Murder case Martina Posch

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Martina Posch 1986

The Martina Posch murder case is an unsolved violent crime that occurred in Upper Austria on November 12, 1986 . The case is one of the best known and most sensational in Austrian criminal history.

Course of events

17-year-old Martina Posch lived in her mother's house in Vöcklabruck and had been doing an apprenticeship as an office clerk at a construction company in Attnang-Puchheim, just five kilometers away, for a year . To get there, she usually used the bus, which left at 6:45 a.m. from a nearby parallel street.

On Wednesday, November 12, 1986 at around 6:40 am, Martina Posch left the house as usual to get to the bus stop. When she did not show up for an agreed meeting with her boyfriend at around 5 p.m., the latter called Martina's mother, who believed that her daughter was already with her boyfriend. When she spoke to her daughter's supervisor, she found out that Martina had not come to work that day. The alarmed gendarmerie was able to determine from testimony that Martina Posch was not on the bus that morning either. Intensive searches by friends, relatives and the gendarmerie were unsuccessful.

On November 22, 1986, two scuba divers found Martina Posch's body wrapped in two olive-green tarpaulins on the shallow bank of the Kienbergwand on the south bank of the Mondsee . The forensic examination revealed that she had been killed by strangulation no later than two hours after leaving her parents' home . In addition, the state of the body revealed that she must have been in a cool environment for a few days between killing and casting at the lake.

Investigations

The fact that Martina Posch had been brought to work by a man and driven back home at irregular intervals by a man since September 1985 resulted from her ticket statements at her place of work and from testimony from friends. However, the identity of this man has never been established. Despite more than 2,000 interrogations and questioning, the checking of more than 500 alibis and the broadcast of the reconstructed murder case in the program Aktenzeichen XY ... unsolved , no further evidence of a perpetrator could be obtained. The scene of the crime as well as the temporary storage location of the corpse, which based on secured evidence, was probably a barn, also remained unknown.

The officials based their greatest hope on the incorrectly manufactured tarpaulin with which Martina Posch had been wrapped. These were exclusively produced in Lenzing and those that had been rejected due to a fabric defect were given to internal people at a reduced price. The officials unsuccessfully checked all employees at the plant and issued sample plans in shops and banks in the area.

Over the following years and decades, a sweater that had been seized from the corpse and the two pieces of tarpaulin in which Martina Posch had been wrapped disappeared. Investigations into the whereabouts of these items were unsuccessful. The regional court in Wels also complained that, even after repeated requests, it had never received the complete files, records and evidence on the murder case. At that time, no traces of DNA were secured, as is standard procedure in current murder cases. The attempt to subsequently secure the DNA on the evidence that was still present was unsuccessful for a long time. This turned out to be a particular setback, since after more than 25 years and without a DNA comparison it was almost no longer possible to convict a denying suspect. On February 9, 2013, the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten and also the Salzburger Nachrichten reported that the security authorities had succeeded in isolating traces of DNA from the murder victim's fingernails, which the investigators were certain to come from the perpetrator. Ten suspects have already been classified as no longer suspect.

Manfred Schmidbauer , the former chief investigator and last regional gendarmerie commander of Upper Austria, continues to deal with the offense ("This case has not left me alone to this day" ... "Martina Posch's murderer should not be able to sleep peacefully" ). Of 179 homicides in which he investigated, the Martina Posch murder case is the only one that has remained unsolved. He also supported the journalist Norbert Blaichinger with his 2011 book “Mysterious Criminal Cases in Austria”, the largest chapter of which is devoted to the Martina Posch murder.

The killing of Martina Posch is the longest unresolved murder case in Upper Austria. Officials are still working on this and other unsolved cases in the state. According to Christian Peter, head of the murder group in the Upper Austrian State Criminal Police Office, such a long-ago case could be solved, for example, by new investigative methods and scientific findings, as well as operative case analyzes, whereby the difficulties lay in the testimony of witnesses and alibi checks.

Main suspects

One of the suspects was Konrad K. from Leonding in Upper Austria , who was convicted in 1991 of raping four girls. It was found that he was in Laakirchen , only 12 km away, around 20 minutes after the murder . The investigators questioned him several times about the case, but K. vehemently denies the act.

Another suspect was Wolfgang Ott , who murdered two women on the banks of waters in Styria and was arrested in 1995 near the Attersee in Upper Austria. Ott also denied the crime. Friederike Blümelhuber, a leading forensic technician in Austria, does not believe in his perpetrators either.

The murder case gained international attention after the arrest of the sex offender Josef Fritzl in 2008, who had kept his daughter in a basement apartment for around 24 years and had seven children with her. At the time of the crime, Fritzl and his wife ran the “Zum Seestern” guesthouse opposite the corpse discovery site. Martina Posch is also said to have looked very similar to his daughter.

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