It’s a hot Sunday morning in the Hessian Odenwald. A mushroom picker from Bad König is walking through a wooded area north of the B45 federal highway. He is 68 years old, has known this forest since his childhood, and immediately senses that something is wrong.
There’s something lying among young beech trees, about 30 meters off the path. At first, he thinks it’s a dead dog. Then he sees hair, light, long blond hair. What the Darmstadt criminal police officers find an hour later is the body of a young woman. She’s lying face down, half-covered with leaves. Her clothes are torn. She’s wearing a denim jacket that still smells of cigarette smoke and disco air.
She had a ticket in her pocket. A ticket for the Neon nightclub in Erbach. The identity of the deceased was established within a few hours. The missing woman is Anna Lena Schleifer, 19 years old, a nursing student from Michelstadt. For days, her family had not known where she was.
For eight days, police and volunteers had combed the forest. She had finally been found. But finding the victim in the summer of 1989 was far from a solution. The forensic team worked for 22 hours at the crime scene. They secured fiber traces from her clothing. They took footprints from the soft ground beneath the beech trees and secured a biological trace—a semen stain—on Anna Lena’s underwear.
In the summer of 1989, that meant little. DNA analysis, as we know it today, was not yet established in Germany. The Federal Criminal Police Office had only had a working group for genetic fingerprinting for two years. The sample was nevertheless secured. In a glass vial, labeled with file number, date, and location, it was stored in a storage room in Darmstadt.
She will lie there for 35 years. My name is Max Kessler. Today I’m going to tell you the story of a case that shows the past never truly disappears. It merely waits. It waits until science catches up with it. And in the summer of 2024, science caught up with Annalena Schleifer after 35 years, through a genealogy website, through a woman from Bensheim who knew nothing about any of it.
A fifth cousin. That’s the story of Annalena Schleifer. By Wolfgang Reiter and a method currently being used in Germany to completely reopen old files: genealogical DNA analysis. It’s controversial, highly complex, and the only method that has ever led to a perpetrator in this case.
Stay with me, it’s worth it. Annalena Schleifer was born on March 6, 1970, in Michelstadt in the Odenwald region. Michelstadt is a small town in Hesse, with about 17,000 inhabitants at the time, known for its half-timbered houses, for the Jewish history of the Odenwald region, and for the quiet Sundays when the bells of the town church echo over the rooftops.
She grew up here with her sister Birgit, who was two years older, in a narrow terraced house on the outskirts of town. Her parents, Heinz and Margret Schleifer, were not a wealthy family. Heinz worked as a machine fitter in a factory in Erbach. Margret was a housewife and occasionally did sewing work for a small tailor shop.
The family lived frugally, but together. It was a household where everyone ate together on Sundays, where the mother insisted that her daughters do their homework at the dining table, where school was important because it was the only way to make something more of life than what the parents had. Annalena, as her sister Birgit later recounted in an interview with Hessian Broadcasting, was a friendly child. Attentive.
Somewhat shy. She rarely laughed loudly, but when she did, it was a genuine laugh. She loved animals. At home, there was an old mixed-breed dog named Bello who slept by her bed every night. At school, she was a solid student, not the best, not the worst. Math wasn’t her strong suit, but she liked biology, German, and social studies.
After secondary school, she decided to pursue vocational training. She wanted to become a nurse. “It wasn’t an impulsive decision,” Birgit said later. Annalena had completed an internship at the Erbach district hospital, spending two weeks in the oncology ward. She returned with red eyes and a clarity of mind that her sister had never seen in her before.
She had said, “Birgit, I want to do this. I want to help the people that nobody wants to see anymore.” In the fall of 1988, she began her training at the same hospital. She was one of 18 trainees in her first year. She still lived at home and took the bus every morning the 12 km from Michelstadt to Erbach.
She earned 430 marks a month. She gave 200 of them to her mother. She saved the rest. She was saving for a driver’s license. She wanted to be mobile. She wanted to be independent. In the summer of 1989, Annalena was 19 years old. She had almost finished her first year of apprenticeship. She had a best friend, Sabine, whom she had known since elementary school.
She had a boyfriend, or what a 19-year-old would call a boyfriend. A young man named Jörg, a bricklayer’s apprentice in Erbach, whom she’d been dating for three months, and whom her parents didn’t know much about yet. And she had plans. She wanted to take a train trip to Holland with Sabine in the fall, to Amsterdam for a week.
