She is gone. There has been no trace of Rebecca Reusch for three years. On February 18, 2019, the then 15-year-old disappeared. She wanted to go to school but never got there. Investigators assume the girl is dead. The criminalistic experience suggests that the student is no longer alive, says Martin Glage, the investigating public prosecutor, of the Berliner Zeitung.
What happened that February morning is still unclear. The only accused for the investigators is the brother-in-law of the young people. According to the prosecutor, there is still initial suspicion against the man, who has already been arrested twice and released again. “We assume that he is responsible for Rebecca’s disappearance and very likely her death,” explains Glage.
Before she disappeared, the student had stayed with her sister in the house in the Britz district of Neukölln. Her sister’s 27-year-old husband is said to have been at a party that night and only got home in the early hours of the morning. At that time, Rebecca’s sister was apparently already on her way to work. The man is said to have later testified that he went straight to sleep at home. But the investigators found out that the young man had apparently still watched porn.
And his car was detected by the automatic license plate recognition system (KESY) on Autobahn 12 at relevant times – on the day of Rebecca’s disappearance and the day after. “He lied when he said he was at home, asleep. In fact, he was driving on the Autobahn,” says Glage. It was the brother-in-law’s car, no one else had access to it.
Last fall, the parents of the missing student reported their daughter’s disappearance in an RTL television documentary. The mother stated that she tried to wake Rebecca by phone in the morning. But the student did not answer her cell phone. The son-in-law, who then called, is said to have told the mother that Rebecca was already gone. She left home to go to school. Prosecutor Martin Glage has another suspicion: “In our estimation, Rebecca did not leave the house alive.”
On the day of her disappearance, Rebecca’s family filed a missing person’s report with the police. But nothing happened at first. “If we had searched the house immediately, we would have been accused of not acting with a sense of proportion,” says Glage today. In Berlin, young people are often reported missing. A total of 10,236 missing person reports were filed with the police last year. Most of them, namely 4634 ads, concerned young people up to the age of 18. Most of those who disappeared turned up again.
Disappeared in Neukölln
Not so Rebecca. She is not the only young person who disappeared in Berlin years ago without an oath:
For example, there has been no trace of Manuel Schadwald for almost 29 years. The then 12-year-old was last seen on June 24, 1993. He left his parents’ apartment in Tempelhof and made his way to the FEZ leisure center in Wuhlheide. He didn’t get there.
The police used sniffer dogs to search the forest in Wuhlheide, among other things. Because the boy liked to play on computers in department stores and in the FEZ, investigators questioned numerous salespeople and supervisors – without a result.
According to research by the Dutch daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, he is said to have been seen by several witnesses in the Rotterdam and Amsterdam child porn scene in the mid-1990s. The police also followed rumors that the child had been killed. The police still have no trace of him. The Manuel Schadwald case is likely to be closed next year. Every missing person report is stored in the police information system for 30 years.
Sandra Wißmann from Kreuzberg is also registered as “missing” in the police computer. She was also twelve when she disappeared on the afternoon of November 28, 2000. She had been on the Kottbusser Damm in Kreuzberg with her mother. At the corner of Böckhstrasse, where they lived, they parted ways. The girl wanted to buy her mother, whose birthday was two days later, a birthday present at Karstadt am Hermannplatz. At 4.40 p.m. the child was seen again by school friends on Kottbusser Damm. Since then there has been no trace of him.
Because the girl was considered reliable and she had a good relationship with her mother, the police quickly assumed that she must have been a victim of a crime. A homicide commission from the State Criminal Police Office took over the investigation. A large number of police officers searched the area – basements, attics, hallways. Policemen put up wanted posters. They interviewed several convicted sex offenders. But that didn’t get her any further.
In November 2001, the case was the subject of the ZDF program “Aktenzeichen XY… unsolved”. Numerous tips were received by the police. But they achieved nothing.
A picture of Sandra Wißmann can still be seen on the police website, showing the twelve-year-old in a blue quilted winter jacket. “The investigations of the State Criminal Police Office did not lead to any concrete clues to the fate of the girl,” it says. “It is assumed that Sandra Wißmann was the victim of a capital crime.”
murder without a body
On the other hand, there was already sad certainty in Georgine Krüger’s missing person case, which has now been cleared up. The 13-year-old from Moabit disappeared on September 25, 2006. She was on her way home from school. Witnesses saw them get off the bus in Moabit. Then their trail was lost. Her cell phone was switched off. Using the retrograde connection data, investigators knew it was last near the apartment. Georgine was also considered reliable. A homicide squad quickly took over the case.
For ten years, the investigations were fruitless. It was not until 2016 that the homicide commission received information that Ali K., a man from the neighborhood, had been sentenced to probation for sexual assault. He had molested a 17-year-old in the basement. At the end of 2018, the victim explained in the newspaper BZ that she had told detectives that Ali K. could have had something to do with Georgine’s disappearance. They would have reacted with disinterest.
As early as 2009, K. is said to have molested two eleven and 13-year-old girls in the neighborhood, which led to a criminal complaint. In 2014, he reportedly tried to drag another girl, then 14, into his basement. This youth also went to the police. But the officials only wrote an activity report at the time, which said: “No criminal offense recognizable.” In addition, the accused had no criminal record.
The public prosecutor’s office and the police rejected the allegations that they had acted too late or not at all. According to the sex criminal law of the time, there was no criminal offence.
In the spring of 2016, a homicide detective checked the files and came across the 2011 sexual offense committed against the 17-year-old. Because of the basement’s proximity to where Georgine disappeared, investigators looked again at Ali K. They interviewed victims and witnesses from 2009 and 2011 again. They then put an undercover agent on the man, who was “wired” by court order and taped Ali K. confessing to him about Georgine’s murder. A radio cell analysis showed that his mobile phone was in the same place as Georgine’s phone at the time of the crime.
Ali K. was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 2020 by the Berlin district court for rape and murder. In December of the same year, the Federal Court of Justice declared the verdict final. Georgine’s body was never found.
In the Rebecca case, too, the investigators hope for clarification. The police checked several variants: According to Glage, however, there were no indications that the girl had run away from home, nor that she had been dragged into the car by a stranger on the way to school. “It’s not impossible, but unlikely,” says prosecutor Glage.
The investigators followed a number of clues: they searched the forests and lakes not far from the A12 for the girl, divers and mantrailers supported them. The investigators finally turned to the public with a photo. As a result, people reported to the police who wanted to see Rebecca in different places – sometimes in Magdeburg, sometimes in Cologne. Investigators say this is normal for public searches.
The clues didn’t work. But the Rebecca missing person case is not a so-called “cold case” for the investigators. The prosecutor says the homicide squad is still involved, although not as intensively as at the beginning of the investigation.