BusinessweekThe Stradivarius Murders

Von Bredow urged peers back home to join him, praising the Paraguayan lifestyle and touting plots of land for sale. He shared photos of his exotic reset over Telegram and videos on YouTube. Here was Loreena, whom he affectionately called Lolo, playing with their cats. Here was the pair making sauerkraut kombucha in their cozy kitchen. Here was a $100,000 1835 Ascoli Piceno violin available for the “seriously interested.”

Von Bredow was proud of the large, remote compound he’d had built in Areguá, just up the road from scenic Ypacaraí Lake and surrounded by jungle and long green fields. The brick walls of the property were lined with barbed wire, security cameras and floodlights. Von Bredow personally painted a life-size mammoth on the gate. Inside the two-floor house, violins and cellos cluttered the living room. Big baroque paintings hung on the walls. More miscellany was stored among the six shipping containers on-site, including kayaks, dusty antiques, mountains of tools for von Bredow’s endless projects and stringed instruments galore.

But there was one gap in the brick fortifications: a stretch of short, simple fence abutting a patch of jungle. Paraguayan investigators theorize that, on the night of Oct. 21, 2021, a band of intruders severed it and entered the grounds, then smashed in the front door, raining glass on the floor.

The following day, von Bredow was found lifeless, sprawled beside his living room table. He’d been shot in the neck, and his body bore signs of torture. Fourteen-year-old Loreena was found dead in the bathtub. She’d been shot in the abdomen. Blood was everywhere—on the carpet, in the hall, in the kitchen. Belongings had been tossed about, maybe from a struggle, a search or both. Missing from the property, the local police announced later, were four specimens of the world’s most expensive musical instrument, the Stradivarius violin.

The roughly 600 remaining violins built in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari, revered for their exquisite craftsmanship and tone, can fetch as much as $20 million each. Prices have risen higher than ever in recent years, owing to an influx of buyers from Asia and a secondary market driven by large investment firms. Some have even built funds allowing investors to bet on a slice of a given violin’s future value.

These tend to be solid bets in part because many Strads now come with centuries of lore. The 1697 Molitor that sold for $3.6 million in 2010, for instance, was said to have been owned by Napoleon. (It’s named for one of his generals, Count Gabriel Jean Joseph Molitor.) Aficionados make the instruments sound downright sacred. “They’re incredible,” says Gabriel Ben-Dashan, executive director of the Stradivari Society in Chicago. “Owning a Strad changes one’s life.”

Von Bredow had told friends he possessed at least one Strad, and at the time of his death, his invite-only website, violinen.biz, featured one for sale, according to his sister, Anita. (She wouldn’t grant access to the site.) He’d also boasted that he owned two violins made by Giuseppe Guarneri, a Stradivari contemporary whose instruments are similarly valuable, selling regularly for six or seven figures.

Yet friends say von Bredow wasn’t a wealthy man, only an eccentric with a history of financial instability and a susceptibility to all manner of conspiracy theories. He was also a celebrity paleontologist and a polymath, described by many as a genius. “He knew everything,” says one friend, Sascha Wildi. “You could ask him anything, and he’d talk for hours.” In death, he left behind a string of murder suspects and few answers.

Like most facets of his life, von Bredow’s entry into paleontology was unconventional. In 1975, at the age of 16, while out with a friend searching for buried World War II weapons in a forest near his home, he discovered a complete mammoth skeleton. Eventually, without formal training, he excavated and cast it. Standing more than 12 feet high, it was then the biggest specimen of European Mammut yet discovered. Von Bredow named it Oskar—chosen, he later said, because a prestigious discovery should evoke an equally prestigious prize.

Showmanship came easily to von Bredow. A natural raconteur, he could mesmerize strangers with his verve, comic voices and seemingly endless collection of esoteric facts. “He was one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met,” says Martin Schleske, a luthier who became one of von Bredow’s friends. “He didn’t care about any conventions. They were just not important for him.”

While endearing to some, von Bredow’s bravado could be irritating, too. Ellen Norten, a journalist who interviewed him in 2002 for a Bavarian state TV program, remembers him as “conceited,” rudely rebuking her for going back to work too soon, he thought, after her husband’s recent death. “He could be very insulting,” Wildi says. “There were a lot of people he was in trouble with.”

