Early June of 1976 would feature a shocking multiple homicide in Switzerland that remains officially unsolved, though developments in the 1990s might have highlighted a culprit, if not a motive.
Over the Pentecost weekend of 1976, a family of five—consisting of sixty-two-year-old Elsa Clara Siegrist-Säckinger, her sixty-three-year-old husband Eugen, Eugen’s eighty-year-old sister Anna Westhäuser-Siegrist, and Anna’s two sons, fifty-two-year old Emanuel Westhäuser, and forty-nine-year-old Max Westhäuser—were inexplicably gunned down in their vacation cottage in the forest of Seewen, in Solothurn, Switzerland. All the victims were killed by multiple shots to the head from a Winchester rifle, and two of the victims were also shot in the chest.
The massacre was discovered on June 6th by a woman taking a walk through the forest. Four of the bodies were still inside the house, while the fifth had been rolled up in a carpet and left on the terrace.
Authorities were stunned by the calculating and cold-blooded attack and speculated that perhaps Elsa and Eugen had been targeted for execution for whatever reason, and that the other family members were simply killed because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
An early person of interest was brought to detectives’ attention not long after the murders. This was an individual named Adolf “Johnny” Siegrist, a relative of Elsa and Eugen who allegedly bore a personal grudge against them. Johnny Siegrist had reportedly asked to borrow a pistol from a business partner of his named Hans Blaser and was thought to have purchased ammunition that would fit an Italian Winchester rifle approximately three weeks prior to the massacre.
Johnny Siegrist was briefly taken into custody but was released after insufficient evidence could be found linking him directly to the crime. He died sometime in the mid-1980s, having never been charged in the so-called Seewen Murder Case.
However, in 1996, there was a startling revelation in the investigation, which remains the largest unsolved homicide case in Swiss history. Late that year, police recovered an Italian Winchester rifle behind the walls of a home belonging to a family named Doser. Upon closer inspection, it was found that this was the same weapon which had fired the rounds that had killed the five victims in the Seewen cottage.
The rifle was eventually linked back to a man named Carl Doser, who in 1996 was living in Basel. Doser had bought the rifle in 1973, and although he had been questioned not long after the murders had taken place, he told police that he had sold the gun at a flea market before the crime had occurred.
Despite the rifle being found concealed in a residence Carl Doser had once lived in, detectives were unable to gather enough other evidence connecting Doser to the victims and demonstrating a motive for why he might have killed them. It was also never established with any certainty whether Carl Doser was acquainted with Johnny Siegrist, and whether the two men had perhaps worked together to perpetrate the slaughter.
Though investigators and much of the Swiss public believe that Carl Doser and possibly Johnny Siegrist are the most likely assailants, the Seewen Murder Case still stands as formally unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 