On September 15, 1981, a 10-year-old German girl Ursula Hermann rode home from her cousin’s house, but she has not been able to return home. This case became one of the most notorious criminal cases in Germany, and it is still controversial. "The Guardian" sorted out this incident on September 24, 2019.
Only a small red bicycle remained
September 15, 1981, that was the first day of the new semester of 10-year-old German girl Ursula Hermann. Ursula is the youngest of the four siblings. After practicing the piano with her brother Michael in the afternoon, she went back to school for gymnastics classes.
After class, Ursula went to the cousin's house in Shaundorf for dinner, then walked through a spruce forest and returned to Essingam Amersy where his home was. There are often hunters, joggers and mountain bikers in that spruce forest.
Originally this journey only took ten minutes, but Ursula had not returned home until 7:20 in the evening. Ursula's mother called her cousin's house, but the other party said Ursula had left 25 minutes ago. After half an hour passed, Ursula still did not return home.
▲Usula Herman disappeared on the first day of the new semester
Usula’s family immediately realized that something was wrong, they rushed Entering the forest, shouting the little girl's name loudly. The three words "Usula" came out one after another in the dark forest, but there was no answer.
Within an hour, neighbors, police, firefighters and sniffer dogs also joined the search and rescue operation. The beam of torches swept across the lake near the forest and through the dense bushes. The night was getting deeper, and it began to rain steadily. That night, Ursula’s little red bicycle was found and fell 20 meters away on the forest path, but Ursula was gone.
After dawn, the search has been strengthened. Dozens of military officers wearing raincoats and rubber boots searched the dense forest. Helicopters hovered over the forest. A police boat and divers were also searching in the lake. But there was no clue. The little girl with a height of 1.43 meters, short blond hair, wearing a gray wool cardigan and red-brown sandals seemed to have disappeared out of thin air.
Mysterious call
Thursday morning, it has been more than 36 hours since Ursula disappeared.
The ringing of the phone broke the sad silence in Ursula’s home. Ursula’s parents answered the phone urgently, but no one spoke. There was silence on the other end of the phone, followed by a short jingle, and then there was another silence, the bell rang again, and then the phone hung up.
In the next few hours, three more similar calls came-very confusing and chilling. A team from the local police station stationed in Ursula’s home and began to record these mysterious calls.
At noon on Friday, the postman sent an envelope to Ursula's father with the words "Urgent" on it. Inside is a ransom note, pasted together with words cut from the tabloid.
▲The kidnapper sent a letter
"We kidnapped your daughter. If you don’t want to be torn up, take 450,000 German marks (about 3.95 million yuan) The ransom is coming.” This letter was sent by the kidnappers before they started calling, because the letter said they would call Ursula’s family with a jingle. "You just need to tell me if you are willing to pay... If you call the police or do not pay the ransom, we will kill your daughter."
That afternoon, the phone rang again, Ursula's mother Answering the phone, a jingle rang, she agreed to pay the ransom. Ursula’s mother wanted to make sure that her daughter was still alive, so she asked, “What are Ursula’s two soft toys called?”
But the kidnappers did not answer. Ursula’s mother was not calm. She yelled into the phone: "Speak, you say something! Is Ursula still alive!"
The second letter
On the same night, the kidnapper sent a second letter. On September 21, Monday, Ursula's family received the letter. The letter
made some strange requests. The kidnappers asked Ursula’s family to use 100 old banknotes in a suitcase. Then Ursula's father was asked to be alone and deliver the suitcase to a designated place.
Ursula’s family is not rich. Her father is a teacher and her mother is a housewife, raising their four brothers and sisters. The neighbors raised some money for them, and the local government expressed willingness to pay the rest. After the Hermans prepared the money, they anxiously awaited more instructions. But they never received any more letters, and never received any more calls.
The police still have no clues. Two weeks later, the police decided to search the forest again. The police dispatched more than one hundred police officers and 10 sniffer dogs to divide the forest into pieces, search them one by one, and probe the ground with metal rods.
was not injured. It was buried alive.
arrived on the fourth day of the search, which was a gloomy Sunday. The police search area had covered most of the forest. This was also 19 days after Ursula disappeared.
▲ Schematic diagram of wooden box structure
At 9:30 that morning, a scream came out of the forest. In a clearing about 800 meters away from the trail by the lake, an officer encountered a hard object while exploring the soil. Another policeman rushed over, swept away the leaves, shoveled a layer of clay, and found a brown blanket.
