Twenty-one-year-old trainee nurse Frauke Liebs was spending the evening of June 20th, 2006 at a pub in the city center of Paderborn, Germany with a friend; they were watching a World Cup match on the television and having a few drinks.
At some point during the night, Frauke noted that the battery in her phone was dying, and borrowed the battery belonging to her friend. She returned it not long before leaving the pub at around eleven p.m., ostensibly to walk to her home, which was less than a mile away.
More than an hour later, at twelve-forty-nine a.m., Frauke’s roommate received a text from Frauke, in which she said she would be home later. It was subsequently determined that this text had been sent from Nieheim, a city nearly twenty-two miles from Paderborn.
Despite what the message said, Frauke never arrived home that night, and failed to show up for work the next day, at which point her mother reported her missing. Eerily, Frauke would call her roommate five times over the ensuing days, always claiming she would be home soon. When questioned for more specific information, Frauke would become evasive. Authorities were later able to trace these calls to different industrial areas around Paderborn.
The last phone call arrived on June 27th, 2006, and it so happened that Franke’s sister was present, and spoke to Frauke over the phone. The sister asked whether Frauke was being held against her will, to which Frauke allegedly whispered, “Yes,” before forcefully shouting, “No!” The call then suddenly cut off, and no more communications from her were forthcoming.
Months later, on October 4th, Frauke’s skeletal remains were discovered in the woods next to a state road near Lichtenau. Though cause of death could not be determined due to the state of decomposition, Frauke was still wearing the same clothes she had last been seen alive in, leading investigators to hypothesize that she had been abducted shortly after leaving the pub and held captive somewhere around Neiheim for some undetermined amount of time. Her other belongings, including her cell phone, purse, and jewelry, were never recovered.
Though there were initially five strong suspects in the crime, eventually all were cleared once their alibis were confirmed. The murder of Frauke Liebs, then, remains a complete mystery.
Crime Immemorial 