crime
Peggy case: Victim buried 21 years after disappearance
A memorial stone with the portrait of the girl Peggy in Nordhalben. Photo: David Ebener/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Her unexplained fate moved people, the case was rich in trials and tribulations: the girl Peggy disappeared in Upper Franconia in 2001. Now the family has been able to bury their child.
Almost 21 years ago, the then nine-year-old girl Peggy disappeared in Upper Franconia – now her remains have been buried.
As the lawyer Ramona Hoyer announced on behalf of the family on Monday, the funeral took place on April 6th at a secret location. “We wish that peace would come and that we would be given the space to mourn,” said the statement from Peggy’s mother and family.
The Peggy case is one of the most spectacular criminal cases in Germany with a number of errors and some spectacular twists. In May 2001, the nine-year-old girl disappeared after school in Lichtenberg in Upper Franconia (Hof district). A large-scale search operation – including with Bundeswehr Tornados – was unsuccessful. The police followed a number of leads to the Czech Republic and Turkey. But the girl was gone.
In 2004, a mentally handicapped man from Lichtenberg was convicted as Peggy’s murderer, but he was released ten years later in a retrial. Only 15 years after the disappearance did a mushroom picker find Peggy’s body in a forest on the border between Bavaria and Thuringia.
But even that did not bring any breakthrough in the investigation. On the contrary, at times the confusion became even greater: A DNA trace at the site where the corpse was found temporarily even linked the case to the crimes of the right-wing extremist terrorist cell NSU, which turned out to be a forensic technology glitch. The DNA of NSU terrorist Uwe Böhnhardt had reached Peggy’s location through a contaminated folding rule.
Another suspect became the focus of the police. Although he initially admitted to having brought Peggy’s body to the wooded area, he later recanted this confession and was released. In October 2020, the police and public prosecutor’s office finally closed the file cover, and the Peggy case has been a “cold case” ever since.
According to their own statements, the police have followed 6,400 investigation tracks over the years and conducted around 3,600 interrogations. Specialists prepared 250 reports, the investigative documents fill around 450 files.
The girl’s body has since been released, said a spokesman for the Bayreuth public prosecutor’s office on Monday. Peggy’s family now expressly thanked the special police commission that had recently investigated the case: “Our special thanks go to the employees of SOKO III for the trusting cooperation and that they kept their promise and brought Peggy home.”