The shot rang out before Dieter could even process the sound. He slammed his foot on the gas, tearing down the dark Miami street. When he finally looked over at Kirsten, her face was covered in blood. He screamed for help, finding a police officer on the sidewalk.
The officer looked into the rental car and saw her bleeding from the head. She was alive, but barely. The medics arrived in two minutes. It wasn’t enough.
Kirsten Kishnik was killed by a bullet to the head. Now Dieter Reichman sits in a Miami prison cell, waiting for his trial. He’s been here since October 29th, 1987, arrested for illegally purchasing firearms. His bail is set at $150,000—about $400,000 in today’s money—and it’s far beyond what he can pay.
So he waits. He plays chess with his cellmate, Walter Smikowski. Walter’s been inside for about a month, convicted on seventeen counts of fraud and serving a ten-year sentence. Two men sharing a cell for months get to know each other well, and the two have grown close.
They talk about their lives while they play, and Walter is eager to hear how Dieter ended up here. Dieter tells the story of the night he lost his girlfriend. It was December 1986 when the couple arrived in Miami Beach for their vacation. They stayed through the end of October, enjoying the sun, the nightlife, and their favorite activity—the gun range.
Dieter loved Florida’s gun laws. Back in Germany, collecting firearms was nearly impossible. So during his visits to Miami, he took advantage of the relaxed regulations. He’d bought two guns on a previous trip and left them with a local attorney for safekeeping until he returned.
On this trip, he bought a third when Kirsten saw one in a magazine she liked. On the evening of October 25th, the couple went to a Brazilian cocktail bar for dinner. Sipping drinks and enjoying the meal, they suddenly realized they’d never taken a picture with the “Welcome to Miami Beach” sign. It became urgent.
They drove around, got lost, and found themselves on a dark street corner where a group of men stood. Dieter slowed down as he passed them. They thought he wanted to buy drugs. They signaled him.
He made a U-turn and pulled up next to them. Men circled the car. Then came the loud noise. He hit the gas before he could understand what had happened.
Speeding away, he glanced at Kirsten. Her face was covered in blood. She was shot in the head. She didn’t survive.
Dieter told this story to the police countless times. He told it to Walter more than once during their chess matches. And now police were investigating Kirsten’s murder, which led them to look closer at Dieter himself. When police searched his motel room after the shooting, they found his guns and ammunition.
They swabbed his hands for gunshot residue and found enough to suggest he’d been in close proximity to a gun being fired. His shirt had a large blood stain—if he’d been sitting in the driver’s seat, as he claimed, the splatter pattern would’ve been different. They found blood on a blanket folded on the driver’s seat, but none on the seat itself or the seatbelt. It seemed possible Dieter wasn’t even in the car when the shot was fired.
The German authorities were contacted. They discovered something that shifted the entire investigation. There were five life insurance policies taken out on Kirsten, all signed between 1978 and 1987, worth nearly one million German marks. Dieter was the sole beneficiary of every single one, including the rental car insurance that paid double indemnity for accidental death.
The German investigation revealed more. Kirsten was a sex worker, and Dieter acted as her pimp. Multiple people said Kirsten was his only source of income. Dieter had denied all of this whenever the topic came up.
But during a game of chess with Walter, he slipped. Not only did he admit Kirsten was a sex worker, he laughed and said she was worth more to him dead than alive. Walter, who’d been playing defensively all game, suddenly switched tactics and attacked. He knocked off Dieter’s pieces, moving in for the kill.
The detectives formed their theory. Sometime between leaving the cocktail bar and finding the police officer, Dieter stopped the car, got out, walked around to the open passenger window, and pulled the trigger himself—or directed the shot. He wiped her blood on his shirt, folded the blanket on the driver’s seat to hide where he should have been sitting, and sped off to find help, blaming gang violence. It was a plan almost a decade in the making.
On October 29th, 1987, Dieter was arrested for illegally purchasing the guns found in his motel room. He was confident the charges would be dropped. He could go home and leave this nightmare behind. But the nightmare was just beginning.
Dieter’s trial was held on December 29th, 1987, exactly two months after his arrest. Two of the three gun charges were dismissed immediately. The jury acquitted him of the final one. He was released the very next day.
But as he walked out of prison, the Miami Beach police arrested him for the murder of Kirsten Kishnik. He was indicted on one count of first-degree murder and one count of unlawfully displaying a firearm. He waited over six months for trial. When questioned repeatedly about the night of the murder, he claimed he didn’t recall anything else.
The fact that he’d been drinking that night could corroborate that claim. He’d covered all his bases, he thought. In a city with overflowing morgues and an understaffed, overworked police force, he was certain Kirsten would just appear to be another tragic victim of America’s murder capital. The trial began on July 13th, 1988, and lasted a month.
Witness after witness took the stand. Many testified against Dieter. But the most damning testimony came from his own cellmate. Walter Smikowski had been approached during Dieter’s stay at the Metropolitan Correctional Center to act as an informant.
He was asked to report anything Dieter said about Kirsten’s murder. Walter testified that Dieter was very pleased with the idea of becoming rich from the insurance payout as a result of Kirsten’s death. It was devastating evidence. In no small part because of Walter’s testimony, Dieter was found guilty on both charges.
The motive was financial gain. Because of this, the jury voted to recommend the death penalty—nine out of twelve jurors in favor. Appeal after appeal, the results were the same. In 1996, after nearly a decade of court battles, Dieter succeeded in getting his death sentence vacated.
But freedom was not granted. Kirsten, like countless other vulnerable people, had found herself with very few options, disheartened by Dieter’s promise of safety. She was a young woman forced into a line of work she didn’t want. When she tried to get out, the man just decided to find another way to use her for his own financial gain.
She was a person, a lovely person. But Dieter saw only property. He used people like pieces on a chessboard, willing to sacrifice a life if it would get him further ahead. He kept his story straight with every police officer.
But one slip-up—saying the wrong thing over a game of chess—sentenced him to likely spend the rest of his life in prison.
