Season 53

The team investigate when the body of a man is found in the Dortmund harbor area.

Carolin and Moritz Seitz were once known as a successful couple of actors. But today she is considered the wife of a murderer: four years ago, Moritz Seitz was convicted of killing the former theater star Thore Bärwald after an excessive New Year's Eve party. Now Ole Stark turns himself in to the police. He is also an actor and claims to be the real killer. The public prosecutor's office cannot initiate new investigations, but they give Ballauf and Schenk a week to find out what is true about the story that is being served to them.

After four years in prison for the manslaughter of her father, Sara Manzer wants to look ahead. She has support for her new life - primarily from her friend Marlene, who takes her into her apartment. Sara, who has turned from a party girl into a reserved woman as a result of her imprisonment, wants to shake off memories and reorient herself. But then the police show up at her door. A former colleague was stabbed and old files of her case were found on him. She reluctantly admits that she spoke to Benno Rose before his death. He had new insights into her old case that should relieve her. Sara insists she had nothing to do with Rose's death. Which doesn't stop the inspectors from investigating.

Feline Wagner disappeared a year ago and a friend reported her missing. Now her body is found by chance in a burial forest during preparations for an urn burial. An argument at the site distracts Faber: It's hard to miss the fact that Commissioner Bönisch and the KTU member Sebastian Haller are already having their private dispute on duty again. Observing that Martina Bönisch's emotional life is putting a strain on herself and her work doesn't leave Faber unmoved. Rosa Herzog and Jan Pawlak contact the Ihle funeral home: The gravesite was reserved here, a few days after Feline Wagner disappeared. It was paid for in cash by a man who gave a false name. Another murder victim is rescued, just a few steps away from the first. There was a year between the two murders - and soon twelve months have passed again...

What begins as a completely "normal" murder investigation takes on ever wider ramifications: The shopaholic Magnus Rosponi is found beaten to death in his apartment. But neither his cheerful bowling friends nor Silke Haller, who recognizes the dead man as a teenage crush, can explain why the popular man had to die. Instead, Professor Boerne finds a strange, small object in the corpse. Thiel discovers parallel amorous entanglements. And when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution turns up in the shady characters Muster and Mann, things get absurd. Apparently Thiel and Boerne have stirred up a hornet's nest and even attracted the attention of an assassin. But how is it all connected? And what's the story with the little dog that loves eating bananas?

Falke and Grosz are entrusted with a delicate task under strict discretion: 17-year-old Juan Mendez has disappeared from a fine boarding school where celebrities and elites from business and politics have their children educated. Juan's father is the ambassador of an authoritarian country. The questionable despot is known for having members of the opposition and journalists arrested and tortured. While Juan's girlfriend Hanna has the worst fears, his best friend August suspects that the boy just wants to avoid the official celebrations of the state visit. Whatever the reason, Juan's disappearance puts the Bergsons, the teachers who run the school, in distress. The good reputation of the school is its most important asset. In the course of the investigations by Falke and Grosz, the boy's bodyguard comes under suspicion, especially when a blackmail letter appears: Juan's kidnappers are trying to free imprisoned opponents of the regime and journalists.

After an autumn storm, a skeletonized body is found under an uprooted oak tree. As Borowski suspects very quickly, it is the remains of his first friend Susanne. When Borowski was 16, he wanted to hitchhike Fehmarn with her for the legendary Jimi Hendrix appearance. After an argument, however, Susanne disappeared without a trace. Borowski had tried restlessly to clear up the disappearance. What was a grim assumption at the time is now suddenly bitter certainty when the forensic medicine Kroll unambiguously identifies the body. More resolutely than ever and without consultation with his colleagues, Borowski is pursuing the unexpected opportunity to face the perpetrator at the time after all these years. When Mila Sahin sees through this,she is shaken by the tragic fate of her colleague and initially covers him. But Borowski's constant going it alone finally forces her to involve her superior Schladitz.

A young couple alerts the police in the middle of the night. The two discovered a woman's body in a forest on the outskirts of Frankfurt. But when the chief inspectors Anna Janneke and Paul Brix arrive there, the body has disappeared.

The young IT specialist Lukas Keller is brutally murdered near his sports club for no apparent motive.

A headless male body is recovered from the Spree, whose identity is difficult to establish. A little later, Nina Rubin is being followed by a young woman. Julie Bolshakov tells the detective that she witnessed a murder and asks Rubin for police protection. However, contact with Julie puts Rubin in a dilemma, because from now on she has to keep Karow out of the investigation so as not to endanger the young woman. Karow investigates the identity of the dead man, but senses more and more that his colleague is hiding things from him. Trust has been a thorny issue between the two from the start, and Rubin's behavior hurts Karow - especially since they've also become closer privately. All the more the old problem breaks out again. In her latest case, will Nina Rubin be able to free Julie from the clutches of her crime family?

At first glance, the Bremen inspectors Moormann and Selb are dealing with the suicide of a mentally ill person. After a house fire, the tenant's body is found in her hermetically sealed bedroom. [Harbor Crimes.]

A wife initially disappears without a trace from her house, which was obviously broken into. Traces of blood suggest the worst. Her husband Simon Fischer called the police, but then left the house. Gorniak, Winkler and Schnabel initiate a large-scale search for Kathrin Fischer. The desperate Fischer himself quickly becomes the focus of the investigation: the traces in the house were manipulated, the break-in was apparently faked - forensics finds older traces of blood... Neighbors and colleagues give different accounts, but there are indications that Fischer beat and terrorized his wife. Did he want to prevent her from leaving him, did he kill her and fake a kidnapping? Or did Kathrin Fischer secretly prepare the escape and stage the bloody act to incriminate her husband, because she can only be safe from him if he is in prison?

When Julia Grosz's friend Ela, who infiltrated Hamburg's left-wing autonomous scene as an undercover investigator for the LKA, disappears without a trace, Grosz sets out to look for her. Under a false identity, she goes into the hedonistic, liberal milieu in which her friend seemed to have lost herself.

The chief inspectors Max Ballauf and Freddy Schenk are called to a canal on the outskirts of the city. A 19-year-old drug addict has been murdered. It quickly turns out that the victim, Lara Krohn, became a street prostitute because of her addiction. Her best friend, Kim, who is the same age, suspects that Lara was killed by a customer.