Murder of Viola Drath

Viola Herms Drath was a German-American author, journalist, and longtime member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy who was active in German-American diplomatic circles for over thirty years. Born in Düsseldorf in 1920, she built a career in the United States as a writer, editor, and foreign policy adviser, including work related to the "2+4" process toward German unification. She lived in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., with her first husband, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Francis Drath, until his death in January 1986.

In the early 1980s, Viola met Albrecht Gero Muth, an unpaid intern from Germany who was 44 years her junior. Four years after her first husband's death, Drath, then 70, married the 26-year-old Muth. During the marriage, Muth adopted increasingly elaborate false identities, including insisting on being called "Count Albrecht" after fabricating a story about inheriting a title, and later claiming the rank of brigadier general in the Iraqi Army following the 2003 start of the Iraq War. He used this fabricated status to organize diplomatic-style events in Washington, D.C., and in April 2011 arranged a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery purportedly on behalf of the Iraqi government.

Early in the marriage Muth began a pattern of domestic violence against her, which led to repeated police visits to the couple's Q Street home in Georgetown. On August 11, 2011, Drath was found dead in the bathroom of that home at age 91.

Following her death, Muth was held at St. Elizabeths Hospital. He was initially found incompetent to stand trial after being diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder and a delusional disorder. A subsequent forensic evaluation by psychologist Mitchell Hugonnet concluded that Muth had narcissistic personality disorder but was not mentally ill, a finding that factored into his later prosecution.

In 2014, Muth was convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to 50 years in prison. In remarks made before sentencing, Judge Russell F. Canan described Muth as "a common serial domestic violence abuser, made worse when he drinks, who subjected Ms. Drath to many years of abuse."

The case later became the basis of the film "The Worst Marriage in Georgetown," later retitled "Georgetown," directed by and starring Christoph Waltz, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 27, 2019, and was released theatrically in the United States on May 14, 2021.