She had already bought the guidebook. I’m telling you all this because Annalena Schleifer isn’t a case number. She’s not a cold case. She was a person with plans, with a sister she loved, with a dog that slept by her bed every night, and with the firm intention of passing her written driving test in the spring of 1990.
She never experienced that spring. July 14, 1989, was a Friday. It was hot in the Odenwald, a typical summer evening in southern Hesse. Annalena came home from the hospital at 4 p.m. She had worked the early shift, from 5:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., then school, then home. She was tired. She ate a snack with her mother—a cheese sandwich, an apple, a glass of apple cider—then lay down for two hours. She got up again at 7 p.m.
She showered. She put on jeans, a white blouse, and a denim jacket. She applied light makeup. She rarely wore makeup, but tonight was a disco. And people wore makeup at discos. Umz rang the doorbell. Sabine drove an old red Opel Kadett, which her brother had lent her for the evening.
The two girls said goodbye to Annalena’s mother, promised not to be late, and set off. Margret Schleifer waved to her daughter from the kitchen window. It was 8:15 p.m. It was the last time she saw Lena alive. The Neon discotheque was located on the outskirts of Erbach in a former warehouse on Bahnhofstrasse. It had only opened two years earlier and was considered the most popular destination for young people from the entire Odenwald district.
The music was a mix of Neue Deutsche Welle, early house, and the Eurodance precursors that were topping the German charts that summer. Modern Talking was out. Sabrina Salerno was in. It was hot in the hall, the floor sticky, the air heavy with cigarette smoke. Annalena and Sabine arrived at 9 p.m.
They showed their tickets at the entrance, went straight to the bar, and ordered two Bakadi Colas. They danced and met acquaintances. Around 10:30 p.m., Jörg, Annalena’s boyfriend, arrived with two colleagues from his bricklaying apprenticeship. Annalena danced with him, and they kissed. Witnesses later recalled that the two seemed calm.
Happy, not drunk. At 12:20 a.m., one of the few exact times that could later be reconstructed because Sabine later gave a statement and remembered it precisely, Annalena said she wanted to go outside for a bit to get some fresh air. Sabine wanted to go with her. Annalena declined.
She said, “I’ll be back in five minutes.” She left her handbag in the cloakroom. She took nothing with her except her pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She went through the back exit into the parking lot. She never came back. At 12:45 a.m., Sabine became uneasy. She went outside. She didn’t see Annalena. She asked the doorman if he had seen her.
The doorman, a man named Hubert Mai, said, “Yes, he saw her outside smoking shortly after midnight. She was talking to someone in the shadows at the edge of the parking lot.” “To whom?” Sabine asked. Hubert Mai couldn’t say. He hadn’t looked. It was dark. It was a man. Taller, perhaps older. He knew nothing more.
Sabine, Jörg, and the others searched the parking lot. They asked the smokers who were still outside. No one had seen anything concrete. Annalena was gone. At 2:00 a.m., Sabine drove back to Michelstadt. She hoped Annalena had simply gone home with someone else, but Annalena wasn’t home. Margret Schleifer woke up, heard Sabine’s desperate explanation, and woke her husband. Heinz Schleifer called the police at 4:00 a.m.
The officers in Erbach accepted the missing person report, but they reacted cautiously. A 19-year-old girl not returning home after a night at the disco was not uncommon in 1989. Perhaps she was out with her boyfriend. Perhaps she had met someone. “She’ll contact us again later today,” they said. Only when there was still no sign of life on Sunday afternoon, when Jörg confirmed that he knew nothing either, did they take action.
Only when Sabine went to the police and described her observations from the previous evening did the police begin searching. The search lasted eight days. It encompassed the entire Odenwald region between Erbach and Michelstadt, involving dog teams, volunteers, and helicopters. It was one of the largest search operations the Odenwald district had ever seen.
On Sunday morning, July 23, retired forestry worker Werner Bachmann, while mushroom picking, stumbled upon what no one else wanted to find. The autopsy revealed the following: Anna Lena Schleifer was killed between midnight and 4 a.m. on July 15. The cause of death was clear: strangulation with a narrow, rigid object, likely a belt or a thin cord.
She had defensive wounds on her hands. She had fought. She had been sexually assaulted before her death. The semen stain on her underwear was well preserved because the body had been in a cool, shady place. She was probably not killed where she was found, but somewhere else, possibly in a vehicle, and then transported.
