Crime Immemorial

It was the spring of 2001, and Peggy Knobloch was nine years old. She lived with her mother, sister, and stepfather in the town of Lichtenberg, Bavaria.

Because both of her parents worked, Peggy was in the habit of going to a neighbor’s house after getting off the school bus in the afternoon, to wait for her mother to come home. On May 7th, the child got off the bus as usual at about one-twenty p.m. and began covering the short distance toward home, carrying her jacket, a satchel, and a Barbie doll. Shortly thereafter, though, the little girl completely disappeared, and her ultimate fate remained unknown for fourteen years, during which time the case became known as the “German Madeleine McCann.”

Police searched the entire surrounding area for her in vain over the ensuing week, and subsequently even utilized military aircraft with highly specialized cameras to scan the environs, looking for any sign of her. Tragically, their efforts amounted to nothing, largely because the terrain surrounding the family home was extremely dense and unforgiving.

There were few leads at the time Peggy went missing, though two young boys did tell investigators that they thought they saw the child getting into a red Mercedes with Czech plates. Although law enforcement then expanded their search to the Czech Republic, they again came up completely empty.

Later that same year, a local man with an intellectual disability was caught by his mother in the act of molesting a seven-year-old boy. The man told his mother that he had also molested Peggy Knobloch, and that he had later tried to apologize to her, but panicked when she attempted to run away. He claimed that he then accidentally suffocated her. After his mother reported this confession, the man was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he was repeatedly questioned by police. Authorities arrested him in October of 2002, and two years later, he was convicted of the murder of Peggy Knobloch, in spite of the fact that he had recanted his confession in the meantime.

In 2014, however, his conviction was overturned, after a retrial determined that the man’s confession had been coerced, and that he had been questioned multiple times without an attorney present.

Finally, in summer of 2016, a man out foraging for mushrooms came across the skeletal remains of Peggy Knobloch in a heavily wooded area, after the bones had been dug up by wild animals. The site where the body was found lay less than ten miles from the girl’s home.

Months after the body was discovered, police announced that DNA recovered from the scene seemed to link the murder to neo-Nazi terrorist Uwe Böhnhardt, who had died in 2011 in an apparent murder-suicide. Not long after this revelation, however, authorities retracted this information, stating that the DNA had more likely been transferred to the site on some unspecified piece of police equipment.

In 2018, there was seemingly another false lead when an unnamed man reported to police that another man had led him to Peggy Knobloch, who at that time was stashed at a bus stop. This man supposedly found Peggy barely alive and attempted to rescuscitate her, but failed to do so, and then took her dead body deep into the woods to hide it, so he wouldn’t be blamed for her death. The man also claimed he had burned the little girl’s jacket and satchel. Though officers followed up on this information, the man eventually also retracted his confession, and was released when no further evidence could be found connecting him to the crime.

In 2020, police announced that they were shelving the investigation, all but guaranteeing that the murder of Peggy Knobloch will remain forever unsolved.