What Was Hiding in Germany's Göhrde Forest? // DARK SUMMER VOL. 2
This story starts with a police officer who was investigating a suspect in a missing woman's case. When the officer went down into the man’s basement, he found a secret, locked leather door in the far back corner of the room.
Now, to understand what was in that room, and who that man was, we need to start all the way at the beginning, and go deep into the Göhrde Forest where in 1989, multiple bodies were discovered deep within the woods.
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SOURCES
Forensic Pathologist called for further investigation (2014 - German): https://wendland-net.de/post/hald-tagung-zu-den-goehrde-morden-rechtsmediziner-fordert-ermittlungen-vorantreiben-46054
Why Did Birgit Meier Die? (German): https://archive.ph/DZmvJ
Gohrde Murders in the World Encyclopedia of Serial Killers: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_World_Encyclopedia_of_Serial_Killers/3Go4EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=gohrde+murders&pg=PT165&printsec=frontcover
German Mystery Murders Solved: https://www.dw.com/en/dna-evidence-solves-five-1989-german-murder-mysteries/a-41951674
In Netflix’s Dig Deeper, Who Was Suspected Serial Killer Kurt-Werner Wichmann? https://www.oxygen.com/true-crime-buzz/in-netflixs-dig-deeper-who-was-suspected-serial-killer-kurt-werner-wichmann
DNA Test Confirms Suspicion Against Cemetery Gardener (German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/goehrde-morde-dna-test-erhaertet-verdacht-gegen-friedhofsgaertner-kurt-werner-w-a-1198890.html
When the State Forest Became the Forest of the Dead (German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/goehrde-morde-dna-spur-bei-zwei-doppelmorden-a-1185334.html
Göhrde Double Murders Solved After 28 Years (German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/goehrde-morde-zwei-doppelmorde-nach-28-jahren-aufgeklaert-a-1185227.html
Death in the State Forest (German): https://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/goehrde-morde-das-raetsel-der-vergrabenen-damenschuhe-fotostrecke-168518.html
Police Search for Göhrde Murders in Hamburg Telephone Book from 1989 (German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/goehrde-morde-in-niedersachsen-polizei-sucht-nach-hamburger-telefonbuch-von-1989-a-036ae827-5877-4860-a5df-b0d340c61f57
The Phantom of the Göhrde (German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/das-phantom-der-goehrde-a-76c81eef-0002-0001-0000-000009089608?context=issue
The Mystery of the Buried Women’s Shoes (German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/goehrde-morde-das-raetsel-der-vergrabenen-damenschuhe-a-1266236.html
Police site w/ unidentified Kurt-Werner evidence (German): https://www.pd-lg.polizei-nds.de/startseite/kriminalitaet/deliktsbereiche/cold_cases/ermittlungsgruppe-goehrde-113732.html
On the Trail of the Murderers (German): https://archive.ph/dAJIp
A Brutal Series of Murders and its Story (German): https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/Die-Goehrde-Morde-Brutale-Mordserie-im-Staatsforst,goehrde192.html
Does it Ring? (German): https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/goehrde-mord-cold-case-telefonbuch-lueneburg-1.5664666
28 Years After the Crime: Göhrde Murders Probably Solved (German): https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/niedersachsen-28-jahre-nach-der-tat-goehrde-morde-vermutlich-geklaert-1.3806871
Göhrde Murders: Serial Killer Collected Trophies (German): https://www.rtl.de/cms/goehrde-morde-serienmoerder-sammelte-trophaeen-ein-blick-in-das-geheime-zimmer-4996801.html
The Harbinger of Doom (German): https://archive.ph/fh8sI
Text of some of Kurt-Werner’s suicide letters: https://www.reddit.com/r/serialkillers/comments/akpkkn/kurt_werner_wichmann_germanys_worst_serial_killer/
1989 German TV episode on the murders: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8zqu7o - translated transcript: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aXRZ8-Vxbwv8JgCgyPt339YCMqjFW9xBdrAt0X-WD6g/edit?tab=t.0
It Was the Gardener (German): https://archive.ph/yguNu#selection-2025.0-2036.0
Hamburg detective Wolfgang Sielaff finds murdered sister Birgit Meier after 28-year hunt https://www.thetimes.com/world/article/hamburg-detective-wolfgang-sielaff-finds-murdered-sister-birgit-meier-after-27-year-hunt-zt2373hq6
Kurt-Werner Wichmann Lünepedia (German): https://www.luenepedia.de/wiki/Kurt-Werner_Wichmann
Encountering the Phantom (witness report - German): https://wendland-net.de/post/dem-phantom-begegnet-vor-25-jahren-schlug-der-goehrde-moerder-zu-37210
What happened to Birgit Meier? https://vocal.media/criminal/what-happened-to-birgit-meier-answered-three-decades-late
TRANSCRIPT
Today, I’m going to tell you a story about a police officer who was investigating a suspect in a missing womans case. And when the officer went down into the man’s basement he found a secret, locked leather door in the far back corner of the room.