After Oskar, in the 1980s, von Bredow discovered several other ancient creatures’ remains at the wooded site outside Siegsdorf. When the town, which had subsidized his castings, set out to build a museum to house his finds, he spurned them to start his own, sparking a minor tussle over who owned the fossils. (The town got Oskar.) “Bernard was not a diplomat,” recalls Dick Mol, a paleontologist and friend. “He could be a little arrogant.”

The Mammutheum wound up with an unkempt, oddball character that reflected its owner’s. It melded a nerdy love for the ancient world with a deep desire to freak out the squares. In the verdant grounds, overgrown with weeds, he placed towering statues of prehistoric monsters, including the enormous rhinoceros known as a Siberian unicorn. He taught seminars on bowhunting and fire making. In a thatched-roof hut, he cooked meals for guests over open flame, slicing slabs of meat with stone daggers and serving homemade moonshine. Sometimes he dressed as a cave man.

This eccentric program also helped make the museum a vehicle for wider self-promotion. Through the ’90s, von Bredow fashioned himself into an ice age expert, presenting on television, consulting on films and touring his wares in traveling exhibits across Europe. “He lived off his wits,” recalls Adrian Lister, a British paleontologist. “He could see this was a way of making his living.” With Russian scientists, he helped excavate another mammoth in Siberia.

Around the turn of the century, von Bredow’s attention shifted to another obscure yet distinguished niche: antique violins. Just as he’d taught himself the intricacies of handling fossils, he learned to build and restore stringed instruments, sourcing wood from a forest near his house. In that 2002 TV interview, he deemed his new obsession “the most difficult craft there is.” Often he showed up unannounced at Schleske’s studio outside Munich, offering to clean the place in exchange for training. “He really wanted to be good,” Schleske says.

In only a few years, von Bredow became skilled enough to earn a modest reputation as a dealer and restorer, bolstering it with his knack for publicity. In a 2008 TV documentary, he constructed one violin entirely with Stone Age tools. Another he made from mammoth ivory. Mostly, though, he purchased his instruments, scouring EBay for gems. By the 2010s he possessed some 200 violins and cellos, which he stored at his Siegsdorf home, hanging some from the ceiling.

Von Bredow lent some violins to professional musicians, selling others through word-of-mouth or on violinen.biz, which dates to 2004. He often bragged to friends of his collection’s exorbitant value—so high, he told them, that he couldn’t afford to insure it.

But von Bredow was growing frustrated with Germany. Life under Merkel had become too restrictive, too expensive, too racially diverse. He’d always harbored a certain paranoid sensibility. His friend Verena Schmidt recalls helping him check his cabinets and bookcases for listening devices.

Von Bredow’s grandfather, a logistics specialist for the Nazis, had fled Germany for New Zealand after the fall of the Third Reich. Von Bredow had spent a great deal of time there as a child and young adult. In his 20s he’d attended sermons by Barry Smith, an evangelist preacher who spent decades warning of imminent apocalypse and railing against the “new world order.” Haggis Lamb, a friend who often hosted von Bredow in Blenheim, a quiet town on the South Island, recalls him regularly sleeping with a bowie knife under his pillow.

In middle age, von Bredow was drawn in by grand conspiracy theories involving Bill Gates and George Soros, and his darkly conspiratorial turns began to unnerve even longtime friends. He became enamored with the Reichsbürger movement, which rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state in favor of the bygone Reich. “He got stranger and stranger every week,” says Schmidt, adding that she distanced herself from him a few years before he left for South America.

In 2015, von Bredow began making visits there. The lush, sparsely populated country of Paraguay has a peculiar history of German immigration, including among White supremacists. (Nietzsche’s sister once co-founded a “racially pure” colony of Aryans there.) When von Bredow permanently relocated two years later, he left most of his fossils in Siegsdorf. But he took his violins, shipping them in containers across the Atlantic.

