The pleasant spa town of Bad Kreuznach, astride the River Nahe in the rolling farmland of southwestern Germany finds itself at the center of one of the most bizarre, high-profile murder mysteries in the country's history - the search for a serial killer whom police and prosecutors call, simply, 'The Woman Without a Face'. They have no fingerprints to go on; no witnesses; no description-- just a trail of DNA, now stretching back 15 years and across three countries. A case that had for years been disturbing, yet still fairly obscure, has leapt onto the front pages of German newspapers. For it appears now that the mystery woman may not only be a killer, but a cop-killer.
Last year, 22-year-old policewoman Michèle Kiesewetter was taking a lunch break with a colleague in their patrol car in Heilbronn, nearly 100 miles from Bad Kreuznach. Two people climbed into the back seat and shot the officers from behind, killing the woman and seriously injuring her 25-year-old partner. The assailants struck so quickly their victims had not even drawn their weapons.
The case shocked the country. It also sparked one of the largest criminal investigations in German history-- with results that at first puzzled, then stunned, the investigators. The only clue was microscopic traces of DNA, found on the center console and the rear passenger seat of the patrol car. And when the samples were compared with Germany's central crime database, there was an extraordinary match-- from two quite different murder scenes stretching back a decade and a half. The 'Woman Without a Face' had, it seemed, struck again.
If nothing else, the frenzy of media coverage that followed did at least give the mystery woman a name. 'The Phantom of Heilbronn', the headline writers soon dubbed her, as newspapers, magazines and documentary-makers chronicled the police efforts to hunt down their elusive suspect. And the more the police probed, the more matches they turned up, not only with a string of further crimes across southern Germany but, as the DNA call went out across Europe, with nearly a dozen break-ins and vehicle thefts across the border in Austria and France.
But the story didn't stop there. The DNA signature of "The Phantom" has continued to turn up at new crime sites since Heilbronn-- most bizarrely, perhaps, a few months ago when the corpses of three Georgian car dealers were trawled from a river near Heppenheim, south of Frankfurt. Two men were jailed for the killing, an Iraqi and a Somali. In the Iraqi suspect's battered old Ford, forensic officers found traces of the same DNA found in the police car in Heilbronn. But how did it get there? Who is the woman whose genetic calling card has been found at more than 20 scenes of theft, assault and murder hundreds of miles and more than a dozen years apart? If their Iraqi suspect can help, police say, he's not telling.
More than 100 police and prosecutors on five investigating teams across Germany, Austria and France are now involved in an increasingly frantic effort to answer those questions. Check out this article on the U.K.'s Guardian website for more fascinating details.
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