I’m going to tell you about Europe’s most notorious serial killer that you’ve never heard about.
What makes this story even more perplexing is that the serial killer was female – something almost unheard of as these are extremely rare.
It all started in 2007, with the murder of a 22-year-old policewoman named Michele Kiesewetter in Heilbronn, Germany.
Kiesewetter and a colleague were attacked – her colleague was shot in the head but survived. Kiesewetter was not so lucky.
As with most police killings, this attracted considerable attention across Germany – the Heilbronn police themselves racked up over 16,000 hours investigating.
As you’d expect from modern police, they took DNA on cotton swabs and sent it out to be analyzed.
This is when things took a startling turn: the results were linked to numerous cold cases – including a murder that had been dated back to 1993!
In total, cops linked this woman – an Eastern European woman, as the DNA suggested – to 6 other murders.
But that wasn’t all – this mysterious woman – this serial killer – this cop killer – was also attached to many robberies, including a car dealership and a school break-in.
The people who had been convicted of these robberies claimed that she never existed, despite all of the DNA evidence suggesting otherwise.
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Maybe this woman was some Professor Moriarty type – the foil of the great Sherlock Holmes – and was a criminal mastermind!
As with most bizarre cases and news agencies, she was given a catchy name: the Phantom of Heilbronn.
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As the investigations kept ramping up over the following months, the Professor Moriarty analogy became seemingly more likely, because her DNA was popping up outside of Germany!
Professor Moriarty
Her DNA was found at crime scenes in Austria and France – it seemed she associated with Slovaks, Albanians, Serbs, and Romanians – among others across Eastern Europe.
The Phantom had never been seen. She never showed up on any security camera footage, despite the fact that her DNA at the scenes suggested otherwise.
Anyone that did witness her described her as looking like a man.
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For years and years, German authorities hunted for this elusive thief and serial killer.
Until 2009, when they finally caught a break: when trying to establish the identity of a burned body and through DNA research, they discovered that it matched!
Had they finally caught the Phantom of Heilbronn?
Only.
The dead body was discovered in 2002 (7 years before).
And it was a man.
Odd, the police thought — understandably.
The DNA had come from an asylum seeker, who had to be fingerprinted years earlier as part of the asylum-seeking process.
They went back to redo the test, just using a different cotton swab and — nope, no DNA from the Phantom.
So, they went back to the source: the factory that produced the cotton swabs themselves; Greiner Bio-One International AG.
And that’s when they realized exactly what was happening.
There was a reason why the Phantom of Heilbronn was so elusive, why nobody had seen her, and why she never showed up on security cam footage:
She never existed.
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Here’s what actually happened:
There was one factory that produced all of the cotton swabs involved in all of these crimes – while they were sterile, they were never designed for human DNA collection.
It turned out that the factory employed mostly women – Eastern European women, to be exact – who all fit the DNA type assumed to fit the Phantom. It turned out that all the swabs had been contaminated before shipping.
After thousands of hours of work by the police was wasted and 40 criminal investigations brought back to square one, the German police were at least able to take some solace from the fact that there was, really, no female serial killer.
And that is some solace, right?
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And what of Michèle Kiesewetter, whose murder started all of this?
In 2011, a Neo-Nazi group named the National Socialist Underground committed a bank robbery.
When investigating, police discovered Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt; two of the three Neo-Nazis, dead in a burning caravan.
It is suspected that they ended their lives after their vehicles had been discovered.
In that caravan, the police also discovered the service pistol of the murdered policewoman.
Now with leads, police then investigated the flat the trio shared together, where they found and arrested the last surviving member: Beate Zschäpe.
Forensic experts also discovered further evidence to suggest that this trio was, in fact, responsible for the killing of Kiesewetter.
Alongside this, they were also responsible for a series of murders of nine immigrants of Turkish, Greek, and Kurdish descent between 9 September 2000 and 6 April 2006; a 1999 bombing in Nuremberg; the 2001 and 2004 Cologne bombings; and a series of 14 bank robberies.
Had the trio’s vehicles never been discovered and they had never committed suicide, then authorities would never have known of their existence.