at once. You wouldn't get back on a plane and fly to Germany.
You wouldn't dispose of the weapons. You wouldn't keep the bloody clothes under the bed.
-The calculated killer even tried to manipulate the jury. -His English was immaculate, and he was trying to tell
the jury how it was all Matthew's fault. And he spent two days doing that, and I'd never seen a suspect do that in a trial before.
So, it was a very, very difficult, very long trial. We had to prove everything. We had to bring officers from Germany to give evidence.
-[ Speaking German ] -I was asked to be a witness at the hearing. The judge wanted to know
what David Heiss had said to us during the interrogation. And once again, I described it in detail.
-The evidence against David Heiss was undeniable. -CCTV of him coming from Birmingham to Nottingham.
There was the bloodstains, the walls, elaborate evidence shown to the jury of the spatter.
DAV written on the computer screen. The evidence against David Heiss was utterly compelling.
-On the 11th of May, after just 2 1/2 hours, the jury found David Heiss guilty for the murder of Matthew.
Mr. Justice Keith told Heiss that Matthew's death involved a substantial degree of both planning and premeditation,
and that he brought the knife to kill Matthew, and then make it look as if he killed himself.
David Heiss was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 18 years before parole.
-He was only sentenced to a minimum of 18 years because of his age. If he had been older, he'd get a lot longer term.
This was an horrific crime. -I think had he not been caught for Matthew's murder,
I think this is an individual who would have, at least, gone on to harm other people,
if not kill somebody else because he was prepared to go to these extreme lengths to get what he wanted.
Who's to say that he wouldn't have done the same with the next thing that comes along in his life that he can't have?
-What makes David Heiss one of the world's most evil killers is the total lack of conscience, remorse, empathy,
sympathy with the victim. He is a machine. A machine who has disappeared into a virtual reality,
who is not any more a man, but is suddenly simply a symbol. -Heiss was a selfish, obsessed individual
who callously killed an innocent man in cold blood just because he didn't get what he wanted.
His meticulous planning and depraved, obsessive urges make David Heiss one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Fueled by jealousy and rage, the obsessive online gamer David Heiss turned into a deadly stalker who would stop at nothing to get what he wanted.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

David Heiss murdered Matthew out of obsession with Joanna, leading to a brutal and premeditated attack.

Key points

The Making of a Killer. David Heiss's obsession with Joanna escalates, leading him down a dark path.
A Fatal Obsession. Heiss's fixation on Joanna grows dangerously intense, culminating in a tragic decision.
The Uninvited Guest. Heiss arrives unannounced at Joanna and Matthew's flat, escalating tensions.
The Brutal Attack. David Heiss viciously stabbed Matthew a total of 86 times, showcasing a calculated rage.
The Cold Calculation. Heiss's actions were not impulsive; they were premeditated and calculated, revealing his true nature.
Matthew's Last Clue. Despite his injuries, Matthew left a clue for the police by writing 'DAV' in his blood.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He's gonna go from a completely law-abiding citizen to a first-degree killer in one second.

Describing the drastic change in David Heiss's character.

0:56WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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