Peggy Knobloch

This episode deals with a crime committed against a child. Please exercise self-care when choosing to listen.

Peggy Knobloch sipped her hot cocoa as her mother Susanne tied her hair into a ponytail ready for the school day. The 9 year old then put on her jacket and grabbed her satchel. She was about to leave the house when she paused and said to her mother that there was something important she had forgotten to say. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl looked across to her expectant mother and said, “I love you Mum”,  before quickly heading out of the front door and making her way down the street. 

Monday, May 7th 2001 was a beautiful spring day in the tiny town of Lichtenburg, in north eastern Bavaria. Peggy first walked to a local supermarket to buy a packed lunch, after which she went to school ready for the day's lessons. School finished at 12.50pm. According to journalist Annika Hinke, writing for the website Krosse-Info in 2020, Peggy was slightly late leaving school, though we do not know why. She walked home with a classmate and they separated a short distance from Peggy's house. Peggy was seen at 1.24pm in Henri-Marteau Square, approximately 50 metres from her home. This is the last official sighting of Peggy, though reports of other sightings of the little girl continue throughout that afternoon and into the early evening. 

We don't know when concern was first raised about Peggy's absence but at 7pm, Susanne Knobloch, Peggy's mother, called the police to report her daughter missing.

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The next month witnessed an intense search of Lichtenberg and the surrounding region. The town is situated in the district of Hof, in Upper Franconia and lies within the Frankenwald nature park. The area has many rivers, hills and forests and it was not easy ground for emergency services to cover. The military were called in to help and Bundeswehr Tornado fighter jets were used to cover the vast wilderness. No trace of Peggy was found. The attention of investigators then turned closer to home.

During a press conference a distraught Susanne said something off the cuff which raised police suspicions about the family. Susanne posed a question regarding who would have to pay for the search if it turned out that Peggy had simply run away, as opposed to being abducted. As soon as the press conference finished the hand of a law enforcement officer was placed on Susanne’s shoulder and she was led away to be questioned. 

This was the start of a nightmare for Susanne and Peggy’s father, Mario Schwenk. They both came under intense scrutiny as rumours began circulating that they may have been involved in some way with their daughter’s disappearance. Susanne is described as a single mother and did not live with Peggy's father.

Exact details of the German authorities' theories concerning the family are unclear but Krosse- Info reported in 2020 that one avenue explored by investigators was that Peggy may have been taken to Turkey by her father. They suggested this was because of a parental disagreement over her upbringing. Investigators travelled to Turkey and also to the Czech Republic following leads. Speaking in 2021, Peggy's father says it was a witch hunt against him and the family. After numerous inquiries the investigating team came to the conclusion that neither Susanne or Mario had anything to do with their daughter vanishing. 

Chief Inspector Herbert Manhart of the Bayreuth prosecutor's office headed up the investigation into Peggy’s disappearance. After the family were cleared of involvement, the investigative team began taking a look at men living in Lichtenburg who had a history of offences against young girls. One of the men they brought in was the 23 year old son of a local innkeeper. He was described as Peggy's neighbour and I will refer to him as Ulvi K. 

Ulvi had suffered meningitis as a child which had resulted in brain damage. This left Ulvi with pronounced learning disabilities. Ulvi had been caught exposing himself to young girls and was undergoing therapy with a mental health professional. Manhart brought him in for questioning and Ulvi provided a solid alibi that was checked out and verified. He was dismissed as a suspect. Ulvi then went to a psychiatric facility for ongoing treatment.

As time went on with no definitive news about Peggy the strain on her mother Susanne increased. The distraught parent could not bring herself to even enter her daughter’s bedroom because of the sense of loss and pain. When Peggy disappeared her younger sister Jasmin was just three years old. At such a young age Jasmin struggled to comprehend what had happened to the big sister she adored. In an article in Stern magazine in March 2022, now in her mid- 20’s, Jasmin recalls that following her sister's disappearance she no longer wanted to go to sleep at night. When she went shopping with her mother she would insist that they buy two of everything, one for her and one for Peggy. The family felt totally alone, unable to fully grieve and with no one able to give them answers about what had happened to Peggy.

In February 2002, with little progress having been made on the case, Herbert Manhart retired. Minister of the Interior Günther Beckstein placed the investigation under the command of Wolfgang Geier. Geier went about reviewing the progress of the investigation. The theory that his predecessor favoured was that Peggy had gotten into a car driven by a stranger passing through the town. Geier wasn’t so sure, and took another look at some of the local suspects. 