Steinmetz had been a cello prodigy in Fürth, his Bavarian hometown. He has said he went on to play professionally for more than a decade, mostly in the Nuremberg Philharmonic Orchestra and the Nuremberg Opera House, until an ear condition and his doctor father led him out of music and into medicine. In the early 2000s he studied endocrinology at the prestigious University of Hamburg. His 2010 dissertation, which is available online, focused on female-to-male gender-confirmation surgery, which he underwent in the 1990s.

In Germany, however, there are almost no public records of Steinmetz. Neither the Nuremberg Philharmonic nor Opera House has a record of his employment. It’s unclear whether he received an M.D. A dozen acquaintances and colleagues either didn’t respond to requests for comment or declined to speak about him. (“Leave it—it’s not good for him,” said one, his former luthier in Berlin, before hanging up.)

Asked about his past, Steinmetz says, cryptically: “Many people had taken advantage of me” by the time he met von Bredow. “I came to Paraguay because I believed Bernard was my friend” is all he would say of his motivations.

Steinmetz eventually took over a small building on von Bredow’s compound in Areguá, a quiet town an hour’s drive from Paraguay’s capital, Asunción. Down the road, von Bredow and Loreena often swam in Ypacaraí Lake alongside marshy reeds and wading tero-tero birds. Steinmetz says he bought his parcel of land from von Bredow for $10,000. Separate from the small building, where he slept, he also received a yurt, where he kept some of his things.

Steinmetz found work with a philanthropic youth orchestra run by conductor Luis Szarán, who says Steinmetz is “a very good cellist.” The National Symphony Orchestra in Asunción confirms that he sat in with its players on occasion, too. But as lovely as his playing was, Steinmetz could also discomfit people. He could come off as cheery and exuberant one second, severe and brooding the next. Local violist Victor Aguilar describes these mood swings as “very weird.”

Soon after Steinmetz relocated to Paraguay, something drove him and von Bredow apart. There are conflicting accounts about what. According to four people who knew von Bredow, Steinmetz had received numerous loans from him, in Germany and Paraguay, which he never paid off. Steinmetz disputes this. “He never gave me a penny,” he says. Von Bredow’s friends also say, and Steinmetz doesn’t deny, that the disagreement centered on a cello and several violins.

The cello was made by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, a 19th century French luthier. Steinmetz says it was a gift from his late father worth somewhere between $200,000 and $500,000. He considered it his “life insurance.” In Areguá, he says, he needed cash, and von Bredow agreed to sell the cello for him. Months passed with no word on the sale, Steinmetz says, and when he inquired, von Bredow alleged the instrument was a fake and “wasn’t worth shit”—something Steinmetz vigorously disputed. He says von Bredow told him he’d brought the cello to Germany and refused to return it. From then on, “the relationship broke and broke,” Steinmetz says. He went to the Areguá police and accused von Bredow of theft, but nothing came of it.

Steinmetz remembers letting von Bredow continue to store a dozen violins and cellos in his non-yurt building while von Bredow was away in Germany. Then, one day in November 2018, with von Bredow in Europe, Steinmetz’s building burned down. The fire started mysteriously, in the middle of the day, while Steinmetz was out, he says. The whole structure was incinerated. Von Bredow would later tell his friend Volker Grannas that the instruments were worth more than $1 million and completely uninsured, according to Grannas. In Germany, von Bredow received photos from Steinmetz of charred headstocks as proof that the instruments had been lost in the blaze.

At first, von Bredow took the incident at face value, but some in his circle wondered about the timing. Anar Bramo, a professional violinist in Germany, says that when he raised doubts, von Bredow replied, “Yves is my friend.” But as time passed, Bramo says, von Bredow’s doubts seemed to grow. After returning to Areguá, he’d found some violin remains, according to Bramo, but only from his cheaper models.

Specialists have long debated why Stradivari’s violins are so exquisite. Perhaps he incorporated some long-lost building technique. Maybe he used a unique varnish or some bygone wood. In 2003 two American scientists speculated that reduced solar activity during his lifetime might’ve resulted in wood growth with “superior acoustical properties.” In 2021, Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist and Stradivarius obsessive in Texas, found that Strads’ bodies were put through “aggressive chemical treatment” involving zinc, copper, borax, lime water and alum.