The investigators from the Darmstadt Criminal Police formed a special commission. It was called Soko Wald (Special Commission Forest). It consisted of 20 officers. Over the next 18 months, they would conduct 411 interviews. They would find nothing. The Soko Wald team worked meticulously. They checked every guest who had been in the Neon nightclub that evening.
More than 300 people, whose names were determined through tickets and witness statements. They checked the staff. They checked Hubert Mai, the doorman, whose testimony was considered crucial. They checked Jörg, her boyfriend, and his colleagues. Everyone had alibis that corroborated each other. They checked Sabine.
They even checked Heinz Schleifer, the father, because in most homicides the perpetrator comes from the immediate circle. One of them had an alibi. At the time of the crime, he was asleep in the next bed in the bedroom beside his wife, who confirmed this. There was no reason to suspect him.
Investigators examined all known sex offenders within a 100 km radius. They checked truck drivers who had traveled on the highway, leading to the hypothesis that the perpetrator might be a traveler passing through. They interviewed farmers, foresters, and gas station owners. They released composite sketches.
They offered a reward of 20,000 Deutsche Marks. Nothing. The fiber traces secured from the body could not be matched to any specific substance. The shoe prints at the scene were too indistinct for clear identification. The semen sample was analyzed using the then-standard procedure, which revealed the donor’s blood type.
Blood type A, positive Rh factor. This was the most common blood type in Germany. It excluded nothing and no one. The special commission Soko Wald was disbanded in the spring of 1991. At that time, the file comprised 21 binders, filled with interrogation transcripts, evidence files, composite sketches, and reports.
It was transferred to the archives of the Darmstadt public prosecutor’s office. The case was not closed. Murder does not have a statute of limitations in Germany. But the case was shelved. In the years that followed, what often happens in such cases occurred. The Schleifers tried to move on with their lives. Birgit, the sister, married in 1993, had two children, and for years did not speak publicly about her sister.
Heinz Schleifer died of a heart attack in 1999. The doctors said his heart had actually been healthy. Birgit later said, “Her father died of a broken heart.” Margret Schleifer still lives in Michelstadt today. She is 79 years old. The file has only been opened three times in the last 35 years. Once in 1997, when a sexual murder occurred in the neighboring Erbach Forest and investigators examined a possible connection.
There was no match. Once in 2006, when the DNA trace was re-sequenced using the now-modernized method and entered into the national DNA database. There was no match. And again in 2016, when a retired crime scene investigator reviewed the old files out of personal interest. He found nothing new. It seemed as if Anna Lena Schleifer would never see justice.
But in April 2023, something happened that had previously only been attempted in isolated cases in Germany. The Cold Case Hessen initiative was a pilot project launched by the Hessian Ministry of the Interior in January 2023. It was the first state-level team in Germany to deal exclusively with unsolved homicides.
Seven officers, two external forensic experts, a budget just enough to review and prioritize 470 meters of old case files. The team leader was Dr. Andrea Renner, a former BKA profiler, 56 years old, with 21 years of professional experience. She had worked in the USA in the early 2000s, observing the development of genealogical DNA analysis there.
She was familiar with the case of the Golden State Killer, who had been identified in California in 2018 using precisely this method. Joseph James DeAngelo, a former police officer, had been sought for 40 years and was found by a third cousin who had uploaded her DNA to the website GEDmatch to research her family tree.
Andrea Renner had set out to implement this method in Germany. This was a legal and ethical minefield. German data protection law is stricter than American law. The BKA’s DNA database contains only profiles of individuals who have already been convicted or are suspected of crimes.
It contains no civil genealogical data. A genealogical DNA analysis had to be conducted via a foreign website, and even then only if the user had explicitly consented to their data being used for law enforcement purposes. Renner and her team examined the Hessian cold cases for suitability.
Three criteria had to be met. First, a sufficiently preserved biological trace of the unknown perpetrator had to be available. Second, the case had to be serious enough, such as murder or a serious sexual offense, to justify the ethical risks of the method. Third, all conventional investigative methods had to have been exhausted. Anna Lena Schleifer fulfilled all three criteria.
In May 2023, the semen sample was reprocessed. The laboratory of the Hessian State Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden created a high-resolution SNP profile—not the classic DNA fingerprint from the national database, but a detailed genome profile, as used for parentage analysis. This profile was encrypted and uploaded to the GEDmatch Pro website via an American intermediary.
