In May 1993, a 62-year-old woman named Lieselotte Schlenger was found dead in her home in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. She had been strangled to death with a piece of wire taken from a bouquet of flowers discovered near her body.
There were no signs of forced entry or any witnesses to testify, so the police had very little information to work with. The only lead they had was DNA taken from a teacup sitting on the table.
The DNA belonged to an unknown woman. There was no match, and the case went cold. The sample sat in an evidence locker for eight years.
Then, on March 21, 2001, a 61-year-old man was strangled to death in his kitchen with garden twine. He was Josef Walzenbach, an antiques dealer who lived in Freiburg, which is about two and a half hours south of Idar-Oberstein.
The same DNA was found on a kitchen drawer in his home. This time, when police ran the DNA, a match came up.
They believed that they were on the trail of a female serial killer. Soon, her DNA began to appear everywhere. Months later, her DNA showed up on a discarded heroin syringe that a seven-year-old child accidentally stepped on in a playground in Gerolstein.
A few weeks later, it was on a half-eaten cookie that was ditched at a burglary in Budenheim. It was also detected on a toy pistol used to rob Vietnamese gemstone traders in Arbois, France, an abandoned stolen car in Heilbronn, a bullet from a domestic shooting between two brothers in Worms, and over 40 break-ins across Germany and Austria.
Every accomplice, suspect, and culprit that the police interrogated denied that a woman had been involved in the crimes. But since her DNA kept appearing everywhere, the police continued looking.
She was initially dubbed “the woman without a face.” After the death of a 22-year-old police officer, her name changed to “the Phantom of Heilbronn.”
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
The officer, Michèle Kiesewetter, was eating lunch with a colleague in their patrol car when two people approached them from behind and shot them in the back. She died, and her partner was left injured.
A reward of 300,000 euros ($352,065) was offered for any information about her. Experts were flown in from across Europe, and over 800 women with criminal records in Europe were tracked down and tested for a match. At one point, officials even consulted fortune tellers for answers.
Finally, in 2009, the case was closed for good. Authorities in France discovered the burned body of a man believed to be an asylum seeker who went missing in 2002.
They processed his fingerprints from an old asylum application to try to confirm his identity. To their surprise, his DNA came back female, and it was a match to the Phantom of Heilbronn.
They tested the DNA again and did not find the phantom’s DNA. It turned out that the DNA had come from the cotton swabs that were being used. It was traced back to a woman working in the packing center of an Austrian medical supply company.
So, for 16 years, the German police were chasing a female serial killer who didn’t exist, only to discover that it was contaminated cotton swabs all along.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