Whatever explains the instruments’ quality, today’s market has rewarded their rarity and prestige. In 2005, Christie’s sold one, the 1699 Lady Tennant, for $2.3 million. The next year the 1707 Hammer went for $3.5 million. This record was broken in 2010 with the sale of the Molitor of Napoleonic fame. In 2011 the 1721 Lady Blunt sold for $15.9 million. In 2021 another sold for just less than that amount. Others are valued at more than $20 million.

The escalations in Strad sales prices have, of late, priced out even the most successful musicians. “Those who play them can no longer afford them,” says Dmitry Gindin, a rare-violin expert, consultant and investor in Europe. Many reside untouched in museums, but it’s also increasingly common for owners to loan their stringed assets to talented players, hoping to burnish a reputation as a patron of the arts. Typically a musician pays all maintenance and insurance costs, which can range from 0.5% to 2% of total value, sometimes as much as $15,000 a year or more.

Gindin attributes the boom in Strad values in part to interest from high-net-worth individuals in Japan, Taiwan and China, who he says have changed the market “considerably.” But rare instruments have attracted attention from large investment firms, too. Kathryn Graddy, an economist at Brandeis University, wrote in a 2011 paper that such assets deliver 3.5% in real returns—“less than stocks and similar to treasury bonds.” Over the past decade, more firms have come to see them as a safe way to diversify a portfolio.

One in Australia, the ACO Instrument Fund, focuses entirely on rare stringed instruments. The $7 million fund—which keeps one Stradivarius, two other rare violins and a cello—is run by the Australian Chamber Orchestra and loans its instruments to its musicians. Minority investors can buy in starting at $50,000.

Also common are informal arrangements wherein a handful of enthusiasts purchase shares in a single instrument. Most of the time these investors are already involved in the violin business, as dealers, certifiers or restorers, and so can contribute to the upkeep and eventual sale.

Expertise is important, because amateurs are prone to misidentification. A true aficionado can determine the authenticity of a Stradivarius, Guarneri or Amati with relative ease. But an amateur, especially an arrogant one, can be easily misled. Online, anyone can search and compare images, and errors are common. “People call many times a week who think they have a Strad,” says Ben-Dashan.

Von Bredow himself was often fooled, according to Bramo. He says he borrowed many von Bredow violins over the years that were supposed to be rare, high-end models, only to play them and be disappointed. Eventually, Bramo says, he started bringing them to specialists for a closer look. Of the 15 violins he brought in, none were found to be authentic. He believes that dozens more also weren’t what von Bredow said they were. “A lot of violins which he thought were very expensive, or a Stradivarius or Guarneri or something like that, were not original,” Bramo says. “They were only copies.” He says von Bredow laughed off the idea, convinced he knew better.

To resell a rare violin, you need authentication records that track the instrument’s chain of custody over the centuries. True antiques will often carry three or more such documents. Today these are issued by only a handful of trusted authorities, such as the craftsmen-dealers Charles Beare and Florian Leonhard in London and Eric Blot in Cremona. If a violin lacks these certificates, it’s practically impossible to sell for anywhere near market value. And even if someone who’d stolen an instrument also had its certificates, it would be risky if not outright foolish to put it on the open market.

There have been cases of musicians losing expensive violins. Less commonly there have been documented cases of fraud—of lesser violins passed off as ultrarare. But no expert reached could recall a targeted theft involving a home invasion. Two years ago, when thieves broke into Gindin’s home, they ignored his instruments. “It doesn’t make any sense to steal violins,” Leonhard says. “It is extremely unusual.”

Before her arrival, Anita had contacted two friends of von Bredow’s, Grannas and Stephen Messing. It was the mild-mannered Messing, a former IT guy running a pizzeria in Areguá, who called police to report the murder scene. The first thing he noticed was the shattered entryway. When he entered the house, his eyes darted to the bathroom, where Loreena was floating in a tub of crimson water. He gasped. “I hadn’t experienced it before,” he says, “this kind of concentrated shock.”

For the next several days, he remembers, he helped detectives from Asunción work their way through the crime scene, standing guard for three nights outside the house alongside an officer. “I was there as the representative of the victim,” he says. They asked him “50 times” to reopen the shipping containers on the property, he recalls, ostensibly to look for clues. He says he assumed they were stealing things. (Paraguayan authorities didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.)

