She would now be 45 years old: Sonja Engelbrecht from Munich. On the night of April 10th to 11th, 1995, the then 19-year-old college student disappeared without a trace. Since then, the parents have been desperately looking for her, the murder commission of the Munich police investigated – in vain. Now it is clear: Sonja Engelbrecht is dead.
A forest worker found a human thigh bone in a wooded area in the Upper Bavarian town of Kipfenberg (Eichstätt district), which, after another DNA analysis, could be unequivocally assigned to the woman who had disappeared from Munich. The police have been searching the wooded area in the Altmühltal since morning hours. Dog handlers are just as active as the riot police, a total of around a hundred officers. The search is said to last until dark and will continue for the next few days.
It is one of the longest unexplained “cold cases” of the Munich police. Homicide chiefs came and went, the mystery of the young woman’s disappearance remained: serial killer? Hitchhikers? Act of relationship? Hundreds of leads were followed, and well over 100 witnesses were heard. On April 11, 1995, the 19-year-old went from a party to Stiglmaierplatz with her companion, a school friend who was two years younger than her, at around 2.30 a.m. She wanted to call her sister from a phone booth while her friend was taking the tram away.
Most recently, Sonja Engelbrecht is said to have stood in a telephone booth – but her sister did not receive a call. After that, every trace was lost. After several television broadcasts, the homicide squad received some leads. Several women had reported who had been approached by a man on the night of the crime. That was in 2003 – the then head of the homicide squad was still confident that he would “be able to close the Engelbrecht case in a month or two”.
In the summer of 2020, a forest worker who was marking trees discovered an open bone. It was a human thigh bone. A recent new DNA analysis then revealed that it was a remnant of the missing. Sonja Engelbrecht’s death is therefore a certainty. But what happened the night they disappeared remains a mystery for the time being.