She shot and killed Klaus Grabowski, a man on trial for the rape and murder of her daughter Anna (14 November 1972 – 5 May 1980), in an act of vigilantism in the District Court of Lübeck in 1981, when she was 31.

[1][2] She grew up in Sarstedt, a small town near Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, West Germany, where her parents had fled from East Prussia after the Second World War.

[3] Her father, previously a member of the Waffen-SS,[3] was the stereotypical authoritarian figure, a heavy drinker who spent much of his time at a bar close to the family home.

[3][4] Bachmeier was perceived as a troubled adolescent by—what she described as—a dictatorial stepfather, and her mother eventually kicked her out of the house.

[5][6] As a result, Bachmeier took Anna to work at the pub, and she was said to never feel a need to rush home after her regular hours behind the bar.

[9][10] He held Anna for several hours at his home, sexually assaulted her and ultimately strangled her with a pair of his fiancée's tights.

[15] At around 10 a.m. on 6 March 1981, the third day of the trial,[7] Bachmeier smuggled a Beretta 70[16] into the courtroom of Lübeck District Court, room 157, and fatally shot Grabowski.

[7][10] It sparked extensive media coverage; television crews from around the country and overseas travelled to Lübeck to report on the case.

[21] In addition, after Stern published her life story, and details about how she allowed her first two children to be adopted by loving families, public opinion shifted as she no longer appeared to fit the "innocent mother" image.

[7][22] The West German judiciary was criticized for enabling a man who had sexually abused two girls to use hormones to regain his libido.

[9] On 21 September 1995, she appeared on the television talk show Fliege on Das Erste, where she admitted to shooting Grabowski after careful consideration to enforce the law on him, and to prevent him from further spreading lies about Anna.

[11][22] In an ARD documentary from 2006, a former friend also said that Bachmeier rehearsed the shooting in the basement under Tipasa after Anna's murder.

[7] Before her death, Bachmeier asked reporter Lukas Maria Böhmer of the broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk to accompany her and film the last stages of her life.

[5][7] In the early 1980s, the Anna Collective, a group made up of Aida Jordão, Suzanne Odette Khuri, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Patricia Nichols, Baņuta Rubess, Tori Smith, Barb Taylor, and Maureen White, began work on a theatre piece about Bachmeier.