After the police took off the blanket, they found a wooden board that seemed to be the lid of a box. This wooden board is 72 cm long and 60 cm wide, the size of a small coffee table, and is painted green. The police pried open the seven sliding bolts fixed on it and removed the planks. There was a shocking scene-Ursula was inside, her body was cold and lifeless.
When the police officer carried out the little Ursula, he couldn't help crying.
Two policemen hurried to Ursula’s house and told them the news. Ursula's mother was stunned, unable to speak a word. Ursula’s father repeatedly asked: "Is my daughter injured before she died?"
The answer is no. Ursula was not injured before she died. More precisely, she was buried alive. of. The autopsy revealed that Ursula died within 30 minutes to 5 hours after being buried. There was no sign of struggling or even moving in the wooden box. The doctors believed that Ursula was drugged, most likely nitrogen dioxide, and then put in the box.
What's in the wooden box?
The structure of this wooden box is very strange. It is 1.40 meters deep. It contains a shelf and a toilet. The toilet lid is down to a seat. There are three bottles of water, 12 cans of drinks, six large chocolate bars, four packets of biscuits and two packets of chewing gum. There is even a bookshelf with 21 books, including Donald Duck comics, western novels, romantic novels and thrillers.
▲Wooden box model
In addition to these things, there is also a desk lamp and a portable radio. The radio station where the channel of this radio is located is exactly what broadcasts Uzbekistan. Sura’s parents heard the ringing station on the phone.
In order to allow Ursula to breathe, this wooden box is also designed with a ventilation system made of plastic pipes that extends to the ground. But this design does not play a role in ventilation, the oxygen in the wooden box will soon be exhausted.
This wooden box weighs 60 kilograms, so the police speculated that there must be more than one kidnapper, and it may take at least two people to transport it to the woods. The perpetrators must know this forest well because they chose a remote location in the forest and avoided people's attention when digging holes and passing through dense bushes.
People in the nearby village are panic, parents are afraid to let their children leave their eyesLine half step. The bizarre modus operandi is that this case was widely spread, and even at the funeral of the poor little girl, many reporters came.
"He asked me to dig a hole in the forest"
In order to find the murderer, the police started offering rewards for clues. Soon a 31-year-old man named Werner Mazurek came into the sight of the police.
Mazurek lives with his wife and two children only a few hundred meters away from Ursula’s home. He is a car mechanic. He is burly, short-tempered, and has some foreign debts. He owes more than 140,000 marks to a bank, so he is motivated.
One week after Ursula’s body was found, the police interrogated him.
Initially, Mazurek could not recall where Ursula went on the night of his disappearance. After 24 hours, he said that he had been playing board games with his wife and two friends. The police raided his home and repair shop and found no clues related to the crime.
Later that month, the authentication team found fingerprints on a piece of tape while inspecting the wooden box. The police rekindled hope, but the fingerprint did not match with Mazurek, nor did it match the fingerprints of thousands of locals.
But the police still suspect that Mazurek is involved in this matter. At the end of January 1982, he and his two friends were interrogated by the police again and were released a few days later.
One month later, Klaus Fifinger, another friend of Mazurek, was interrogated. He was a mechanic who lost his job due to alcoholism. Feifinger’s landlord said that a few weeks before the incident, he saw Feifinger tie a shovel to a mop.
Feifinger initially stated that he was innocent. But on the second day of the interrogation, when the interrogators were resting, he had a private conversation with the chief of police. He said something surprising: "What if I know?"
When the interrogators came back, Feifen Ge told them that in early September 1981, Mazurek asked him to dig a hole in the forest and promised to pay 1,000 marks (about 4390 yuan) and a color TV. Fifinger said he had dug the hole and later saw a box buried in it.
solve the case? Do not!
After listening to Fifinger's confession, the police are convinced that they have solved the case. But when the police took Fiffinger to the forest and asked him to identify the place to dig the hole, Fiffinger could not find it at all, or even know the direction.
After returning to the police station, Feifinger said: "I want to withdraw this testimony. What I said is not true." In the subsequent 10-month interrogation, Feifinger refused to repeat the confession. In the end, he Was acquitted.
