Published: 7 February, 2014
EXCLUSIVE by ALICE HUTTON

A MURDER fugitive has been extradited from Broadmoor Hospital to Germany eight months after he was convicted of beating a blind man to death outside his home in West Hampstead. 

Tim Sommer had been on the run from the German police over the alleged killing of Fatma Bezohra, 47, when he murdered Dr Douglas Hutchison in November 2012.

The 19-year-old, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, had walked out of two psychiatric hospitals in the weeks leading up to the death of the well-known 60-year-old arts blogger, who was known as “Professor Whitestick”, in Goldhurst Terrace. 

By the time the German national targeted the visually impaired campaigner, after spotting him outside Charing Cross Station on November 29 and following him home, he had evaded capture for 18 days. 

He was finally arrested after police found him walking in West Hampstead covered in blood.

Sommer pleaded guilty to killing Dr Hutchison on the grounds of diminished responsibility and told the court he had done it because he believed the former chemist, who had lost his sight in 2002 after suffering from meningitis and shingles, was the “Devil.”

Following Dr Hutchison’s death questions were raised by his family about how the German authorities had allowed Sommer to leave the country as well as why he had remained at large for so long.  

In May last year Judge Brian Barker QC, Recorder of London, waived a life sentence at the Old Bailey in favour of a hospital order so that Sommer could be extradited to Germany to face the charges over the death of Ms Bezohra, a woman he had allegedly met whilst being treated in a psychiatric hospital.

She was found at her home in Schiebelhuthweg, Darmstadt – Sommer’s home town – having been beaten with a table leg and a lamp. Sommer has not yet been charged.

The son of two plastic surgeons, Sommer was described to the court as an intelligent and gifted student. He had been admitted to a mental hospital in Germany prior to both killings but had discharged himself and stopped taking medication. 

The Old Bailey was told in May last year that following the alleged killing of Ms Bezohra, Mr Sommer travelled 350 miles to Berlin, where he was picked up four days later by unwitting police and taken to an open psychiatric unit after he had been spotted climbing a building.

However, he was allowed to discharge himself and had left the country and travelled to England before he was connected to the killing. 

The prosecutor’s office of Darmstadt, the regional equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service, confirmed to the New Journal that Mr Sommer was transferred from Broodmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire whose inmates include the “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe, to the German authorities on December 31. 

Judge Barker made the extradition order on the grounds that should the case collapse in Germany he would be sent back to the UK to serve out his sentence.