It was a bloodstained, light green and white checked blouse from the police evidence room that provided new clues decades after the murder of two girls in Middle Franconia and the Allgäu. Twelve-year-old Marion Baier was wearing the blouse when she was murdered in 1973 - and DNA traces were now found on it that were also found in a similar case in Kempten. Since then, investigators in Fürth have been following up on many new leads: a yellow Porsche is currently an important lead.
Patrick Merten heads the working group at the criminal police in Fürth that has reopened the investigation into the murder of Marion Baier in the small town of Oberasbach. “Even back then, a lot of leads were followed,” says Merten. Numerous file folders, labeled “MURDER Marion BAIER”, bear witness to this. However, these did not lead to the perpetrator at the time. Only DNA testing brought a breakthrough - a forensic method that did not exist 50 years ago.
DNA trace expands perspective on the perpetrator
“It was like winning the lottery,” says police chief Michael Dietsch. It is not self-evident that such an old piece of evidence can still be found, is not contaminated with other traces and then results in a hit in the DNA database.
The investigators cannot yet assign the DNA to a specific suspect. This was also found on the body of 13-year-old Sonja Hurler, who was murdered by an unknown person in Kempten in 1981. “This broadens the perspective of the perpetrator immensely,” says Dietsch.
Even then, there had already been suspects whose police had questioned them and whose alibis had been checked. “The first hope was that the same name would be found twice in the files,” says Merten. The collaboration with colleagues in Kempten is very close. “We can access each other’s electronic case data and thus test hypotheses directly.”
In fact, there were people who had connections to both places, says Merten. These included people who grew up in the Allgäu and studied in Middle Franconia. But a suspect has not yet been identified in this way. The cold case includes around 830 investigative leads in Fürth alone, and Merten and his team have already processed almost 600.
Every clue could be the decisive one
The investigators in Fürth and Kempten therefore hope that new information from the public could put them on the trail of the perpetrator. “At the time of the two murders, people didn’t just drive to Franconia,” says a police spokesman in Kempten. In January, the criminal investigators addressed the people in the Kempten area and the region around Oberasbach in the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY… unsolved”. On the anniversary of the two girls' deaths, they also drew attention to the cases with posters at the crime scenes.
«We are really grateful for every tip. It could be the decisive one,” says Merten. According to him, one of the main clues at the time was a yellow Porsche that a witness said he saw parked on the side of a road with the engine running and high beam on the night of the murder. It led past the construction site where construction workers had discovered Marion Baier's body early in the morning.
The yellow Porsche
At the time, the witness stated that he had seen a man arguing with a girl inside the sports car with Nuremberg license plates, says Merten.
Merten reports that the investigators had already checked the alibis of all owners of a yellow Porsche in Nuremberg. “We want to make it watertight again with a DNA comparison.” However, he and his team rely on the information in the old investigation files.
“The problem is that the admissions offices back then worked with index cards and they no longer exist.” So if the witness was mistaken about the license plate back then and there was a different letter instead of an N for Nuremberg, there is now no chance of looking for Porsche owners from that time anywhere else.
Give the perpetrator a face
After all this time, it is questionable whether the investigators will even be able to find a living suspect. If the perpetrator was a teenager or young adult, he could still be alive today, says Merten. But even if he has since died, it is important for the relatives of the girls who were killed to find out his identity. “Giving the perpetrator a face - that is the goal of cold case investigations,” says police chief Dietsch.
According to Merten, the Marion Baier case is also about dispelling rumors surrounding the murder. At that time, the investigators picked up some people from their workplace to check their alibis, for example because, according to witness statements, they had a Christopher medallion.
One of these was found at the crime scene in Oberasbach and, according to investigators, belongs to the perpetrator. “The suspicion remained, even though DNA comparisons had already excluded people,” says Merten.
The new investigations should also send a message to the perpetrators in other previously unsolved murder cases from the past: “Nobody can sit back - even after 50 years,” emphasizes Merten.