Now, to understand what was in that room, and who that man was, we need to start all the way at the beginning.
And if you’re interested in mysterious disappearances, dark history, urban legends and more, you’re in the right place, you’re just like me. We upload once a week so make sure to subscribe.
July 12th, 1989. A group of blueberry pickers in the Göhrde (Ger-duh) forest of Lunegurg (Loon-eh-bohg) Germany wandered off the trail in pursuit of ripe berries. It was a beautiful summer day, but as They headed deeper into the woods, the light barely breaking through the canopy. The beautiful, majestic area turns haunting very quickly. And then, entering a small clearing, they noticed a smell that turned their stomachs.
They tried to pick berries, but the further they went off the trail, the more horrid the stench became. Soon, it was overpowering. And that’s when one of the pickers screamed in horror.
There on the forest floor, hidden by some dirt and ferns, are bones. unmistakably human bones. Ones that are so badly decomposed what little flesh is left on them is starting to merge with the soil. But there’s enough left for the berry-pickers to realize they’re looking at the bodies of two people.
But who are they, and what happened?
Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I’m you’re host, Kaelyn Moore, and thank you for meeting me again here in the Rogue Detecting Society Headquarters for this installation of Dark Summer.
Today’s episode spans decades, and also is international, so I wanted to shout out our listener today, Helly, who helped me with some of the german pronunciations. I love my german listeners, I can see you when I look at the shows demographics, you are are #6 on the map of countries who listen to heart starts pounding, I think India is beating you by something like 400 listeners, it’s really small. But you guys have vowels that my american mind can hardly comprehend, so believe me when I say I’m trying my best.
I just wanted to add that we still have merch available in our store, and our Dark Summer t shirt will only be available for a few more weeks, so grab one while you can! If you’d like some merch discounts, you can always head over to Patreon or apple podcast subscriptions, apple subs there will be a message at the end of this episode on how to claim your discount.
Ok, with that, let’s get back to it.
ACT 1
When police arrive on the scene, they immediately notice a few things about the bodies. One, they seem to have been there for a while. Even in the summer, their level of decomposition is staggering.
And two, they’re naked, except for a floral skirt on one of them, which is pushed up. The rest of their clothes are nowhere to be found.
The bodies are quickly identified as husband and wife Peter and Ursula Reinold. Months earlier, on May 22nd, their two teenage daughters reported them missing after they hadn’t come home from a picnic the day before in Gohrde forrest.
But what was especially eerie about the case, was how the day they were reported missing, before the girls even called the police, they got multiple phone calls to their home phone. (SFX) But every time they’d pick up, the person on the other line was gently breathing, as if waiting for them to start talking. The phone call would only end when the girls hung up.
And They had a horrible feeling that something bad had happened to their parents, and that the person on the other end of the line knew it too.
After receiving a missing persons report from the daughters, the police arrived at the forest to inspect the area. The first order of business was to figure out if Peter and Ursula ever made it to Göhrde forest as planned on Sunday.
For reference, Gohrde forest is a beautiful, quiet and secluded place to have a summer picnic, but it can get very scary, very fast. This is the type of forest that inspired all of those horrifying German children’s stories for hundreds of years, like Hansel and Gretel. The kind of place the Brother’s Grimm would walk at dusk for inspiration.
The forest is about 75 square kilometers of densely packed tall pine trees. Walking paths cut through them, but stepping off the paths for even a few dozen meters can cause you to become disoriented and lost, and nearly invisible to search parties.
