An Apple fanboy is regretting installing Apple’s health app on his phone.

Hussein K has been on trial in Germany for allegedly raping and murdering a student in Freiburg, and disposing of her body in a river.

Coppers had a few problems with the case. No one can agree on Hussein's real age, and there's a mysterious chunk of time missing from the geodata and surveillance video analysis of his whereabouts at the time of the crime.

The police decided that having a look at his iPhone would be a good idea. Hussein refused to turn over his password, and of course, Apple refused to help, so coppers hired a Munich company to knock it over.

It was not that difficult, and that gave police access to Apple's Health app, which was added to all iPhones with the release of iOS 8 in 2014. The app records how many steps he took and what kind of activity he was doing throughout that day, and there was a portion of activity identified as "climbing stairs," which authorities were able to correlate with the time he would have dragged his victim down the river embankment, and then climbed back up.

Freiburg police sent an investigator to the scene to replicate his movements, and sure enough, his Health app activity correlated with what was recorded on the defendant's phone.

Agatha Christie would have had a devil of a job writing modern crime fiction. These days if Miss Marple couldn’t knock over an iPhone her job would be tricky.