After a few days, the police stopped guarding the house, and Anita asked Grannas to go and retrieve her brother’s violins, lest they be stolen by looters before her arrival. Grannas, a cattle farmer who’d known von Bredow in Germany, says he brought four of the violins back to his house, along with some other items. “I wanted to bring more but didn’t have room in my truck,” he says. He and Messing held a funeral. Police later had to exhume the bodies to perform autopsies.

To handle von Bredow’s estate, Anita hired Andrés Casati, a Paraguayan lawyer recommended by the Dutch Embassy. When Casati accompanied Anita to give a statement to the prosecutor, Sandra Ledesma, he told her they also needed to take a statement from Loreena’s mother, Judith Peters, who was still in Europe. Anita got her on the line, but when Peters learned the purpose of the call, she hung up.

Casati says Anita assured him that Peters was simply “very hurt” and didn’t trust the judicial system in Paraguay, but he found it disturbing that she didn’t come to Paraguay after her daughter’s murder. “I was a prosecutor for five years and a judge for 12 years, and I’d never seen anything like this,” he says. (Peters couldn’t be reached for comment for this story, nor could von Bredow’s surviving children.)

Also unnerving, Casati says, was Anita’s ostentatious security detail, which included members from the local chapter of a German biker gang. They followed her everywhere, heavily armed. After a week, he says, he dropped von Bredow’s sister as a client. “It was all very strange,” he says. “I have a professional reputation to protect.” Anita’s account contradicts this: She says she’s the one who dropped him. “Another lie,” she says.

Around this time, Grannas and Messing say, they were growing frustrated by the Paraguayan police’s, and the German Embassy’s, seeming unconcern about solving their friend’s murder. Grannas says he was particularly troubled because he wanted justice for the Bredows and felt that the chances were remote without foreign pressure. In November 2021 he emailed reporters at Bild, the German tabloid, urging them to investigate. The paper sent Philipp Lichterbeck, a freelancer in Brazil, to Areguá, where he spent several days with Grannas. They visited the von Bredow compound, stepping past police tape into the ransacked living room. Weeks after the murder, Lichterbeck says, “there were still bloodstains on the floor.”

A few days after Lichterbeck visited the crime scene, the police searched Grannas’ home and found weapons, including a cache of guns that Messing had tried to hide. They detained Grannas, Messing and Steinmetz without charges, sending all three to a jail outside Asunción called Emboscada. “We made the decision to search the houses of the people closest to the victims and found a lot of evidence,” Ledesma, who declined to comment for this story, told local reporters. In her theory of the case, the three had conspired to steal von Bredow’s violins together, torturing their friend to acquire the authentication certificates. She suggested the killers must have been known to the victims, because why else would they have killed Loreena, too?

But the evidence against Grannas and Messing was flimsy. The authorities made a fuss about having found the von Bredow violins Grannas had retrieved, even though he’d done so at Anita’s request. Grannas, a longtime hunter, has a large gun collection in his home, but none that the police found was a 9mm pistol, the model forensic experts had concluded was used in the killings. Neither Grannas nor Messing had a history of conflict with von Bredow, and both were, by all appearances, financially secure. As for Messing hiding the guns, he says he wanted to prevent police from stealing them. Grannas also had an extremely solid alibi: A team of workers corroborated that he’d been at his ranch several hours away on the night of the murders, and he had tollbooth receipts supporting that story. “I’m a roughneck, but I would never be able to do something like that,” Grannas told Bild. “If I had wanted a violin, Bernard would have given it to me.”

Nonetheless, Anita went to meet Páez in his office in Villa Morra, an upscale Asunción neighborhood, soon after she arrived in Paraguay in the wake of the murders. He struck an odd figure, a short, portly man with a silly fedora and skull-faced rings who kept saying he was a Freemason. “I handled him with reserve,” she says. “But I trusted him because my brother trusted him.” That changed, she recalls, when, while reviewing some documents Páez had provided to her, she noticed an odd-looking handwritten item that read “TESTAMENT” with squiggly German underneath.

