It was approximately six p.m. on Friday, December 17th, 1971 and a man named Werner Schmidt had just dropped off his daughter Patricia—also answering to the nickname Susi—at the home of her friend, sixteen-year-old Frieda Piechnick. Mr. Schmidt then went on to his job as a bartender at the German Club in Adelaide, South Australia.
The two girls hung out at the Piechnick home for a couple of hours, after which Frieda walked Patricia to the nearby Burger King, where Patricia was due to begin her work shift. Frieda then walked back home.
Patricia, meanwhile, worked her shift at the fast food restaurant, and then went outside to wait for her father to pick her up. Werner Schmidt, however, was running about ten minutes late, and by the time he arrived at the Burger King, Patricia was already gone.
At first he was not alarmed, as he figured Patricia might have walked home, or gotten a ride with someone else. As a matter of fact, though Werner Schmidt did not know this at the time, Patricia had told her friend Frieda that on the previous Tuesday, she had gotten a ride home with an unattractive man in his thirties who drove a “flash car” and had wanted to take her to Adelaide Hills, though he dropped her off in front of her house after she turned down his offer.
On this particular Friday, though, Patricia never arrived home after work, and at approximately nine-thirty a.m. on the morning of December 18th, her family reported her missing. About nine hours later, her dead body was found on a dirt road near Hallett Cove, south of Adelaide.
Patricia Schmidt had been raped and murdered. She was found naked except for her boots, though her sweater and coat had been draped over her body, and her bra was hanging from a nearby fence. The purse she’d been carrying was never located.
One odd detail that investigators noted was that there were traces of white and pink paint on her body, as well as small fragments of metal, such as nickel and nickel silver. Authorities conjectured that perhaps she had been killed in some type of workshop—such as that specializing in engraving or key cutting—before her body was dumped along the dirt track.
Police attempted to locate the individual who had allegedly given Patricia a ride home from work on the Tuesday prior to her death, but had no luck, and it seemed that once this single precious lead had been exhausted, no more were forthcoming, and the slaying of sixteen-year-old Patricia Schmidt was added to the tally of the nearly one-hundred unsolved murders still on the books in South Australia.
In more recent years, authorities have announced that they have successfully extracted a DNA profile of the culprit or culprits and are attempting to utilize genealogical searching in order to solve the decades-old case. Additionally, there is still a one-million-dollar reward available for anyone providing information leading to a conviction.
Crime Immemorial 