arrest
Missing wife’s body found in husband’s house after seven years
Flowers, candles and a photo showing Dorota G. are placed in front of the house where she lived with her husband
© Rolf Vennenbernd / DPA
A woman disappears without a trace and her husband is suspected of having committed a crime. But the body is nowhere to be found. After seven years, the police have apparently found out about the alleged perpetrator.
In the case of Dorota G., who has been missing since 2016, the Aachen police have now secured her body and arrested a suspect. This is the now 41-year-old husband of Woman. He is therefore strongly suspected of having treacherously murdered his wife in Süsterseel in the Heinsberg district in October 2016 and having hidden the body. As senior public prosecutor Katja Schlenkermann-Pitts reported in Aachen on Tuesday, the police had their sights set on the man from the start. The difficulty, however, was that a body could not be found. A search of the man’s house in the small town of Süsterseel on the German-Dutch border initially yielded no clues.
“We never stopped investigating and followed up on every tip,” said a spokeswoman for the public prosecutor’s office. The man has now been taken into custody.
Suspect is silent
Today, the police and prosecutors suspect that the man took the body of the then 29-year-old out of the house immediately after the crime and hid it in an unknown location. At the time, the man stated that his wife had left the house and had not returned.
He aroused renewed suspicion some time ago by renting a new apartment in Geilenkirchen, but kept the house in Süsterseel despite financial problems. During a search of his new home, the woman’s badly decomposed body was found in a bag in a shed, Schlenkermann-Pitts said. When the old house in Süstserseel was searched again, sniffer dogs struck the attic, so investigators suspect that the body was also stored there in the meantime.
The suspect has been silent so far and has not provided any information, said Schlenkermann-Pitts. The public prosecutor’s office assumes the murder characteristic of insidiousness. One could suspect jealousy or at least personal relationship disputes as a motive, but one has to wait for the main hearing here. According to media reports, the woman wanted to leave the man for someone else.
The now 14-year-old son of the victim and the alleged perpetrator is looked after by the youth welfare office. Flowers were laid and candles set up in front of the house in Süsterseel on Tuesday.