Early one morning Julia Draeger’s body is found in North Park in Düsseldorf: apparently the 17-year-old schoolgirl was beaten to death. Naturally it comes as a huge shock to Julia's parents, and to her boyfriend Peer. He and his parents Christoph and Jule Katzmann, both teachers, had become a sort of second family for Julia, who came from a poor background. CID Chief Inspector Martin Stolberg launches the investigation, assisted by his two colleagues Sofia Lechner and Florian Glade. The investigators quickly establish that Julia was mugged by two youths in the park not long before her death - and they even manage to track down the adolescents involved, Timo Becker and Benno Sattler. But Stolberg refuses to charge the two youths with murder; he is certain that the case is more complex than this. So Stolberg and his colleagues set out to discover more about Julia's family background and school friends. But it soon appears that everybody they question is guarding a secret. They find out that Julia was extremely talented and ambitious, the star journalist on the school newspaper - and not somebody who would blindly obey orders from the staff of the school or even the director, Jule Katzmann. Apparently Julia was showing some interest in a particularly unpopular sports teacher, Ulf Hakens. Both Peer and Tara, who was a close friend of Julia's, are convinced that the murder is connected to an anonymous article Julia published in the school newspaper which made slanderous accusations against Hakens. Shortly afterwards Sofia Lechner comes across two masked figures about to launch a brutal attack on Hakens, and they are revealed as Tara and Peer, giving vent to their hatred for the teacher. But when Stolberg questions Tara he realises that she has a completely different motive: she was the one who wrote the article about Hakens that Julia published… and she did so to get revenge. She was infatuated with him, but he didn't return her advances. However, now Stolberg establishes that Julia was also investigating another story, which was just as scandalous. And this leads straight back to Peer’s father, Christoph Katzmann. It turns out that the Katzmann family, despite their impeccable facade, is prepared to go to any lengths in order to conceal the dark secret in their past...