GEDmatch Pro, which is exclusively accessible to law enforcement agencies and only searches the data of users who have explicitly consented to be contacted for law enforcement purposes, found a match within 48 hours. The match originated in Germany, from Bensheim, a small town on the Hessian Bergstrasse, 46 km west of the location where the data was found.
A woman named Helga Wenzel, 61 years old, a retired bank employee, had uploaded her DNA to an American genealogy website 19 months earlier. She indicated a relationship of four to six degrees, presumably a fifth cousin. This meant that Helga Wenzel and the perpetrator shared a common ancestor somewhere between four and six generations back.
Andrea Renner and her team faced a task that resembled a historical puzzle. They had to reconstruct Helga Wenzel’s family tree in every direction, going back six generations and tracing all descendants from that line. They worked with two professional genealogists, searching church records in the Bergstrasse region of southern Hesse and in Rhineland-Palatinate.
They combined civil registry data, census data, and death certificates. After 11 weeks of work, they had reconstructed a family tree with 364 individuals. Of these, 79 were men who were adults between 20 and 60 years old in the summer of 1989. Of these, 46 lived within plausible geographical proximity to the Odenwald region at the time of the crime, defined as a daily commute by car.
46 men. One of them was Anna Lena Schleifer’s murderer. The team began with a triage. They excluded men who were demonstrably deceased at the time of the crime, abroad, or in custody. They narrowed it down to 22. They eliminated men who were physically excluded based on documented medical records or their whereabouts at the time of the crime.
They narrowed it down to 14. They excluded men whose profession, place of residence, and circumstances made their presence in the Odenwald that night extremely unlikely. Three men remained. The first was Friedrich Reiter, born in 1946, second cousin of Helga Wenzel, a teacher at a secondary school in Heppenheim in the summer of 1989.
He had an airtight alibi for the night of the murder. He was on a school trip to Bavaria, which was confirmed by class photos, witnesses, and daily reports. He was eliminated. The second suspect was Karl-Heinz Reiter, born in 1939, a third cousin of Helga Wenzel. He was a civil engineer in Mannheim in the summer of 1989. A more detailed DNA analysis revealed that he was from the wrong generation.
The degree of kinship to the suspect at the crime scene didn’t match his profile. He was eliminated. The third suspect was Wolfgang Reiter, born on February 17, 1950, a third cousin of Helga Wenzel. In the summer of 1989, he was 39 years old. He worked as a long-haul truck driver for a transport company in Heidelberg. His main route took him from Heidelberg via Mannheim, Darmstadt, along the B45 federal highway through the Odenwald forest to Würzburg and back.
Federal Highway 45 runs 200 meters from where Annalena Schleifer was found. On August 14, 2024, over a year after the first DNA match, police stopped Wolfgang Reiter at his terraced house in Heidelberg-Pfaffengrund. He was 74 years old at the time. He lived alone. His wife had died of cancer in 2020.
He had a 55-year-old son who lived in Hamburg and had no close contact with his father. He was an unremarkable man, no criminal record, no unusual behavior. A retired truck driver, member of a shooting club, and gardener. Grandfather of a seven-year-old grandson. The officers took a saliva sample from him.
Six hours later, the state criminal police office (LKA) laboratory had the result: a 100 percent match with the trace found at the crime scene in 1989. The interrogation began that afternoon. Wolfgang Reiter initially denied everything. He said that although he had often driven on the B45, and yes, it was possible that he had been there in July 1989, he had never had anything to do with a girl.
“He has never killed anyone. He has never raped anyone. He is a decent man.” Investigators confronted him with the DNA results. He said it must be a mistake, perhaps a mix-up in the lab. The officers explained that the probability of such an error was less than one in a billion. He remained silent. On the second day of questioning, investigators showed him a photograph of Annalena.
It was a school photo from the nursing course in 1988. She was wearing her nurse’s uniform. She smiled shyly at the camera. Wolfgang Reiter looked at the photo. He began to cry. On the third day, he began to speak. At first, only in fragments. He was on his way back from Würzburg on the night of July 14th to 15th, 1989.
It was late, maybe 2 a.m. He said he was tired. He had stopped at a small parking lot on the B45 to smoke. He saw her there. A young woman standing on the side of the road. She waved. She wanted to hitchhike. The investigators asked: “Did she wave? Or did you see it that way?” Wolfgang Reiter hesitated.