So the police knew It wouldn’t be an easy task to track down the two picnickers. And At first, the search proved fruitless. The forester in charge of the nature reserve couldn’t remember seeing the couple—which wasn’t that unusual. At the time, the forest was a popular destination and especially heavily visited on warm days.
The daughters helped police and neighbors hang up flyers with their parents’ photos. They looked happy and conventional—a middle-aged couple, still dressing and wearing their hair like they did in the ‘70s. Ursula had short, thick, curly hair that framed her face like a halo. Peter had a mustache, bushy eyebrows, and aviator eyeglasses.
And not long after this, a local woman passed one of these flyers, and it sparked something in her. She had remembered seeing them that day.
The woman told police she had been riding her horse in the woods that Sunday, when she ran into Ursula and they started chit chatting. She still remembered Ursula's short, teased hair and big framed glasses. She asked her why she was carrying a basket, since it was too early in the season to forage for the beautiful, multicolored mushrooms that grow deep within the forest.
Ursula responded that it contained a picnic. Even from above them on horseback, the woman noticed Peter was wearing new, bright white athletic shoes. A strange choice for hiking around the mossy nature preserve. She also remembers him wearing a pair of binoculars around his neck.
But it wasn’t just Peter’s new sneakers or Ursula’s picnic basket that made that Sunday ride memorable.
A couple of hours later, as this witness and her horse were headed home on the same trail, a Honda Civic drove towards them at a high rate of speed. She was actually forced off the trail and had to pilot their horses up a dangerously steep hill to avoid being hit. She didn’t see the driver, but one of the riders she was with had the presence of mind to memorize the license plate: HH-R 246.
When the police heard that detail, they were floored… it was Peter and Ursula’s car.
The witness went on to say that she took another ride in the forest four days later, on Thursday. And as she was passing the part of the trail near where she spoke with Ursula, there was something poking out of the grass that caught her eye.
It was a bright white athletic shoe.
On May 28th, a baker at a local shop in town noticed that a Honda Civic had been sitting in the parking lot for a few days now. He walked over to try the handle and noticed it was unlocked. He called the police, at least hoping they could have it towed, and they quickly recognized the car.
He didn’t expect to learn that it belonged to the missing couple—especially because his bakery was 60km away from Göhrde (Gerduh) , where the Reinolds (ryenolds) supposedly disappeared.
It was confusing, but things got much more confusing after police examined the odometer and compared it to the known route from the Reinolds’ home to the forest, and the most likely route from the forest to the bakery. Because there were still 60 kilometers unaccounted for.
So, someone had driven the car for maybe a few days after it was taken from the couple.
But there were no clues about what happened until two months later when the blueberry pickers stumbled upon the bodies. Now they had an answer about WHERE Peter and Ursula were. So, they just needed to know….why did this happen? And more importantly who had done this?
One officer was talking to one of the blueberry pickers, trying to figure out if they had seen anything else of note that day, anything else that seemed out of place.
Now, This being a time before cell phones, the blueberry pickers had to bolt out of the nature reserve to report what they had seen. They were so panicked, they weren’t really paying attention to anything else, but…now come to think of it, they had passed a man about 40 years old, with a muscular build and brown hair, carrying a bag…. It’s not much, but the police write that down.
detectives soon arrived and began a thorough investigation of the scene. They even sifted the soil through a sieve to look for bullets or other clues.
But that’s not enough to find anything that would point to who killed Peter and Ursula… or even to how they were killed. This is definitely homicide, but were so decomposed, the means will most likely never be officially determined. So the police went home, regrouped, and came back on July 27th with an even bigger squad.
They did discover a couple of small leads, including a plastic bag with some items of clothing believed to have belonged to the victims. So they decided to spread out a bit more and kept looking. There could be a smoking gun hidden somewhere in the dark woods.
So One group of officers took off in another direction, and trampled through the mossy logs and thick brush, going deeper and deeper into Gohrde (Gerduh) Forest, just like the blueberry pickers had. They were only about 800 meters away from the crime scene when one of the officers shouted out that they saw something. But, this was not a clue. No, this was an entire other crime scene.
The other officers rushed over and could barely process what they were seeing. A lifeless woman sprawled on the forest floor, her Blonde hair, matted with blood. A man was lying next to her, with a bullet hole in his head.
It was Another middle-aged couple—also brutally murdered—in another clearing, in the same section of the same forest. Less than a kilometer from the first crime scene.