By the summer of 1982, the person in charge of this case was replaced, and the police launched a larger search. Requested assistance in investigations throughout Germany and obtained clues from people through television programs, but the investigation was fruitless.
By the end of the 1980s, the investigation had ceased to continue. But across Germany, most people still remember the pending case of the 10-year-old girl being buried alive.
The case was re-examined and a matching gene was found. Is it him?
In a blink of an eye, in 2006, the local criminal investigation office began to investigate the backlog of cases. The kidnapping of Ursula Hermann, which had caused a national sensation, was brought back to the table. The police pin their hopes on DNA analysis technology that has developed rapidly over the past 20 years.
After re-examining the original evidence, the police extracted genetic samples from the screws in the wooden box. This gene sample matches the gene sample of a suspect who brutally killed a rich woman on the top floor of Munich in May 2006. The police are very excited, and the unsolved mystery is about to be solved.
But the excitement brought about by this breakthrough is short-lived. The suspect in the Munich murder was the nephew of the victim, and Ursula was a few years old when he was kidnapped.
After another investigation, the judges ruled that there is no connection between the two criminal cases. As for why the two genetic samples matched, it is still a mystery.
Time has passed
For the prosecutor in the Ursula case, time is running out. The girl’s death was not regarded as murder, but as a kidnapping with fatal consequences. This crime has a 30-year statute of limitations. In another five years, this case will have passed the litigation period.
In 2007, prosecutors reviewed the previous case files and locked Werner Mazurek again. Fifinger was dead, and it was no longer known whether his words were true or false. But Mazurek was still alive, and the police began to monitor him and arranged for an undercover police officer to come to him as an undercover agent.
The police installed recording equipment in his car and house and tapped his phone. In October of the same year, his home was searched, and the police also extracted Mazurek's genetic samples, but they did not match the extracted genetic map on the wooden box.
▲An old tape recorder was found in Mazurek’s house
But the prosecutors still had one hope-during the search, they found it from Mazurek’s house An old tape recorder. In the days after Ursula’s disappearance, the kidnappers called her parents and there was a jingle on the phone. Perhaps this tape recorder was the device used to play clanging sounds back then.
A sound expert obtained the original recording of the call in 1981. He spent several months testing the recorder and concluded that this recorder was indeed the one used by the kidnappers to play the jingle.
Trial
On May 28, 2008, nearly 27 years after Ursula's death, Mazurek was arrested. According to regulations, relatives of the deceased can participate in the trial as co-plaintiffs, which gives them the right to view evidence.
But Ursula’s parents were unwilling to go to court, tore open the wound nearly 30 years ago, and face those terrible details. This task fell on Ursula's brother Michael. At the time of the incident, Michael was 18 years old. He only played the piano with his sister in the afternoon, and her sister disappeared in the evening.
▲Usula’s brother Michael
In his 40s, Michael wanted to find out the truth of the matter, and he had a deep sense of justice that drove him.
In February 2009, the trial was held in a court in Augsburg. Mazurek used a 20-page statement to insist that he was innocent.
The prosecutor provided circumstantial evidence against Mazurek-he is motivated, he needs money, and as a repairman, he can secretly build boxes. When Ursula disappeared, someone saw him listening to the police broadcast. In 2007, after the police monitored the phone call between him and an old friend, they discussed the statute of limitations in Ursula Herman's case.
In addition, the prosecutor firmly believes that Fifinger’s words are true. The old police files show that Fifinger’s confession is accurate in several aspects: the size of the forest clearing, the size of the hole, and the soil. Conditions, and location of the hole. The police believed that his later failure to identify the location of the digging hole was to confuse the police and acquit him.
also has a tape recorder. In 2007, Mazurek said when interviewed by the police that he and his wife bought it at a flea market a few weeks ago. But he could not prove who sold it to him, and no one in the market can recall the scene of the sale that day. Sound experts say that the tape recorder found at Mazurek’s house is “probably” the kidnapper’s tape recorder.
Combining the above evidence, in March 2010, Mazurek was sentenced to life imprisonment. Everyone was very happy that the truth of the case was finally revealed and the murderer was arrested.
The person who disagrees is actually him
In the court, everyone is happy that the murderer of Ursula has finally been arrested. Except for him-Ursula's brother Michael Herman.
