The new information about the death of the baker’s apprentice Klaus Berninger concerns a person from his personal environment who was already the focus of the investigation more than 30 years ago. A police spokesman said Tuesday. There is no concrete suspicion, but the assumption that this person has something to do with the crime on December 20, 1990 or knows something about it.
The investigators also assumed that there are people who could say something about the case, but deliberately do not do it or lie to the police. The spokesman did not give any details about the identity of those affected.
After the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY… Unsolved” last week, the police received around 200 tips about the “cold case”. According to the police spokesman, the mail order catalog from which Berninger had ordered a knife about a year before his death could now also be found. According to the police, this switchblade could also have played a role in the crime, it has disappeared. The knife found during a search at the crime scene in spring 2022 was not, the spokesman said. It is not publicly known what role this knife might have played in the case.
The investigators believe that several people are responsible for the death of the 16-year-old and that the perpetrators came from the victim’s environment, partly because the youth from Wörth am Main (Miltenberg district) was killed extremely brutally. Berninger disappeared after visiting a youth club. Three days later, two riders found his body in a forest near the small town on the Bavarian-Hessian border. The body showed signs of battle.
Murder does not become statute-barred, and so old cases, so-called cold cases, are brought up again and again – the police have been investigating Klaus Berninger’s unexplained death more intensively since spring 2022.