Almost 22 years after the disappearance of the girl Peggy, the mother is now demanding compensation for pain and suffering. She has filed a civil suit before the Hof District Court – against the man who admitted in 2018 that he had taken the girl’s body to a wooded area in May 2001 and later retracted this confession. A corresponding procedure is pending before the regional court, said a spokesman for the court on Monday in Hof.
It is not yet clear when an appointment will take place in this matter, said the spokesman. There is a claim for compensation for pain and suffering of at least 75,000 euros. The man’s defense attorney confirmed receipt of the lawsuit. They will be answered “with factual arguments”, said the Hof lawyer Jörg Meringer on request.
The lawsuit may bring movement to the criminal case, which is one of the most spectacular in recent decades. A number of trials and tribulations accompanied the investigation. A perpetrator has not yet been convicted. The girl Peggy, then nine years old, disappeared in May 2001 on her way home from school in Lichtenberg in Upper Franconia.
Large-scale searches were unsuccessful. The police followed a number of leads to the Czech Republic and Turkey. But the girl remained missing. 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 even briefly linked the case to the crimes of the right-wing extremist terrorist cell NSU, which then 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.
The man from whom Peggy’s mother is now demanding compensation for pain and suffering was initially held in custody in 2018, but was then released again. 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.