Oetker kidnapping brought a record ransom and years-long hunt

BR revisits the 1976 kidnapping of Richard Oetker, which brought a 21 million mark ransom and took investigators years to solve. Its programme Kontrovers – Die Story examines the case and details that have remained little known.

On the evening of December 14, 1976, 25-year-old Oetker was leaving a lecture in Weihenstephan, Upper Bavaria, when a masked man with a pistol overpowered and abducted him. Oetker, one of the sons of the Dr. Oetker food dynasty, was bound and locked in a cramped box fitted with an electric shock device. He later said he could barely move inside it. He suffered life-threatening injuries in captivity and has never fully recovered.

That night, Oetker’s wife received a call demanding a ransom. His family decided to pay and quickly assembled the 21 million marks. Oetker’s brother August took the money in an aluminium case to the mezzanine level at Stachus in central Munich. He left it in front of a steel door with a knob. The door opened, the case was pulled inside and the door shut, leaving police unable to reach the money. The kidnapper escaped with the ransom.

Oetker was released after almost 48 hours in captivity. Investigators followed thousands of leads before a tip from the public helped them identify a suspect. More than two years after the kidnapping, Dieter Zlof was arrested and later convicted of abducting Oetker.

Zlof denied the crime during his trial, which began at Munich’s Higher Regional Court in November 1979. Oetker was the main prosecution witness. Zlof’s lawyer, Steffen Ufer, said he had doubted his client’s innocence, but that Zlof never confessed. The court sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Former Bavarian interior minister Günther Beckstein said investigators had been completely certain of Zlof’s guilt, though Ufer later argued that the court had been lucky to convict the right man in an evidence-based case.

The ransom’s whereabouts remained a mystery for years. In 1998, investigators arrested Zlof as he tried to launder much of the money in London. Former state criminal police investigator Josef Geißdörfer recalled feeling immense relief after the long wait.

Oetker continues to live with the physical effects of the kidnapping. He volunteers in support of victims of violence and lives privately with his family. In 2024, he said: “We can endure much more than we think.”