The case of Olga Hepnarová – a young girl who tried to deal with her difficult relationship with people in a shocking and surprising way. A way, which truly doesn’t resemble anything the history of Czechoslovak criminalistics has ever seen, and which made her case, together with the one of Václav Mrázek, as one of the very few to be known even abroad.
The actual investigation of this particular crime wasn’t overly difficult for the criminalists. The perpetrator was arrested immediately after the crime, she confessed to everything and also presented the motive, not to mention the fact that the whole scene was observed by countless witnesses. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that such clear and easy case (from the investigators’ point of view) was assigned to major Z., at that time the best investigator in the state.
The less demanding this case was for the investigators, the more work had to be done by the ever growing group of specialists – i.e. the doctors and witness experts. And they weren’t your everyday specialists. From all the branches – whether it was the psychiatry, psychology, or sexology, only the best experts were chosen. They all had immense experience, and above all, great authority and reputation in their respective branches. Their task was to find the following: was Olga Hepnarová mentally ill or not, and therefore was she or wasn’t she legally responsible for her crime? Aside from this question, however, there was also another one, much more essential for the future fate of Olga Hepnarová: is it even possible to leave such serious crime without immediate punishment, when the public opinion would almost certainly ask for the death penalty? Finding the answer to this question, however, wasn’t the goal for these specialists, but rather for someone else.
Altogether, four different groups of people were assigned to this case: the investigators (aside from criminalists, there were also members of StB and SNV involved), the doctors (and other expert witnesses), the justice employees (either from the court or prosecution) and also the political functionaries (there are many documents with written instructions and intelligence that circulated between them and the investigators).
“It truly is an exceptional case,” concurred the vast majority of experts who were working on it. And as exceptional as it was for these experts, the case also gained great interest among the journalists as the time went by. Few other cases were mentioned so frequently in the newspaper as was this particular one. Unfortunately, many journalists and other people who were somehow interested in it, often approached this case with a great deal of superficiality, despite its alleged exceptionality. For years and years they would simply copy some basic facts which their colleagues had already written, with some of these facts being either completely false or, at the very least, unverified. Therefore, this website’s main goal is to (at least partially) repay the debt which the journalism owes to the public regarding this case, and to also add or correct some specific data pertaining to it.
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