A grieving doctor traced his mother's death to a plagiarism scandal
A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the tale of Otto Z
After Otto Z's elderly mother died in Munich in 2020, police treated him as a murder suspect and sent a coroner to the scene. He was later cleared, but a toxicology report showed traces of colchicine, a poison tied to the institute's director, Matthias Graw. Digging into Graw's past, Otto found a 1982 book whose chapter closely mirrored Graw's dissertation — and sent the evidence to plagiarism hunter Stefan Weber.
He told me that 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?