Serial incompetence: The insane hunt for The Phantom of Heilbronn
Real-life stories of serial killers are rarely as cool as the movies make them out to be. Not just because they, y’know, have killed real people and that’s rarely cool.
Most of the time, the story of an average serial killer goes thus. A man (and it is almost always a man) with absolutely nothing going on in his miserable, pathetic life decides that the life he earned through his sheer mediocrity isn’t enough for him. He sets out to take brutal revenge on the people who “kept him down”, which are almost always women, for some reason that anyone with a brain stem can figure out, given a few minutes.
He murders a few women and escapes justice because the people he’s killed are women, and most of the time, police departments really don’t think that killers of women aren’t that big of a deal. It also doesn’t help that the testimony that could lead to his capture almost always comes from women, which the police just don’t listen to. There’s basically always this kind of testimony, too. This is one of the big diversions from fictional serial killers, too; they’re almost never criminal masterminds.
No, most of the time they’re far below average intelligence; they just get away with their crimes due to negligence on the part of the police. Once some bright spark in the fuzz puts down their doughnut long enough to do some police work, the perp is normally found and jailed within a few days. Most of the time. After all, one of the most infamous cases in the history of German true crime was one that showed just how profoundly duped a police force could be.
Not in the way that a Hannibal Lecter would evade capture, either, something much, much more stupid than that.
Who was this serial killer?
From 1993 to 2009, Germany was seemingly terrorised by what the press called The Phantom of Heilbronn.
This was the faintly camp name given to the DNA of a young woman found at the crime scene of several police investigations. The crimes in question were numerous and varied in nature. Ranging from break-ins, burglaries and assaults to, most infamously, six murders. Including that of police officer Michèle Kiesewetter in 2007.
In each of those crime scenes, numbering 15 in total, the DNA of an otherwise anonymous woman in her 40s was found. There was never enough DNA found to narrow down the search further than that, but it was clearly the same DNA found every time. On a heroin syringe in the case of Juergen Bueller, on a kitchen drawer after the killing of Joseph Walzenbach, and even on a cookie left at the scene of a break-in taking place in October 2001. The same DNA, every time, but no way of identifying her. Surely, this was some Moriarty-style criminal mastermind, laughing at the hapless cops as she evaded justice yet again.
Well, the one thing we know for sure is that the cops sure as hell were hapless. They didn’t realise until 2009 that the DNA wasn’t being left at the scene by a master criminal; it was being left at the scene by the cotton swabs used by the police on investigation. A batch of swabs had been contaminated, leaving the DNA of one of the women who made them all over it, then they’d been daubed over German crime scenes. After a national (wo)manhunt spanning over two decades, investigators had to bashfully admit that they’d been duped by their own shoddy tools.
There really is something poetic about the closest thing that a genuine super-criminal the world had to offer us in the past 40 years is as real as their fictional counterparts. At the centre of it all is just police incompetence.
C’est la vie. Or perhaps that should be So ist das Leben.