He gained notoriety with his attack on tennis star Monica Seles. Now it is known: Günter Parche is apparently already dead.
According to information from the “Bild” newspaper, the man who stabbed tennis star Monica Seles with a knife 30 years ago has been dead since last year. Günter Parche died in August 2022 at the age of 68 in a nursing home in Nordhausen, Thuringia , where he spent the last 14 years of his life, the newspaper reported on Friday.
On April 30, 1993, Parche stabbed the then world number one Seles with a knife on the Center Court at Rothenbaum in Hamburg. The knife went about an inch into her back.
Parche, an admirer of tennis star Steffi Graf, couldn’t bear the fact that Seles had ousted Graf from the top of the world rankings. He wanted to hurt the Serbian so much that she wouldn’t be able to play tennis for a long time.
Parche received a suspended sentence in court because experts attested him to have a mental disorder. Seles took a two-year break after the assassination, never played a tournament in Germany again and lost the world number one to Graf five weeks after the terrible event. After the attack, she only won one more Grand Slam tournament and struggled with the psychological consequences for years to come.
