Revenge and deception Intrigue against forensic medicine professor uncovered

A forensic scientist comes under suspicion of having copied for his doctoral thesis. But then it turns out that the supposed original is a sophisticated forgery. Now the man responsible is on trial.

In recent years, plagiarism has cost numerous academics and politicians their reputations, and some even their titles. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Annette Schavan and Franziska Giffey are just some of the well-known names that have come under fire in such cases. Plagiarism hunters are now specifically looking for passages in publications that could have been copied without the source being cited.

The case of forensic medicine professor Matthias Graw, however, has a completely different quality, because it is not him who has copied, but the alleged model for his doctoral thesis is a forgery, as Der Spiegel writes.

Matthias Graw, Director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, came under suspicion of plagiarism in 2022. Plagiarism hunters accused him of having copied parts of his doctoral thesis.

The media, including Der Spiegel, picked up on the allegations. But doubts soon arose. There seemed to be something wrong with the original from which Graw had allegedly copied.

A cleverly conceived intrigue

The investigation led to Otto Z., a 70-year-old man who recently went on trial at Munich District Court. He is accused of forging an alleged scientific anthology about a medical symposium held in Romania in 1981.

This work entitled "Colchicine - 100 Years of Research" is said to contain 13 specialist articles allegedly written by international scientists. Among them was a chapter that was almost word-for-word identical to parts of Graw's doctoral thesis - and was allegedly published in 1982, years before Graw's dissertation.

But discrepancies soon became apparent: The anthology could not be found in any library catalog, neither nationally nor internationally. Experts expressed massive doubts about the authenticity of the work. It also turned out that the book was very similar to a publication from 1955, which presumably served as a model. In October 2022, the University of Hamburg discontinued the investigation against Graw. The accusation was not tenable.

Possible motive: revenge after the death of his mother

But why would Otto Z. commit such an elaborate fraud? One possible background could be the death of his mother in June 2020. After her death, documents show, the body was autopsied at Graw's institute after a mortician called in the police.

There was a brief suspicion of manslaughter, but this was quickly refuted. Nevertheless, Otto Z. seemed unable to come to terms with the events. He accused Graw and his team of stealing one of his mother's gold teeth, and became obsessed with increasingly far-fetched conspiracy theories.

One particularly absurd aspect of the case: according to Z., all of the authors named in the alleged anthology have since died. But in 2023, SPIEGEL tracked down one of the alleged co-authors, the Danish physician Niels Henrik Valerius. He clarified that he had never worked on the book. The information about his employer at the time was also false.

For Matthias Graws, the nightmare of being unjustifiably suspected of plagiarism has now come to an end.

The editor wrote this text with the help of AI.