by Two 23-year-old young Germans—a man and a woman—were arrested by German police after a case that shocked Germany and comes down to a line: to solve family problems and start a new life, a young woman sought out a woman similar to you and murdered her to fake his own death.
According to the correspondent of the American station NBC in Germany, the case was baptized by the German press as a “double homicide”. On that TV, criminology professor Fiona Brookman explained that she had never come across a case with these characteristics, as it was an unprecedented situation in a reality that is already very rare: less than 10% of homicides are committed by women and situations where the victims are also women are even rarer.
The case dates back to the summer of last year, specifically on August 16, 2022, when the woman’s parents (whose identity has not been released by police under German data protection law) discovered the body of what they thought was a 23-year-old . eldest daughter, in the car, dead after a violent knife attack.
The body discovered by the couple underwent an autopsy – and that’s when the mystery began to deepen. According to a police statement cited by NBC, the autopsy “raised serious doubts about the identity of the woman.”
A few days later, the police knocked on the couple’s door to give them good news: their daughter was not dead after all. “We were so happy. We thought she was dead,” the young woman’s father said, according to German tabloid Bild.
But the story would take a new turn a little later: the daughter was not the victim, but the author of the crime. The police arrested the 23-year-old and another person of the same age as suspects in the crime. The two are in custody, according to a police statement released this week.
Now, after months of investigation by German police, the contours of the heinous crime are beginning to emerge. According to authorities, the 23-year-old wanted to leave home and change her life to escape family problems.
“I can confirm that the accused 23-year-old woman was apparently planning to start a new life due to family issues,” a police spokesperson told NBC. To do this, the woman created several accounts on social networks, which she ran from end to end in search of someone “as similar to her as possible”.
“Inquiries revealed contact with several young women over a period of several weeks,” the spokesman said, adding that the young woman was able to “arrange a date with the victim”.
Once the target was selected – a young woman of German and Iraqi nationality living in the Heilbronn area – the woman and her partner, both 23, drove to the victim’s home and tricked her into taking her with them and killed her. The knife. The body was then left in the young woman’s car, who fled to her new life.
Initially, these two cases were treated separately — a disappearance and a homicide — but it is now known that the two cases were related and that the missing young woman was, in fact, a homicide victim and that the alleged victim was the mass murderer.