And these bodies were much less decomposed than the first two. Rot had set in, but they were nowhere near the half-mummified, half-skeletal condition of the other victims. So, these victims must have been killed after Peter and Ursula, while police were searching the forest for them. But who would do such a thing?
The detectives had thought they were looking for a double murderer… but now it was clear they were on the trail of a serial killer. And the serial killer was way ahead of them.
ACT 2
After discovering a second double homicide in the Göhrde (Gerduh) Forest while investigating the first, police didn’t know what to think. Their whole theory of the first crime- that it could have been just a robbery gone wrong- was out the window.
To have any chance of solving the case, they were going to need to know more about the second couple—starting with exactly when they had been murdered.
The second pair of victims were in a much less decomposed condition than the Reinolds. So the medical examiner was able to make a precise estimate of their date and time of death.
They had been killed on July 12th… while police were just 800 meters away investigating the Reinolds murders.
The new victims were identified as 46-year-old Ingrid Warmbier and 43-year-old Bernd-Michael Köpping (Kurping) and they were both reported missing on July 13th, the day after they were killed. When their families learned of their deaths they were shocked. Yes, it was horrible that they had been murdered…. But they were also shocked that they had been found together. See both of them were married to other people
The story detectives piece together goes something like this: On July 12th, the day the Reinolds’ bodies were found, Ingrid and Bernd-Michael arrived at the Göhrde forest to take a walk.
The two had been having an affair for some time after meeting at a health spa. It seems the lovers walked more than two kilometers into the woods when they encountered a stranger. At first, they probably thought he was just another picnicker… then he drew his gun.
If Ingrid and Bernd-Michael’s attacker noticed the police nearby, it either didn’t deter him or made him even more eager to complete his next crime. The man threatened the couple, forcing them at gunpoint to lie face down. He bound their hands and feet with adhesive bandages.
Then he strangled Bernd-Michael and shot him in the head. He crushed Ingrid’s skull. At some point either before or after killing the couple, the murderer lifted Ingrid’s shirt and cut her bra. Similar to how Ursula had been found
After the couple were dead, their killer stole Bernd-Michael’s Polaroid camera and his car keys. And just like had been done to the first couple, He took the man’s Toyota Tercel and drove it out of the forest.
At some point the next day, Bernd-Michael’s wife received an anonymous call from a man, who whispered “Your husband is cheating on you!” before hanging up. Kind of like the anonymous calls the daughters got after their parents were killed…
After learning those details, police become certain the two double murders are connected by more than just location.
In both cases, the victims were a middle-aged couple. In both cases, items were stolen but the motive didn’t seem to be robbery. And, most damningly, the killer stole the victims’ cars after both murders.
Investigators eventually found the Toyota Tercel abandoned in Bad Bevensen (BAHT BAY-ven-zen), about 30 kilometers from the forest. As with the Reinolds’ Honda, it had been driven by the killer even after being used to escape the forest—probably for several days.
And, while they were found in different towns, both vehicles had been abandoned near train stations on the same railway. So the killer had probably dropped the cars off, then taken a train home.
When the Toyota was found, police discovered two short hairs in the car. Unfortunately, the hairs didn’t have roots, so at the time DNA testing couldn’t reveal anything of importance—and would have destroyed the hairs in the process. But they held onto them at the police station in hopes of future technological advances.
Meanwhile, word started spreading about the serial killer in the Göhrde (gerduh) forest, and it quickly became a much less popular place to take a walk. In fact, it will be considered dangerous for decades to come. It starts becoming known to locals as “The Dead Forest.”
But here’s the thing. Police were so focused on finding this killer, who had a very specific MO of attacking couples, that they hardly noticed a month later, when another woman vanished without a trace.
On a hot summer night in August, 1989, a 41 year old woman named Birgit Meier disappeared
The evening of August 14th, she met with her soon-to-be ex-husband to hammer out details of their separation agreement. She was taking the divorce particularly hard, at least according to some reports.
The following morning, her daughter went to her apartment, but Birgit wasn’t there.
So of course, the police focused right away on the husband, Harald. He had some hallmark characteristics of a husband who would do away with his wife, they thought. Like how he owned a successful business and would have had to pay Birgit a substantial sum in a divorce.