He said, “Maybe she didn’t wave, maybe she was just standing there.” On the fourth day, he made a full confession. He saw her coming out of the disco. He had stopped at the gas station across the street beforehand and had his fuel card stamped. This card did indeed exist. Investigators found it in the old files, stamped with the Aral gas station Erbach-East, dated July 15, 1989, 12:27 a.m.
At the time, she was considered unimportant. Truck drivers came and went. There were hundreds of such pieces of evidence. “He saw the girl coming out of the back exit of the disco,” said Wolfgang Reiter. “She was alone. She was smoking. She seemed nervous. Maybe she’d had an argument. He didn’t know. He spoke to her as she walked towards the street.”
“He asked if she needed a ride. She hesitated. Then she nodded. She said she needed to go to Michelstadt. That was 12 km away. He said he was driving in that direction. He could give her a lift. She got into his cab. It was a Mercedes truck. Dark blue, tarpaulin cover, Heidelberg freight forwarding company. They exchanged a few words.”
“He asked what she did for a living. She said she was a trainee nurse. She had a photo in her wallet. A dog. She showed it to him. ‘Bello,’ she said.” He nodded. “What happened next,” said Wolfgang Reiter, “he couldn’t explain. It was as if a switch had been flipped. He stopped in Michelstadt. He then drove on along a forest track next to the B45, north of Bad König.”
Annalena protested. She asked where he was going. He didn’t answer. He stopped the truck. He attacked her. He said he didn’t want to tell the rest. The investigators didn’t pressure him. The forensic evidence from 1989 was clear enough. She had resisted, she had fought, she had lost. After the attack, Wolfgang Reiter said, he dragged her body from the cab and carried it 30 meters into the woods.
He covered them with leaves. He went back to the truck. He wiped the marks in the cab with a rag. He continued driving to Heidelberg. He arrived home at six in the morning. His wife was asleep. He took a shower. He disposed of the clothes from the previous night in a trash can behind a supermarket.
He went to bed. He went back to work on Monday, and again on Tuesday. He never spoke to anyone about it again. He said he never committed another crime. This was later verified. There were no further unsolved sexual murders along his routes in the following 35 years. Wolfgang Reiter had killed someone once.
Once was enough to destroy his life forever. And Annalena’s, her family’s, and the lives of three other people whose lives were forever intertwined by this single act. At the end of the fourth day of questioning, he said he had hoped they would never find him. But he knew that one day it would come to this.
He just hadn’t thought it would happen so late. With the confession, the case seemed clear. A confession, a DNA match, a reconstructed night of the crime. The Darmstadt public prosecutor’s office filed charges of murder in conjunction with rape in November 2024. The trial before the Darmstadt Regional Court began in January 2025.
Then something happened that no one had expected. Wolfgang Reiter’s defense team consisted of two lawyers from Mannheim. The older one, Dr. Konrad Bühler, 68 years old, was a specialist in criminal proceedings with medical-psychiatric components. On the third day of the trial, he filed a motion.
His client, he said, unfortunately suffers from early-stage vascular dementia. The diagnosis was made in April 2024 by a neurologist in Heidelberg, four months before the arrest. The diagnosis is documented in the medical records. It was not a fabrication. Bühler argued: “Wolfgang Reiter was not fully competent to stand trial at the time of his testimony in August 2024.”
“His confession was given under the influence of cognitive impairment. He was able to recall details suggested to him by investigators: the gas station card, the transport company, the truck model. But the emotional veracity of his confession was medically questionable.” Furthermore, the defense requested a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether Wolfgang Reiter was criminally responsible at the time of the crime in 1989.
Bühler said there were signs of long-term mental health problems. Wolfgang Reiter had been treated for severe depression in the early 1980s. He had suffered from dissociative episodes. If these episodes were acute at the time of the crime, Section 21 of the Criminal Code would apply: diminished responsibility, which could lead to a more lenient sentence.
Possibly even Section 20: full criminal responsibility and innocence. The Schleifer family sat in the courtroom. Birgit Schleifer, the sister, was present every day of the trial. Margret Schleifer, the mother, came on three days. They sat there silently, listening. They heard a defense attorney try to pave the way for a man who, in tears, had confessed on the fourth day of questioning, to receive a lighter sentence.
