The Lost and the Found

http://www.doenetwork.org/cases-int/309ufdeu.html

The victim was located on June 2, 1997 in wooded area in Altena-Bergfeld, Germany. She was ****. She had been ****, strangled and later doused with fuel and set on fire. The perpetrator made all efforts to remove any possible means of identification. Post-mortem exams showed that it is almost 100 % certain that the crime was committed by a member of the victim´s family.

https://www.wr.de/wr-info/die-jagd-nach-dem-grausamen-moerder-geht-weiter-id5201322.html

The hunt for the cruel murderer continues

A brutal murder in a forest in the Sauerland 14 years ago leaves the investigators do not rest.

The act is hard to beat even for a murder of cruelty and brutality: The victim, a young woman in her thirties, is first abused by her father, finally strangled and burnt alive. Fourteen years have passed since the crime in which almost all traces have been destroyed. The second peculiarity: To date, it is unclear who the victim - and above all who or the perpetrators were. The private television station RTL 2 has aired the case in its series "Unexplained Murder".

"I do not know a second case of this kind - fortunately," says Ulrich Kayser, head of KK 11 at the Hagen police headquarters, in the face of cruelty. Around 15 references "from all over Germany" have been received since the broadcast on Monday evening; all are processed. Until yesterday afternoon there was no new investigation approach. The riddles about the death of the young woman and her murderer evidently remain. "There is no model version for the exact facts," Kayser classifies the state of affairs over a decade after the murder. What remains is hope - and few facts:

Monday, June 2, 1997, around 7:30 pm. A motorcyclist, motorized with his terrain machine in a wooded area above the Rahmedetals in Altena, near the city limits to Lüdenscheid, makes the grisly discovery: He finds a badly charred corpse and immediately alerted the police. Crime and forensics work until late at night; the fire department lights up the body of the corpse.

Forensic scientists find out later: The remains are the body of a young woman, age 14-22 years, with 1.55 meters in height rather petite. They make a special feature: The woman wore a jewelry that was unusual for the time, a rhinestone on the right incisor.

What follows are monstrosities: DNA evidence shows that the young woman must have been abused by her own father, that she was still alive when her body was lit - and that apparently no one is waiting for her. There are no missing persons to date.

Hope sprouts up when, months later, Scottish experts reconstruct the skull, giving the dead face again. The search for answers to the many questions that will soon be covered by TV shows remains without result.

What remains, however, are speculations. The dead woman and her murderer may have belonged to a passing family who accidentally headed for the remote forest on Bergfeld to kill the young woman there. On the other hand: "I have doubts that a foreigner would find this place," judges Ulrich Kayser. Only: The disappearance of the daughter could hardly have been kept secret by a family from the region.

The investigator Ulrich Kayser describes his work as "work on the edge of the possible". The seasoned criminalist hopes that "one day the mother of the victim will report to the police because she can not stand it anymore!"

Any police department receives instructions on the crime under the catchword Bergfeld Murder.