Missing children in Pirmasens
As missing children in Pirmasens , a suspected series of murders that has not yet been clarified went down in German criminal history.
Events
In 1960, 1964 and 1967, two boys and a girl between the ages of eight and ten disappeared without a trace, each on a Friday and near the lively Pirmasenser Messeplatz. They were never found. The investigation came to nothing.
Investigations from 1973
In 1973, a renewed review of the facts in connection with an operational case analysis brought new knowledge. After a check-out procedure , thousands of men in Pirmasens and the surrounding area were checked for suspicious facts. A then 42-year-old casual worker came under urgent suspicion. He knew the two missing boys well. The man had also come under suspicion because he had repeatedly sought the vicinity of children, often stayed near the places where the children had presumably disappeared and led an "unsteady life". The jeweler's son had studied philosophy and psychology at times . In 1954 he had been treated for a schizophrenic illness. He then lived as a “forest man” in the woods around Pirmasens. During the 600-hour interrogation, he became increasingly entangled in contradictions, so that his guilt was considered certain by the investigators. Instead of an arrest warrant, the Zweibrücken regional court ordered his admission to a mental institution in October 1974. The man consistently denied the crimes and was released by the Zweibrücken regional court at a hearing in March 1976. The admission to the sanatorium was against the presumption of innocence and not under the rule of law, as there was no evidence against the man who was considered harmless.
Entry in the pocketbook for criminologists
The Pirmasens police chief Ernst Fischer, who had led the investigation from 1973, described the cases in 1978 in a paperback for criminalists . The check-out procedure involved searching through public databases of personal data and was a forerunner of the grid search .
literature
- Ernst Fischer: Missing children in Pirmasens . In: Waldemar Burghard; Hans Werner Hamacher (Ed.): Taschenbuch für Kriminalisten Vol. 28, Hilden 1978, pp. 145–182.
- X template . In: Der Spiegel . No. 46 , 1974, pp. 66-70 ( Online - Nov. 11, 1974 ).
- Little myth . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 1976, p. 62-66 ( Online - Apr. 12, 1976 ).
- No bodies and no confession . In: Die Zeit , No. 11 of March 5, 1976, online .
- Net with holes . In: Die Zeit , No. 16 of April 9, 1976, online .
- Ten year old missing for six days . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , No. 213 of September 13, 1967, page 24, ( page no longer available , search in web archives: online ).