A New Jersey man charged with fatally stabbing his wife in the couple’s Bergen County home more than four years ago was allegedly sleepwalking at the time of the crime, according to his lawyer.
Dieter Zimmermann, 76, was arrested in January 2021 after authorities found his wife on the floor of a bathroom in the couple’s townhouse in Mahwah, about 30 miles northwest of Midtown Manhattan.
Jacqueline Zimmermann, 69, was found facedown with her head in a pool of blood, NorthJersey.com reported, citing the affidavit of probable cause.
Investigators said Jacqueline was stabbed multiple times with a “butcher-style knife.”
Dieter Zimmermann, who initially told police his wife had attacked him, later confessed to stabbing the victim after locating “two kitchen knives in her nightstand drawer,” police said.
Last month, he informed a judge that he would waive his right to a jury trial in favor of a bench trial, which is scheduled to begin early October.
On Wednesday, Zimmermann’s defense attorney, Brian Neary, told NJ Advance Media that his legal team is pursuing a psychiatric defense, claiming “he had a mental disease or defect at the time of the homicide with a parasomnia twist.”
Parasomnias are sleep disorders that are characterized by “abnormal, unpleasant motor, verbal or behavioral events that occur during sleep or wake-to-sleep transitions.”
Sleepwalking, a type of parasomnia, may lead individuals to “walk, talk or make physical movements to act out a dream,” experts say.
Neary, who says his client had other psychological issues before the stabbing, admits the team’s line of defense is “very unusual,” and says that even if Zimmermann were to win the case, he would likely not go free.
“He doesn’t walk out the back door,” he said. “He would go to a psychiatric hospital in the state of New Jersey and be held there until such a time as he was neither a danger to himself or to the community.”