So the police brought him in and really put pressure on him to confess, they interrogated him extensively. But every time, he denied any role in her disappearance. Not only that, he offered a large reward for tips on her whereabouts, and actively participated in searching for her, which didn’t really match with the profile the police thought he fit. Still, it was like the investigators had a bad case of tunnel vision, because they kept pursuing Harald and really focused all of their energy on getting him to confess rather than following up on other tips, like the fact that there was evidence Brigit had a visitor over that night after she was seen leaving the meeting with Harald, and that some of her friends mentioned she was seeing another man. One who seemed…unstable.
Eventually, Harald moved to the US to get away from the police harassment, and so they latched onto another theory: Birgit died by suicide. Maybe she was so ashamed of her marriage failing, she didn’t want to go on living.
I’ll add here too, that the Berlin wall fell just three months after Birgit disappeared. It’s completely possible that Germany’s political climate at the time distracted resources from going to her case.
But neither her brother, Wolfgang, who was a detective himself, nor her husband, Harald, bought that. So they pooled their resources and hired a bunch of private investigators to keep looking for Birgit.
And as the investigation into Birgit started cooling off, so did the investigation into the couples found in the Gorhde forest.
Over the next few months, police create a special commission to investigate the murders, follow hundreds of tips from the public and interview a number of potential suspects.
With the help of the woman on her horse, who came forward after seeing a TV report about the murders, and the blueberry pickers, police create a composite sketch of the perpetrator.
He has dark hair, light skin, and a broad nose. His lips are thin and severe, and he’s middle aged, around 40.
A psychological profile of the suspect was also created: he was brutal, possibly a misogynist, aggressive, a loner, overly correct, introverted, able to organize his time so he wouldn’t be missed if absent from work, and sexually disturbed as well as mentally ill. The profiler even theorized that the killer had some sort of sexual problem, which may have caused him to act out his fantasies through murder instead.
So Police went house to house in both the areas surrounding the forest and the areas where the victims’ cars had been abandoned but they didn’t find any strong suspects.
That December, a report about the Göhrde murders aired on a popular German television show about unsolved cases, Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst, asking members of the public to come forward with any new evidence. A 50,000 Deutschmark reward was offered for information leading to the identification of the killer, which would be around 67,000 USD today
Hundreds more tips came in, ranging from the reasonable to the delusional… but the few leads worth following turned out to be dead ends.
At that point, the case went—maybe not totally cold—but definitely lukewarm.
By 1990, not much was happening with the Göhrde case anymore—but Birgit’s brother Wolfgang, along with a private investigator he hired, were still desperately looking for answers as to what happened to his sister.
And that year, they found a potential suspect: a handsome, but creepy, local man named Kurt-Werner Wichmann, who knew Birgit for a little while before she vanished. She even went home with him once after a party.
Once Wolfgang started looking into Kurt-Werner, he saw that he had a record tracing back to his teenage years, when he was convicted of threatening to kill a tenant in his family home. In the early ‘70s, he did time for kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and attempting to murder an 18-year-old hitchhiker, who only escaped with her life by somehow convincing him she wouldn’t tell anyone about the kidnapping—then bravely reported him anyway.
But, by 1990, he’d been, seemingly, a respectable, happily married, law-abiding citizen for over a decade. So, when his name came up in connection with Birgit’s disappearance, the local public prosecutor didn’t think he was a realistic suspect. Just seeing her at some parties and maybe hooking up once didn’t seem like a close enough relationship to motivate him to kill. The public prosecutor wouldn’t sign a warrant to search Kurt-Werner’s home.
But that changed in 1993, when a new public prosecutor came to town. And, with no other leads to follow, she agreed to sign a search warrant for Kurt-Werner’s home. The officers brought a few cadaver dogs, just in case Birgit’s body was there. But at the time, it was simply said that the two had casually known each other, so no one was really expecting much. They headed over to his house one day while he was out working as a cemetery gardener.
And the second the cadaver dogs arrived on Kurt werners property, the K9s alerted all over the place. The police couldn’t believe what they were seeing—it was as if there were dead people everywhere. The dogs pointed to the trunk of a red Ford Probe. They pointed to random parts of the yard that, when dug up, revealed dozens of shoes, purses, and items of apparel, seemingly from different people. The whole property was like a junkyard for miscellaneous personal items… the kind of stuff it was easy to imagine a serial killer keeping as trophies. But none of the items were confirmed to belong to Birgit… at least not yet.
