On October 11th, 1991, a sixty-two-year-old man by the name of Colin Oliver was walking from Cuckfield back to his home in Burgess Hill, via Broxmead Lane in the village of Bolney, in Sussex. As he wandered a little way off the road to urinate, he was horrified to discover part of a human body rolled up in a scrap of bloody carpet.
The victim was found to have been beheaded, and his hands had also been removed, either with an axe or with bolt cutters. Neither the head nor the hands have ever been found, and police speculated that the killer had removed the body parts in order to complicate identification.
The dead man—who would eventually be christened the Bolney Torso—was believed to be between thirty-five and forty-five years old, but most likely in his late thirties. He was white, stood about five-foot-seven with a strong upper body but a protruding belly, and had a somewhat Scandinavian appearance. He also had a mole that was vaguely star-shaped on his right thigh.
Investigators were making no progress on identifying the victim, but before the year was out, they did get an intriguing lead on a suspect.
It so happened that a real estate agent who had been in charge of a property on Copyhold Lane—about a mile and a half from where the Bolney Torso was found—became suspicious when the tenants who had been renting the house suddenly abandoned it on October 9th. The tenants had been a German man named Gunter Josef Knieper and his girlfriend, Kornelia Maria Teusel. The pair had rented the house in September of 1991, paying six months’ rent in advance; a sum of about ten-thousand pounds.
During the inquiry into these individuals, police discovered that Knieper had been using an alias—Dr. Matthias Herrman—and additionally was wanted for questioning in connection with a series of fraud charges in Ireland and Germany.
Not only that, but when investigators searched the rental house in Sussex, they found an issue of Penthouse magazine that had an article about dismembering bodies in it, and the pages containing the article had various numbers written on them.
Knieper, as well as three other German nationals thought to be involved in the prior fraud allegations, were eventually arrested, though all denied having anything to do with the murder of the Bolney victim. Aside from the magazine, no other physical evidence tying Knieper to the crime has ever been discovered, and he has never been charged in the case.
In 1995, an anonymous person left flowers and a note on the grave of the Bolney Torso victim. The note read, “For the unknown male, Peter and team, remember our loss.” This clue has never been unraveled.
In 2009, there was a small breakthrough in the case when DNA analysis of the remains suggested that the victim was originally from southern Germany, but had likely spent the last year of his life in the United Kingdom, or living somewhere along the French-German border. Detectives were also later able to establish that the victim had likely been dressed after he was already dead, and that the clothing he was found in did not belong to him.
The case seems to have hit a wall as of 2011, and no further developments have been announced in the years since then.
Crime Immemorial 