Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber
German half-brothers; convicted of murder
Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber are German half-brothers who were convicted of the 1990 murder of actor Walter Sedlmayr. The murder, and subsequent trial and conviction of Werlé and Lauber in 1993, received extensive media coverage in Germany and elsewhere.
In 2009, Werlé and Lauber again received international media coverage when Werlé attempted to remove his name from foreign media sources, including the English language Wikipedia, citing German privacy laws.
Sedlmayr murder and trial
On 15 July 1990, Sedlmayr's body was found in the bedroom of his Munich apartment. He had been tied up, stabbed in the stomach with a knife and was beaten about his head with a hammer. On 21 May 1993, a Munich court found Wolfgang Werlé and his half-brother guilty of Sedlmayr's murder and sentenced both to life imprisonment. Sedlmayr was one of Germany's prominent actors, and the case was described by the Berliner Morgenpost as "the most spectacular in Munich's postwar history."
Witnesses at the trial said that the two brothers were involved in business disputes with Sedlmayr. The case became notable for its lurid tabloid newspaper coverage of Sedlmayr's homosexuality, which had previously been private. The German media reported the identities of both of the brothers at the time of the trial. An appeal against the convictions was rejected in 1994.
“Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber” enters the record as german half-brothers; convicted of murder. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wolfgang, Werlé and Manfred can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16979759. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1993, 2009 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.