Inside the house, the officers found other suspicious items—blank checks used for forging, and a listening device for spying on the tenant who had been renting a bedroom from Kurt-Werner.
Then, when the dogs went into the basement, they pointed at something that honestly felt straight out of a horror movie. There in the back corner was a leather-covered door that was padlocked. None of the other doors in the house were leather. None of the other doors appeared to be kept locked all day. Just this one.
Police looked around for a key, but found nothing. Kurt-Werner must have taken the key with him when he went to work. Which, of course, made the officers all the more anxious to get inside and see what he was hiding. He had no problem leaving suspicious women’s shoes buried in the yard where any stray dog could dig them up… so what was he keeping buried in this dungeon, under lock and key?
Police forced the leather door open with a crash, revealing a whole, soundproofed secret room that not even his wife knew about.
Inside was a whole different version of Kurt-Werner than the face he had been showing to the world ever since he left prison and supposedly reformed himself. It was like one big toybox for his true, evil self.
Guns. Ammunition. Drugs. Nazi memorabilia, including a pro-Nazi book called “Why We Vote for Adolf Hitler.” A huge collection of pornography, including child sexual abuse material. Syringes full of unknown substances.
And possibly the creepiest object of all: a set of handcuffs with a tiny dot of blood on them. It wasnt enough blood to test for DNA with current technology, but police were careful to preserve that little brown dot as they placed the handcuffs in an evidence bag. Maybe in the future, they’d be able to figure out whose blood it is.
For now, though, they have a different problem.
Police made a few big mistakes with the search: the first one being not waiting to do it until they could also get an arrest warrant and grab Kurt-Werner before he found out police were at his house.
And then, during the search, they make a second mistake: lacking a warrant for his arrest, they call him at work and ask him to come in voluntarily for questioning.
Instead, by the time the detectives got enough evidence from his home to hold him, he was already on the road, headed out of their jurisdiction and maybe even out of the country.
On his way out of town, Kurt-Werner did something that no one really pieces together, it was reminiscent of the Gorhde murders. He called Birgit’s husband, Harald Meier. He somehow knew who he is and has his number.
He hissed into the phone, “I have you and your clean brother-in-law to thank for this.” When Harald asked who was calling, Kurt-Werner replied, “You know exactly who’s there, and you’ll hear from me.”
Kurt-Werner managed to stay on the run for two months. Then, on April 15th 1993, he was pulled over after fleeing the scene of a traffic accident, on his way to southern Germany. Police found parts of a submachine gun and ammunition in his trunk. He’s arrested on weapons charges and jailed at Heimsheim Prison.
And Ten days later, on April 25th, Kurt-Werner hangs himself with a belt in his prison cell. He leaves behind several notes with strange, cryptic messages to his family, like “take special care of my tulip tree” and “the Madonna statue near the fireplace should be smashed.” Another note instructs his brother to “clean the gutters very carefully.” They would seem normal written down as a to do list, but they seem like a strange code written in a suicide note. He even complains about his sore neck, in a letter apparently written after a failed first attempt to hang himself.
In Germany, you can’t convict the deceased of crimes, so often times, investigations into people who have passed away tend to stop. and so Kurt-Werner’s suicide effectively ended the effort to investigate him, —but police are still allowed to investigate missing persons cases and to use evidence already collected, such as the creepy items from Kurt-Werner’s house.
But there was a problem with this. Remember, nothing they found at Kurt-Werner’s home connected him to Brigit. And also, they didn’t fully search the house, so there’s not a comprehensive list of everything that was in there. It seemed like they jumped the gun when they tried to get him back to the house while they were still investigating, and so their hands were a bit tied here. efforts to find Birgit continued, but they weren’t able to go back to investigate Kurt-Werner's home.
So, it’s slow going. And, over the coming years, life goes on for everyone involved in the case.
Birgit’s brother Wolfgang retires after a legendary career as a detective and chief of police. Kurt-Werner’s widow, Alice, gets remarried, to a man named Hannes (Hah-ness) Rudloff, who somehow agrees to move into Kurt-Werner’s house—creepy secret room and all.