“Oh, and what is this?” she asked, trying to sound casual while her heart was racing. Páez showed her: It was a will, dated March 2021, with von Bredow’s signature and stamped fingerprint.

This was odd. Von Bredow already had a will back in Germany. Why make a second one here? But things soon became frightfully clear. In the event of von Bredow’s death, the document read, all of his possessions should fall to his lawyer, Páez.

Anita is adamant that the will wasn’t written by von Bredow. “It’s not the handwriting of my brother,” she says. Another friend of his who’s seen the will agrees. “Bernard wrote in a high-class, old-style German that was quite complicated and beautiful,” he says. “This was not.”

She alerted authorities to the suspicious will. Police found piles of cash and several violins in Páez’s possession and arrested him. He was driving a rental car at the time, and its GPS tracker indicated it had been in Areguá, near the von Bredow compound, on the day of the murders. He, too, has not been formally charged with anything, and has denied the claims by Anita and others that he was involved in the murders or faked the will.

This past fall, I met Páez inside Tacumbú, Paraguay’s largest prison. He had a more mundane explanation for almost every incriminating-looking detail. He said the violins weren’t von Bredow’s, but gifts he’d bought in Buenos Aires for his musical wife. The money, he said, was his own. Yes, he’d been in Areguá on the day of the murders, but only, he said, because he owns property there. (Bloomberg Businessweek couldn’t verify this claim.) The only thing he couldn’t explain was the will. Why would von Bredow have left his possessions to his lawyer, instead of to the loving daughter in his care or to the other children back in Germany? “I was surprised,” Páez said with a shrug. He also claimed Anita’s story was wrong about a crucial detail—she’d given the will to him, he said, not the reverse.

Páez alleged that it was von Bredow’s sister who’d planned the murders, alongside Grannas, Messing and Steinmetz. “I am here in prison because I have information about corruption,” he said, stabbing an indignant finger into the air. “About Grannas the criminal, Messing the criminal, Yves the criminal, Anita the criminal.” (Anita, like the other three, denies this allegation.) As for the claims that he’s prone to violence and violent threats more broadly, including the suggestion of knee-breaking, Páez said again that these were examples of his accusers telling on themselves.

It’s possible Páez had the von Bredows killed in some harebrained inheritance scheme. Perhaps the burns found on von Bredow’s body were from being tortured into writing the phony document. Casati, who knew Páez in law school, says it’s more likely Páez simply faked the will after learning of his client’s untimely death. That would make him guilty of fraud—and astounding stupidity—but not homicide. “I think he was just trying to be clever and take advantage of the situation,” Casati says. “I don’t think he had anything to do with the murder.”

Steinmetz remains in the prison, pending a trial that has been repeatedly delayed. (He has yet to be formally charged with anything.) He has access to a cello, which he often plays for other prisoners, sometimes accompanied by a guitarist. He says he’s been framed—by Grannas, Messing, Páez, the Paraguayan judicial system, the Freemasons. He insists he’s not a liar. “If you start out with a lie,” he said during a jailhouse visit in October, “you have to bend every truth to fit it.”

The local police have never provided any evidence that four Strads were stolen, as they initially claimed, and declined repeated requests for comment. Ledesma’s office declined to release information on the violins seized from Páez. And there’s no evidence von Bredow ever owned a real Strad—just his own bragging and the purported sales listing on his website. After all, the total supply of the instruments is very well known and rigorously authenticated, and none of the authenticators are aware of any being anywhere near Paraguay. “The chances of something new coming up are infinitesimally rare,” Ben-Dashan says. Yet even the promise of a Strad could’ve been enough to set off heinous crimes.

Two weeks after the murders, a young Swiss friend of von Bredow’s, a multimillionaire, also flew to Paraguay to investigate. He’d made friends with von Bredow during his last decade in Germany and says he’d felt himself to be the same kind of seeker as the young von Bredow chasing his mammoths. The brutality of the killings, especially Loreena’s, had moved him to see if he could help get some answers. But the trip freaked him out—the other expats, the police, the biker gang. After two weeks, he abandoned his quest and returned home, willing to speak about it only on condition of anonymity. “With every character I was dealing with, there was always this element of something strange in their background,” he says. “I never knew who to trust.”