The Girl in the Box: the Mysterious Crime that Shocked Germany

On a Tuesday night in September of 1981, 10-year-old Ursula Herrmann of Eching, Germany, left her aunt's house on her bike. She should've made it to her home in ten minutes, but she never did. Within an hour, police and villagers were combing the woods. Ursula's parents received a demand from kidnappers to pay two million deutschmarks in ransom. The Hermanns were not rich, but neighbors and the local government agreed to raise the money. But they never had a chance to deliver it. After negotiations with the kidnappers faded, a new search began in the forest.   

By the fourth day of searching, a gloomy Sunday, they had covered most of the forest. Ursula had been missing for 19 days. At 9.30am, there was a loud shout. In a tiny glade about 800m away from the lake path, one of the officers had struck something solid when probing the soil. Another policeman rushed over and, after wiping away the leaves and scraping through a layer of clay, discovered a brown blanket covering a wooden board. He removed it only to find second board, which appeared to be the lid of a box. It was 72cm by 60cm – the size of a small coffee table – painted green and locked from the top with seven sliding bolts. Using a spade, he forced the lid open, and peered in. There was Ursula. Her body was cold, lifeless. The officer wept when lifting her out.

Two detectives were sent to break the news to Ursula’s parents at their home, a short walk away. While her mother was too distraught to ask any questions, her father asked repeatedly: had his daughter been hurt before her death? The truthful answer was no. An autopsy concluded that Ursula died within 30 minutes to five hours of being buried. Since there was no sign of struggle, or even movement, inside the box, the doctors assumed she had been drugged beforehand, possibly with nitrous oxide.

It appeared that the kidnappers had planned to keep Ursula alive. The box, 1.40m deep, was fitted with a shelf and a seat that doubled as a toilet. It was stocked with three bottles of water, 12 cans of Fanta, six large chocolate bars, four packets of biscuits and two packs of chewing gum. It also contained a small, bizarre library of 21 books, from Donald Duck comics to westerns, romance novels and thrillers with titles such as The Horror Lurks Everywhere. There was a light and a portable radio tuned to Bayern 3, the same station that broadcast the traffic jingle. To enable Ursula to breathe, the box had a ventilation system made from plastic plumbing pipes, which extended to ground level. But whoever designed it had failed to realise that without a machine to circulate the air, the oxygen would quickly run out.

Police investigated the crime for years, but without evidence linking any particular suspect, it was closed in the late '80s. More than 20 years later, it was reopened bcause of new DNA technology that might point to he perpetrator. However, what investigators found leaves doubts. Has the crime been solved or not? Read the case of the girl in the box at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting


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