The couple left the leather door closed for their entire marriage. Even after Alice died in 2006, 17 years after Birgit’s disappearance, Hannes (hah-ness) continued to live in the house, but never looked inside the secret room. It seemed like they were only able to live with it by pretending it didn’t exist.
Wolfgang and Harald were getting older, but they were still determined to find Birgit, at any cost. They still paid for private investigators. Plus, after Wolfgang’s retirement, he basically was on the case full-time.
Finally, in 2013, they got frustrated enough to try something kind of crazy—they just appealed to Hannes (hah-ness) Rudloff’s sense of human decency. His wife was dead, she couldn’t be embarrassed anymore. He was elderly and mostly blind. He had nothing to do with Kurt-Werner now. So would he please just let their team look in the secret room and see if they can find anything new that might help find their missing loved one?
And… he says yes. Something about their plea worked. He says they don’t even need a warrant. Come on in.
Wolfgang’s investigators enter the secret room, sometimes described as a “torture room,” and almost immediately find a piece of evidence the police missed 20 years before. It’s something that makes them stop in their tracks and almost wretch.
Kurt-Werner recorded some episodes of the TV show “Aktenzeichen XY ungelöst,” about unsolved cases. One was about Birgit going missing. Another was about the Göhrde murders. He even recorded a followup segment, featuring tips on the murders sent in by viewers.
This was the first time that anyone put together that Kurt-Werner must have killed Birgit and the two couples murdered in the Göhrde forest. But how are they supposed to prove it to the skeptical police, when he’s been dead for 20 years… and If the police agree he’s guilty now, they’ll be admitting they let a serial killer slip through their fingers?
ACT 3
So, now that our detectives believed that Kurt-Werner killed at least five people—Birgit, Peter, Ursula, Ingrid, and Bernd-Michael—they needed to know as much as they can about him. They dig deep into his background. And what they found was about as disturbing as a life story gets.
Kurt-Werner Wichmann was born in Lüneburg on July 8 1949. He was his parents’ first child, and remained an only child until 1958 when his younger brother, Hans-Joachim, was born.
From the beginning of his life, Kurt-Werner’s behavior was abnormal. According to his parents, at some point in his infancy a taxi crashed into his stroller, which they came to blame for his misconduct.
But his parents may also have been neglectful or abusive. An anonymous person allegedly saw him as a baby covered in feces, crawling around a dirty kitchen floor with piles of spilled flour all over. Other people who knew the family mentioned that his mother was frequently ill and sometimes didn’t get out of bed all day.
His father was allegedly violent towards his mother. On one occasion, he was seen chasing after her with an ax. Before the age of 14, Kurt-Werner was sent to a reform school.
At age 15, he tried to strangle his family’s tenant. At 21, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted the hitchhiker.
And… during those six years between the strangling and the kidnapping that finally sent him to prison for a stint, there were a bunch of unsolved murders and sexual assaults in and around the Göhrde forest. He probably wasn’t the only perpetrator, but there was a clear pattern, and police noticed that violent crimes went down in the area while he was away in prison.
But when he got out, and supposedly started his new, reformed life? There was another string of murders and sexual assaults in the area. Even while he was dating and later marrying a beauty queen, wearing nice suits, hitting the local cocktail party circuit… he was living two lives.
The life other people saw… and the one he kept locked in his secret basement room.
After the 2013 search, both Birgit’s case and the case of the Göhrde Murders finally start to heat up again… albeit slowly, after so many years without progress.
In 2015, While reviewing police evidence archives, an investigator named Richard Kauffman discovers the blood-spotted handcuffs found in Kurt-Werner’s house. At the time, there wasn’t enough blood on them for DNA testing. But, as the officers in 1993 had hoped, the technology has improved immensely by 2016, when Kauffman sends the handcuffs off for testing.
The report comes back, with the news that Wolfgang has been simultaneously hoping for and dreading since 1989: the blood is Birgit Meier’s. It’s the first physical evidence of her whereabouts since she disappeared.
Kauffman theorizes that Kurt-Werner kidnapped Birgit meaning to hold her for ransom. Harald, her husband, was fairly wealthy, and Kurt-Werner enjoyed an expensive lifestyle that he couldn’t afford through work alone. But something must have gone wrong, causing Kurt-Werner to kill Birgit instead.
