On that Monday evening, April 10, 1995, Sonja Engelbrecht left her parents’ apartment in Munich at around 8:45 p.m. The 19-year-old has an appointment with a friend. She meets him at the main train station. The two take the subway to a bar where they meet two friends. After that evening, the four of them celebrate in the apartment of one of these friends until they leave the apartment building at around two o’clock.
According to testimonies from her friend, Sonja stopped at a phone booth on Stiglmaierplatz on the way back to call her sister or her parents, and her friend jumped into an approaching tram. There is no proof that Sonja actually calls anyone. The fact is that the young woman does not return home that night.
25 long years pass before there is finally a trace – and at the same time sad certainty: Sonja is dead. A forest worker finds a bone in a forest near Kipfenberg-Grösdorf in the Eichstätt district – around 100 kilometers north of Munich – which the police round a year later than her femur can identify. A large-scale search operation is then started, but this is interrupted in winter.
When she is taken in again, police officers find Sonja’s remains in a crevice in the rock. Police suspect she was the victim of a sex crime and that she was killed the night she disappeared and her naked body was hidden wrapped in garbage bags and tarps. The remains of a ceiling are also found.
Even 28 years after her disappearance, the police are still looking for clues in the unsolved case. What happened that night? The investigators have offered a reward of 10,000 euros for information that leads to the clarification of the crime or the arrest of the perpetrator. On Wednesday, March 1, the case will be discussed as part of the ZDF special “Aktenzeichen XY … Cold Cases” (8:15 p.m.).
In addition to the Sonja Engelbrecht case, it also shows three other unsolved cases:
Here, too, the police are hoping for information from viewers of the show.
Watch the video: Packed up and sunk in the water – the corpse of a small child floated in the Danube for weeks. The boy’s identity is a mystery to investigators. A profiler explains in the video the actions of the police.
Sources: ZDF, Bavarian police, sonja-engelbrecht.de, dpa
