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Five years have passed since the quadruple murder of Rupperswil AG. Five years in which, after a feverish chase, Thomas Nick (37), the murderer of Carla Schauer († 48), his children Dion († 19) and Davin († 13) and Dion’s girlfriend, Simona F. * († 21), arrested and convicted. However, the questions remain open to this day. Much has been speculated on how investigators discovered the killer.
On Monday, the “Aargauer Zeitung” wrote: The search for an antenna, which was previously considered a crucial piece of the puzzle in the investigation of the Rupperswil murders, was really only one indication of several. The expensive search method determines which cell phones were connected to the transmitter masts near the crime scene at the time of the crime. Although the killer’s number appeared, it was still just one in a mountain of data of around 30,000 phone numbers.
With the help of sources familiar with the case, BLICK now reveals: It was these three crucial steps that led to the arrest of Thomas Nick.
Appointment process: Thomas N. is properly maintained(03:33)
Google provided the first clue
1st step: The first major tip came from the Internet giant Google. Investigators had asked Google to obtain the IP addresses of all those computers from which the victim’s family was Google searched before the crime. The researchers say it was only thanks to the help of the American search engine that they got on the right track. Nick had searched for his victims in advance and also found information on the Internet; left a clear data trail.
When Google released this data, the researchers’ work focused primarily on the group of people who had searched the Internet for the family. Google itself does not comment on the individual case, but writes that there were five inquiries from Switzerland within six months of the event. What cases are not reported.
2nd step: Only from here did the antenna search come into play in a second step. And that too overwhelmed Thomas Nick. The unemployed dog’s movement patterns used to be regular: Thomas Nick used to walk his dogs around the same time and often passed the Schauer family home. The day of the crime, of all time, his cell phone did not connect to the usual transmission tower. Thomas Nick hadn’t gone for a walk that Monday morning as usual. The murderer had stated at trial that he had put his cell phone in flight mode before the crime. Thomas Nick’s changed movement pattern made him even more suspicious of researchers and thus became the next important piece of the puzzle.
The police set a trap for the killer
Investigators had a suspect, but no hard evidence. So they decided to set him up. It was the third and final step in solving the quadruple murder.
3rd step: According to the police source, they knew that Nick was going to Aarau and a traffic control was established between Rupperswil and Rohr AG. Nick was taken into custody, tested for alcohol and made to blow into the tube. This is how investigators got hold of the suspect’s DNA. This was immediately sent to the lab, where it was compared to the DNA found at the crime scene – a direct hit!
Access took place the next morning. About ten police officers stormed a Starbucks branch in Aarau and arrested the killer shortly before 9 a.m., exactly 146 days after the killings. Thomas Nick had already done his research on the internet and had new potential victims in his sights.
On March 16, 2018, the Lenzburg AG District Court issued the verdict: Nick was sentenced to life imprisonment plus proper custody for multiple murders, hostage-taking, sexual acts with a child, arson and other crimes.
The Aargau prosecutor declined to comment on the request. Probably also not to prevent future criminals from leaving their fingerprints on the Internet before the crime.
