Violent crimes against children and young people are particularly shocking to people, even if they happened decades ago. This was also recently shown in the TV manhunt for a case from Swabia. But that doesn't help the detective.
Donauwörth (dpa / lby) - A murder of a young person in Swabia almost four decades ago moved many people again last year. After the manhunt with a film in the ZDF program "Aktenzeichen XY... unsolved", many tips on the unsolved case were received.
Nevertheless, the investigators did not really make any progress ten months after the TV report. "Bottom line: There is nothing new after the broadcast," reported police spokesman Siegfried Hartmann. Individual clues are still being followed, but: "There is nothing where you can say that this will be the big breakthrough."
The 15-year-old high school student Simone Langer was attacked shortly after midnight on July 29, 1983 on the outskirts of Donauwörth. The police are looking for a pickup truck into which the girl is said to have been dragged. The student's body was discovered two months later 80 kilometers away in a forest near Allersberg in Central Franconia (Roth district) on Autobahn 9 (Munich-Nuremberg).
The police rolled up the case again with great effort. The events were reconstructed and filmed for "XY". The contribution met with an unexpected response: "We expected a lot of information, we received an unexpectedly large number of information," said the head of the Dillingen criminal police, Michael Lechner, in February after the broadcast. A total of around 200 tips were received by the police.
The investigators only made progress in the search for possible witnesses who were also traveling in a camper near Donauwörth at the time and had broken down there. Through the TV program, the four men from the Kronach area in Upper Franconia could be identified. The police spokesman reported that they had reported themselves, but could be ruled out as perpetrators.
Hartmann emphasized that such cases would actually never be closed. If there are new approaches, they are always checked. "We will not give up." Crimes against children would evoke a special investigative ambition on the part of the police. Murder cases such as the act of violence against the schoolgirl do not become statute-barred and can therefore still be prosecuted decades later.
