21-year-old Frauke Liebs is kidnapped, held captive and killed during the 2006 World Cup. A podcast reopens the mysterious case. The goal: to find previously overlooked clues that could lead to the murderer.
The murder of Frauke Liebs is one of the most mysterious crimes in Germany. In the summer of 2006, after watching football with a friend in a Paderborn pub, the nursing student was kidnapped by a stranger and held captive for at least a week. During the past week, she has been on the phone again and again. Her body was found three and a half months later in a remote forest. Since then, the police and family have been looking for the perpetrator.
In the new Stern podcast “Frauke Liebs – the search for the murderer” the most important witnesses investigate the open questions and traces in this case. “The podcast is now the last attempt to clarify the whole event,” says Frauke’s mother Ingrid Liebs. The 69-year-old believes that there are accomplices to the crime in addition to the perpetrator. “You can’t hold a young woman somewhere for a week completely unnoticed. She needs to go to the toilet, she needs to drink something. The perpetrator drove around with her, which was shown by the later connection data of her mobile phone. So Frauke has to go in get in and out of a vehicle.”
Due to the mysterious circumstances, the crime is one of the best-known murder cases of the police authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia. The so-called profilers, the operative case analysis of the State Criminal Police Office, were consulted twice in the investigation. The evidence suggests that the perpetrator probably knew Paderborn and the surrounding area well. Investigators believe the perpetrator let the young woman use her cell phone to make the police and family believe she was gone of her own free will. Frauke Liebs called her roommate and ex-boyfriend several times, she also called her brother and sister. She sounded groggy, her voice slurred.
Forensic psychiatrist Nahlah Saimeh suspects a very controlling, domineering, and self-assured perpetrator, “of meticulous thought.” According to her assessment, the perpetrator had the crime scenario in mind long before Frauke Liebs was kidnapped and killed. “He knew what he wanted: to hold a woman captive,” Saimeh told the star. She assumes that Liebs was more of a chance victim, that he might have known briefly, but nothing more. The culprit has not yet been found.
The Paderborn public prosecutor responsible, Kai Uwe Waschkies, sees the podcast as an opportunity to address the decisive witness after all. “I want people to talk about the case, that people ask around, that those involved might then make suspicious remarks, that someone might spill the beans.” Waschkies suspects that the perpetrator could have informed someone from his environment. “I mean, when you carry a burden like that, it burns in your soul and weighs you down. And you can maybe keep that to yourself for a few years, but I think there comes a point where you open yourself up to talk this burden off your soul.”
In the last episode of the 13-part podcast, Frauke’s mother makes an emotional appeal directly to the perpetrator. “Tell me what happened, give me the opportunity to round off Frauke’s life picture, to look back on Frauke’s whole life and let the beautiful memories come to the fore. Please talk to me.”
The series “Frauke Liebs – the search for the murderer” made it to first place in the German podcast charts within a few days. All 13 episodes of the podcast are available for free on RTL Musik.
