One Count Guilty, One Not — Then Gone: The Disappearance of Bernhard Fritsch

Bernhard Fritsch disappeared on June 2, 2025.

I’d covered his trial for months. He was quiet in court, polite, careful with words. When the verdict came, he didn’t flinch. One count guilty. One not. Fifteen years on the table. Then he was gone.

Men vanish for many reasons. Sometimes, because they finally understand that the fight is over. For eight years, his life was measured in hearings and court-imposed restrictions. One morning, he simply disappears.

The morning of June 2, attorney Kirk Schenck’s name appeared on my phone. I thought he was calling to tell me Fritsch had been remanded into custody. Schenck told me Fritsch never appeared. The court had issued a warrant.

He’d been despondent, frightened, and convinced the system was rigged against him. I wondered if he’d taken his own life.

For two months, there was nothing. No word. No body. If he’d killed himself, I thought someone would have found him.

One day the phone rang. It was Fritsch. He didn’t say where he was, only that he was “going somewhere,” and then he’d speak out about the American justice system. He didn’t tell me the place. I didn’t ask.

Two months after that call, Fritsch called again.

He wasn’t a fugitive. He was a refugee, safe in his own land.

I wrote the headline, simple and plain: Fritsch in Bavaria. Germany does not extradite its citizens.

The FBI knew. They’d already filed it on the docket in an affidavit in his case.

FBI Special Agent Kristi Hamada wrote the court “Bernhard Eugen Fritsch used passport number X0961855 to take Lufthansa flight 521 16 from Mexico City, Mexico to Munich, Germany on October 6, 2025, with  the flight arriving on October 7, 2025.”

My story was nothing more daring than the stories that once tracked Edward Snowden to his exile in Moscow. A man runs from a system. The world has a right to know where he went. What matters is not the geography, but the right to tell the truth about a life the government would rather forget.

My position before he ran, is my position now — his trial was unjust. I’m writing not to defend him, but to understand what kind of country builds a system so perfect that innocence is no defense and that a man’s only escape is flight.

That’s the story – more even than the alleged crime that the indictment said.  Fritsch’s 8-day trial was a show for the crowd. The verdict was written before he walked in.

An Autopsy of Injustice

What I’m documenting is not his innocence, though he appears to be innocent, but rather what drew him toward exile. I’m not writing a defense brief; I’m tracing the road —how every step, every misstep, every bureaucratic corner was cut until the outcome was sealed.

I’m glad he hadn’t died. He hadn’t rotted in a cell. He lived — not by luck, but by geography. Because he was born in Germany, where the law is not so cruel.

It means Fritsch’s story can still be told.  He can participate in its telling. And from an outsider’s perspective he can speak about the system that built the cages and calls it justice. A system that can turn a man into a criminal just to prove it’s working.

I understand. He ran because he wanted to live. I write because I want the truth to live. That’s all there is.

We are both fugitives in our own way — one from prison, one from forgetting. He escaped into exile; I into words.

What remains is the same question every courtroom avoids:

When the law loses its soul, who becomes the criminal — the man who runs, or the one who stays?

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

Frank Parlato

Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.

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