The court ordered two expert reports. The first was prepared by Professor Dr. Hartmut Lessing, a forensic psychiatrist at the University Hospital Frankfurt. Lessing examined Wolfgang Reiter over four sessions, totaling 11 hours. He concluded that while incipient vascular dementia was present, it was still in a very early stage at the time of the confession.
The confession was detailed, coherent, and supported by independent evidence. It was legally valid. However, Lessing reached a more nuanced conclusion regarding the defendant’s capacity to be held criminally responsible at the time of the crime in 1989. Wolfgang Reiter had indeed suffered from depressive episodes in the 1980s.
However, no psychotic symptoms were documented. A dissociative disorder on the night of the crime could not be ruled out with sufficient certainty, but neither could it be proven. Lessing’s capacity for criminal responsibility was deemed diminished, but not entirely absent. This was the moment when the trial could have tipped.
The public prosecutor’s office requested a second expert opinion. It was prepared by Professor Dr. Andrea Kleinsommerfeld, a forensic psychiatrist at the Charité hospital in Berlin and one of the leading experts in historical assessments of criminal responsibility in Germany. Kleinsommerfeld worked on the report for six weeks.
She reviewed all of Wolfgang Reiter’s medical records, interviewed him three times, and spoke with his former employer, a school friend, and his now-adult son. Her findings were different. Wolfgang Reiter had suffered from depression in the 1980s. Yes, but the crime did not exhibit the pattern of a dissociative episode. It exhibited the pattern of a controlled, targeted, and planned act.
He had deliberately covered his tracks. He had used a rag. He had disposed of the clothes. He had returned to his usual job. He had led a normal life for 35 years. According to Klein-Sommerfeld in her expert opinion, this was not the behavior of someone with diminished responsibility. It was the behavior of someone who knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong.
The second expert opinion turned the case around. On the day of the verdict, October 17, 2024, the Darmstadt Regional Court delivered its sentence. Wolfgang Reiter was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in conjunction with rape. The court determined that the crime was particularly heinous.
This ruled out early release after ten years. Wolfgang Reiter sat in the dock as the verdict was read. He did not cry. He looked at the judge and nodded once. His lawyer announced an appeal. In March 2025, the Federal Court of Justice rejected the appeal. The verdict became legally binding. Wolfgang Reiter is currently incarcerated in the Schwalmstadt Correctional Facility.
75 years old. His dementia is progressing slowly. Whether he will live to see the next five years is medically uncertain. In a statement released after the verdict, the Schleifer family said they wished him neither death nor suffering. They only wished that the world now knew what he had done. That Annalena’s name was no longer just in a file, but in a legally binding judgment.
Birgit Schleifer gave an interview to Hessian Broadcasting in November 2024. It lasted 26 minutes. It ended with a sentence that has since been quoted in many German media outlets. She is sitting at the dining table in her mother’s house in Michelstadt. On the table lies a yellowed photograph of Annalena. The last school photo from 1988.
She looks into the camera and says: “For three years I didn’t know who it was. For 35 years the silence had no face. Now the silence has a name, and that name is Wolfgang Reiter, and I will never have to speak it again.” You have listened to this story to the end, and I thank you for that.
In closing, I’d like to add one more thing. Since its launch in January 2023, the Cold Case Hessen initiative has taken 47 cold cases into new files. Six of these cases have been solved: five through traditional retrial proceedings, and one, the case of Annalena Schleifer, through genealogical DNA analysis. It is the first legally binding case in Germany to be solved solely using this method.
The Hessian model has since been adopted by four other German states. Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Baden-Württemberg, and Lower Saxony have established or announced their own cold case units. There are an estimated 4,000 DNA traces from unsolved homicides in German asterisks that would be suitable for genealogical comparisons.
4,000 Annalenas, 4,000 Wolfgang Reiters. The method is controversial. It raises questions about data protection, uninvolved relatives, and the ethical boundaries of forensic science. These questions will have to be discussed in the coming years. There is no easy answer, but there is a simple truth.
In a small, unassuming town called Michelstadt lives a 79-year-old woman who for 35 years didn’t know who killed her daughter. Now she knows. She can now go to the grave and say, “I know.” This isn’t everything, but it will free many other families from their silence in the years to come. My name is Max Kessler.
If you’d like to support this channel, please subscribe. If this case resonated with you, let us know in the comments. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of a case from Bremen that shows not every genealogical investigation leads to the right man, and what happens when the method fails. Until then, stay vigilant.
