The Phantom of Heilbronn

I’m going to tell you the story of Europe’s most notorious serial killer- no, that’s underselling it: Europe’s most brutal serial killer that you’ve never heard about.

 

What makes this story even more interesting is that the serial killer was female - something nearly unheard of as these are extremely rare.

 

It all began in 2007, with the death of a 22-year-old policewoman, named Michele Kiesewetter in Heilbronn, Germany.

 

Kiesewetter and a colleague were assaulted- her colleague was shot in the head but survived. Kiesewetter was not so fortunate.

 

As with most authority killings, this attracted great attention across Germany - the Heilbronn police themselves racked up over 16,000 hours investigating.

 

As you’d believe from modern police, the cops took DNA on cotton swabs and sent it out to be examined.

 

This is when the murder case took a stunning turn: the results were linked with many cold cases - including a homicide that had been dated back in 1993!

 

In short, cops linked this woman - an Eastern European woman serial killer, as the DNA indicated - to 6 other murders.

 

But that wasn’t all - this magical woman - this serial killer - this policewoman killer - was also linked to many robberies, including a car dealership and a school break-in.

 

The people who had been convicted of these robberies declared that she never existed, despite all of the DNA indication suggesting otherwise.

 

Maybe this woman serial killer was some Professor Moriarty type - the foil of the great Sherlock Holmes - and was a criminal mastermind!

As with most shocking cases and news agencies, she was called: the Phantom of Heilbronn.

 

As the inquiries kept ramping up over the following months, the Professor Moriarty analogy became more likely, because her DNA was popping up outside of Germany!

 

Her DNA was discovered on crime scenes in Austria and France - it seemed she linked with Slovaks, Albanians, Serbs, and Romanians - among others across Eastern Europe.

 

The serial killer had never been seen. She never appeared on any security camera footage, even though her DNA at the scenes indicated otherwise.

 

Anyone that did witness her explained her as looking like a man.

 

For years and years and years German police searched for this sharp thief and serial killer.

 

Until 2009, when they eventually caught a break: when trying to find the identity of a burned corpse and through DNA research, they found that it matched!

 

Had they finally arrested the Phantom of Heilbronn?

 

Only...

 

The dead body was found in 2002 (7 years before).

 

And it was a male.

 

Strange, the police believed — understandably.

 

The DNA had taken from an asylum seeker, who had to be fingerprinted years earlier as part of the asylum-seeking procedure.

 

They went back to update the test, just using another cotton swab and — nope, no DNA from the Phantom.

 

So, they went back to the basis: the factory that produced the cotton swabs themselves; Greiner Bio-One International AG.

 

And that’s when they understood really what was happening.

 

There was a reason why the Phantom of Heilbronn was so sharp, why nobody had seen her, why she never appeared on security cam footage:

 

She never existed.

 

Here’s what happened:

 

There was one factory that produced all of the cotton swabs used in all of these crimes - while they were useless, they were never designed for human DNA collection.

 

It turned out that the factory hired mostly women - Eastern European women, to be the same - who all fit the DNA type considered to fit the Phantom. It turned out that all the swabs had been infected before shipping.

 

After thousands of hours of work by the police was wasted and 40 criminal inquiries brought back to square one, the German police were at least able to take some relief from the evidence that there was, truly, no female serial killer.

 

And that is some relief, right?

 

And what of Michèle Kiesewetter, whose killing started all of this?

 

In 2011, a Neo-Nazi group committed a bank robbery.

 

When investigating, police found Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt; two of the three Neo-Nazis, dead in a burning caravan.

 

It is believed that they finished their lives after their vehicles had been found.

 

In that caravan, the police also found the service pistol of the killed policewoman.

 

Now with keys, police then investigated the flat the trio shared, where they discovered and charged the last surviving member: Beate Zschäpe.

 

Forensic experts also found further proof to indicate that this trio was, in reality, responsible for the killing of Kiesewetter.

 

 

And there you go - the story of Germany’s, nay, Europe’s most popular and sharp serial killer & criminal mastermind — who never existed.

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