In 2017, the private investigative team for Brigit’s case excavates a concrete slab in the garage at Kurt-Werner’s home, with the elderly homeowner’s permission.
Underneath it, they find Birgit’s skeleton, fingernails, and earrings. Her skull showed she died of a gunshot wound to the head, just like Bernd-Michael in the forest.
After Birgit is found, the police finally agree with Wolfgang’s team that Kurt-Werner must be a serial killer.
Later that year, the two hairs from Bernd’s car are finally tested with new methods.
So is trace DNA from the Reinolds’ car seats, which were wrapped in plastic at the time the killer drove their car, trapping some of the killer’s skin cells.
The results confirmed Kurt-Werner had been in at least one of the cars. We’re not certain exactly which one it was—news reports and even police statements seem to conflict on this point.
But, regardless, there are too many other commonalities between the two double homicides for anyone to suspect two different people committed the crimes.
On December 28 2017, the Lüneburg public prosecutor’s office announces that police believe the Göhrde murders to be solved. Based on DNA evidence, Kurt-Werner Wichmann was the killer.
Not only that… they now suspect he took far more than five lives. All in all, there were 21 other murders in the area that Kurt-Werner could have ties to.
In June 2018, the investigative team looking into Kurt-Werner emails colleagues all over Germany a message with the subject line “Suspected Serial Murder.”
Investigators across the country are invited to review photos of evidence found at Kurt-Werner’s home and check to see if any of their unsolved cases might be linked to the dead cemetery gardener.
And they’re taking it seriously—so seriously that, in 2022 they ask the public for help locating a 1989 Hamburg phone book, which they want to use to verify phone numbers potentially connected to the Göhrde murders.
Why would old phone numbers matter now?
Because there’s one final, terrifying detail I haven’t told you about Kurt-Werner’s crimes.
He may not have been killing alone.
As far back as the 1960s, several of the sexual assaults matching Kurt-Werner’s pattern involved survivors who reported they were attacked by two men. So, were those crimes separate? Or did he have an accomplice, who was never caught?
There are other clues pointing to an unidentified accomplice, too. One who participated in the Göhrde Murders—or at least in covering them up.
Kurt-Werner probably drove his own vehicle to the forest before both murders. There was no reasonable way to get there at the time, other than driving. Then, both times, he left in the victims’ vehicles. So, who drove his car back?
And why did he leave such cryptic instructions to his wife and brother in his suicide notes? Did “clean the gutters very carefully” actually have something to do with hiding evidence?
According to friends and relatives, Kurt-Werner was very close to his younger brother, Hans-Joachim Wichmann, until the day he died. Hans-Joachim was totally dependent on Kurt-Werner, asking him for advice on every decision and doing whatever he was told.
To this day, Hans-Joachim refuses to discuss his brother with reporters or the police. There hasn’t been enough clear evidence against him for police to arrest him.
But, if he has a conscience and he knows something the police don’t know about Kurt-Werner, maybe one day he’ll talk.
In the meantime, The Göhrde murders remain an officially open case, despite the DNA match in the cars, because nobody can be charged or convicted with Kurt-Werner dead. Unless, of course, they find the accomplice…
And police are asking all of us to help with that.
They’ve created a website with photos of items from Kurt-Werner’s home that are believed to be evidence in additional crimes, but have not been linked to any specific case.
Members of the public are asked to look at the items, and contact police if they recognize any—particularly if they belonged to a person who disappeared or was killed before 1993, or someone who experienced an unsolved sexual assault in that timeframe.
The items include a number of shoes found buried on the property, along with clothing, women’s handbags, and even parts of a disassembled blue car.
I’ll link to the website in our show notes. If you recognize anything, and I mean anything, don’t hesitate to send a tip in.
If Kurt-Werner’s mystery accomplice is still out there, he probably thinks he’s going to remain a free man for the rest of his life.
Proving him wrong in time to arrest, try, and convict him might be the only way to close hundreds of open cases, and bring justice to hundreds of grieving families.
That is all I have for you this week on Heart Starts Pounding. Join me here for another installation of Dark Summer, when next week I take you across the world again to explore one of Australia’s greatest unsolved mysteries (see i told you I’d talk about places where it wasn’t currently summer!!) You’re definitely not going to want to miss it.
And until then, stay curious