For so many years, as the elder brother, the death of the younger sister is a knot in his heart. He didn't think about finding the murderer himself, it was the job of the police. But in this trial, as the co-plaintiff, he decided to be seriousTreat this role. Before the trial started, Michael reviewed the tens of thousands of pages of the case file. Every night, he locked himself in the study and looked at these cases with furrowed brows.
Michael felt that there are many signs that Mazurek may have committed a crime, but there are still some doubts that bother him. He didn't understand why Fifinger's withdrawn confession was now considered true. Feifinger has a serious alcohol problem. His ex-wife called him a "lazy man" and would never agree to dig a big hole.
Even more strange is that Fifinger's confession was not even signed; it was allegedly recorded by investigators from memory a few weeks later. In addition to these, the genetic samples extracted on the wooden box did not match Fifinger and Mazurek.
There is also a tape recorder. Michael himself is a music teacher and has some understanding of acoustics and sound engineering. He didn't understand how the tape recorder was associated with the ransom money many years ago. Did the kidnapper take the tape recorder to the phone booth? Is there no sound environment around the phone booth?
Michael’s lawyer advised him not to make the matter a big deal, but he still wrote a letter to the court stating that the sound expert’s report on the tape recorder was one-sided. When the verdict on Mazurek was announced, Michael issued a statement in court: "I do not believe that he is guilty, but I also do not believe that he is innocent."
"I want to pursue the truth"
At the end of 2010, six months after the interrogation, Michael had a strange hiss in his left ear, which tortured him day and night. He thinks this may be related to the pressure brought by the trial.
He is still obsessed with this case, constantly flipping through the files, even making his wife separate from him in 2012.
▲Suspect Mazurek
But Michael thinks he cannot give up. He felt that he should pursue the truth for his parents, for himself, and even for the German public. "It's not right for this case to end like this." Michael insisted.
So he came up with a plan-in 2013, Michael filed a civil claim against Mazurek, asking Mazurek to pay 20,000 Euros for his severe tinnitus after the trial. He believes that Mazurek will claim that he was wrongly convicted and will not be compensated, so the court must reconsider the facts of his sister's case. Michael believes that this will be an opportunity to "close to the truth."
Until 2016, Michael's civil claim was not accepted. This time, the media rushed to report. Everyone is very puzzled, why did he refuse to stop, is he obsessed by the case? Except for Hermann's relatives and friends, few people know why he did this.
As the civil trial proceeded, some people who were suspicious of the original verdict appeared. Mazurek's defense attorney is a retired physicist and amateur sound expert named Bernard Haider. He clearly remembered the crime report in 1981 and paid attention to the 2009 trial.
Like Michael, he is highly suspicious of the evidence of the tape recorder. Later, he borrowed a similar machine, obtained the recording of the ransom call, and tried to see if it was possible to confirm the voice expert's findings. After a year of testing, he concluded that it was not and offered help to Mazurek's lawyer.
At the end of the civil case, Michael gained another ally. Zipser, a German scholar in London, learned about the case online. Her major is language analysis, and she uses modern analysis techniques to conclude that the person who wrote the ransom note must be well-educated. "I am definitely not Mazurek," Zipser said.
By August 2018, the civil case was over. The court ordered Mazurek to pay Michael 7,000 euros for tinnitus. Although the case was won, this victory was a loss for Michael, because the judges still Mazurek was indeed the one who kidnapped Ursula.
This case is over, this case is never over
In the years after the criminal trial, Michael believes that Mazurek still has a 50% chance of being the kidnapper. Now he believes that this possibility is only 1%.
In a prison in northern Germany, Mazurek is still trying to clear his charge. He hired a private investigator to track down the man who sold him the tape recorder in 2007.
Michael knows the case materials well-he spends much more time on research than any lawyer who defends or prosecutes.
At the end of last year, in order to retrial the case, Michael submitted a file of all new evidence and theories to the Augsburg State Prosecutor's Office.
In April 2019, the public prosecutor’s spokesperson Matthias Nicolai stated that he admitted that many people still have questions about the verdict of the criminal trial, but insisted that the judge made the correct verdict in 2010 and that this It is "final and absolute". In August this year, the prosecutor's office announced that it would not retry the case.
Is Mazurek a murderer? Or is there someone else? No way to know.
This case has ended, this case has never ended.
(Geng Cong)
*The text and pictures in this article are from the Guardian’s report on September 24, 2019
