Ingrid Liebs doesn’t want to anymore. 17 years after her dead daughter was found, the former headmistress will shut down the website calling for witnesses in a few weeks. Her daughter’s badly decomposed body was found on October 4, 2006 in a forest south-east of Paderborn near Lichtenau. For years, the unsolved murder of Frauke Liebs has been one of the best-known “cold cases” in German criminal history.
“The anniversary is a good time to let go. From my point of view, I have done everything to find who is responsible for Frauke’s death,” said the retired teacher of the German Press Agency. The conclusion of the 70-year-old after a three-year search: “I couldn’t get anyone else to speak.” Ingrid Liebs had placed several photos of her daughter on the website, with the caption “Who murdered Frauke Liebs in June 2006?”
“There is no reliable evidence of such accomplices. But I can’t imagine that there aren’t any. Logically, there must be people who have noticed something. Because my daughter was held captive for at least a week,” says dear.
“Frauke Liebs – the search for the murderer” is the new series podcast from the star. Reporter Dominik Stawski tells the story of this crime in detail and follows up on open tracks and new clues.
All 13 episodes of the podcast are already available for free on RTL Musik.
You can also get the episodes here at stern.de and the podcast platforms Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music. Another episode appears every Tuesday.
What happened? In the summer of 2006, Frauke Liebs watched a World Cup match on TV with friends in a pub in downtown Paderborn. Around 11:00 p.m., she made her way home alone to her apartment, which was about 1.2 kilometers away in the south-west of downtown. The student nurse, who was considered reliable, never arrived there. Her mother filed a missing person report the next day.
In the first week after her disappearance, Frauke called her roommate several times and still spoke to family members on her cell phone. The investigators assume that the perpetrator was near Frauke. Months later, on October 4, 2006, a hunter found the 21-year-old’s body in a forest.
The public prosecutor responsible at the time, Ralf Vetter, who was responsible for the Lügde abuse case 13 years later at the Detmold public prosecutor’s office, said after the investigation was completed: “At the site where the heavily skeletonized corpse was found, no traces of evidence that would point to a suspect could be found. To this day The victim’s personal belongings are still missing: a Nokia cell phone, a Fossil watch and a black handbag.”
Vetter continues: “Ultimately, we lack the witness who saw the victim and the perpetrator together.” In June 2007, a year after the young woman’s disappearance, the police dissolved the homicide unit. Eleven investigators checked 700 clues and clues. Manager Ralf Östermann spoke of a bad track and a difficult starting position. Up to this point, over 1000 people had been contacted, questioned and interrogated – without success.
This is where Frauke’s mother started with her website – so far in vain. There were always hints to her that were not sustainable. “A caller said he saw my daughter with a man at the edge of the forest on Thursday after Frauke’s disappearance. When I asked, it turned out that that couldn’t be because he had to admit that he was the woman he had seen , couldn’t even describe it. When I told him that, he got rude to me too.”
She had been insulted and insulted in recent years when she expressed doubts about the accuracy of the information. “Once a person sent me 45 e-mails that were only partially tolerable. None of this was verifiable because the person gave neither an e-mail address nor their name.”
Every email that comes in gives hope at first. “But then when you read it, you often get annoyed when the emails aren’t viable again because they don’t have any verifiable personal content. I don’t want that anymore. There are of course well-intentioned, empathetic emails too, but unfortunately they’re true You don’t get anywhere either. That wears you down in the long run,” says Ingrid Liebs, describing the experiences of the last three years, during which she was hoping for new information with the help of the website.
In 2021 and 2022, the police followed up on new leads. Ingrid Liebs had her say in a TV documentary, triggering numerous reactions. But here, too, the key to solving the disappearance of the young woman did not materialize.
Murder is not subject to a statute of limitations in German criminal law. And so no files are closed by the police or the public prosecutor’s office. At the Paderborn public prosecutor’s office, Kai Uwe Waschkies keeps an eye on the files. “The Frauke Liebs murder case, which still moves people in the Paderborn district and beyond after many years, also has a special meaning for me as the responsible capital department head of the Paderborn public prosecutor’s office. It is certainly one of the best-known murder cases in the Paderborn district and due to the behavior of the perpetrators is also extremely interesting from a criminalistic and psychological point of view,” says the public prosecutor. He does not give up. “I still have the right to clarify the murder case and I don’t want to put it on record.”
Liebs describes herself as sad in relation to her dead daughter, but not as fundamentally desperate in life. Important anchor points in her life are her son, her second daughter, the grandchild and her partner. She upholds the appeal to perpetrators or those who know about it to come forward.
