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The 9-year-old girl was last seen walking home from school in 2001. Her disappearance puzzled police and became one of the most mysterious missing child cases in Germany. Now, investigators are closing the case.
The German police have ended their investigation into the fate of Peggy K., almost 20 years after the schoolgirl disappeared from a town in the eastern state of Thuringia.
“After more than 19 years, this ends a complex investigation that attracted a high level of attention across the country and was repeatedly in the public eye,” the Bayreuth prosecutor’s office said in a statement Thursday.
Peggy was 9 years old when she disappeared while walking home from school on May 7, 2001.
Fifteen years later, part of his skeleton was found by a man collecting mushrooms in a forest near his hometown of Lichtenberg. The police never came to a conclusion about the cause of his death, or who may have had something to do with it.
Various suspects
Investigations have focused on multiple suspects in the 19 years since Peggy disappeared. The suspicion has also been based on acquaintances of Peggy’s family.
A man with a mental disability was found guilty of her murder in 2004, only to be acquitted in a retrial ten years later.
Police also found traces of DNA belonging to a member of the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Socialist Underground at the site where Peggy’s remains were found. But that link was later attributed to contamination of the evidence.
In 2018, a man admitted to hiding the girl’s body in the forest, but denied killing her. The suspect told police that he had taken the body of a friend at a bus stop in Lichtenberg and had tried to revive the girl, before wrapping her in a red blanket and driving into the woods. He later retracted that confession.
According to the Public Ministry, there was insufficient evidence that he was “the author or had participated in the death of Peggy K.” He added that other potential crimes, such as obstruction of justice, could not be brought to trial because the statute of limitations has already expired.
Peggy’s disappearance in 2001 sparked a long-range search, which lasted for weeks and even involved the deployment of German air force planes to help. Hundreds of policemen were dispatched to comb caves and forests in the surrounding region.
The public sent dozens of tips, but most of the clues led to dead ends.