The Knobloch’s neighbour, Ulvi K, was brought back in for questioning in October 2002. He was spoken to at least 40 times without the presence of a lawyer and Ulvi ended up confessing to the murder.

He claimed that he had sexually abused Peggy three days before the murder. On the afternoon of May 7th he had waited for Peggy on her way home from school. He said he wanted to apologise to her for what he had done. On being confronted with her abuser, Peggy screamed and tried to run away. Ulvi says he panicked and strangled Peggy. He had not planned on killing the little girl, it had just happened in the heat of the moment. He did not say where he had disposed of  the body.

The audio of this confession was not recorded, even though that would have been standard practice. The recording device was faulty and not working properly. A few days later Ulvi recanted his confession. Ulvi’s parents and lawyers said that investigators had used heavy handed tactics whilst questioning him and had asked too many leading questions. 

As far as the authorities were concerned their suspect had owned up to what he had done. They wasted no time in charging Ulvi with the sexual assault and murder of Peggy Knobloch. A trial date was set for Autumn 2003. 

The trial began in October that year but due to a legal error had to be disbanded after five days. It began again the following month and continued for the next 6 months. Although a recording of Ulvi’s confession did not exist, testimony from a prominent psychiatrist proved critical in the outcome of the trial. It was his professional opinion that, due to Ulvi’s learning disabilities, he would have been unable to come up with a confession unless it was true. Ulvi K was found guilty and given a life sentence for murder. The sexual assault charges were dropped as it was deemed that his learning difficulties meant he was not accountable for these acts. Ulvi was not sent to prison but instead was placed in a secure psychiatric hospital to serve his sentence.

From the moment Ulvi K was arrested there had been unease within the community and doubts that the authorities had the right man. Many people were sceptical that he was responsible for whatever had happened to Peggy. Following his conviction, supporters of Ulvi who believed him innocent banded together to coordinate a campaign. In September 2004 a Citizens Initiative was started and supported by two investigative journalists, Ina Jung and Christoph Lemmer. The pair began to take a serious look at how Ulvi’s confession was brought about and uncovered numerous inconsistencies.

Not only had Ulvi been questioned on multiple occasions without a lawyer present but he had been interrogated using the controversial “Reid” method. This model was developed by an American psychologist and former police officer in the 1950’s. A high pressure environment is first created for the interviewee through a direct and confrontational approach. The interrogator then offers understanding and suggests possible reasons and excuses why the person may have committed the criminal act. They then offer help but only if a confession is made. The sole purpose of this method is to elicit a confession. Critics say the method leads to a high level of false confessions, especially from young people and those with learning difficulties.

Jung and Lemmer also discovered that several witnesses had claimed to have seen Peggy up until 7pm on the day she went missing. This timeline didn't match up with the confession purportedly given by Ulvi, who said he had approached the girl on her walk home from school in the early afternoon. None of the people who said they had seen Peggy later in the afternoon or in the early evening were asked to give evidence in court and their witness statements were ignored.

Ina Jung and Christoph Lemmer even found evidence suggesting that two boys who initially said they had seen Peggy at 4pm had been put under pressure by investigators to change their story. 

A key development in the quest to prove Ulvi’s innocence came in 2010, when a witness for the prosecution, who had been a fellow patient on a psychiatric ward with Ulvi, retracted his testimony. At the original trial he had said that Ulvi had confessed the murder to him.

Pressure began to mount on the authorities but it still took another two years for the Bayreuth Public Prosecutors office to announce that they had begun their own investigation into the matter. This decision was made after increased media coverage of the case, including Christian Stücken’s documentary film, “Murder Without a Body”. The following year, in April 2013, Ulvi’s legal team officially put in a 2000 page request for a retrial. Seven months later the Bayreuth Public Prosecutor's office agreed that the conviction looked unsafe and advocated for a retrial. The Bayreuth regional court agreed and ordered that a retrial should go ahead.

The trial started on 11 April 2014 and lasted a little over a month. On the 14th May Ulvi K was acquitted of murder. Due to his poor mental health he remained in a psychiatric hospital for another year but was discharged in 2015. 

The search for other possible suspects had already started while Ulvi K was still serving his sentence.. In 2012 police dug up a garden at a property in Lichtenberg and also a grave in a cemetery in the town. An article in Spiegel from September 2018 talks about two suspects in the case being questioned in September 2013. One of the people was a friend of Peggy's family and the other was this person's half brother. The public prosecutor of Bayreuth found no evidence against either of the suspects.

Jung and Lemmer detailed a suspect in their 2013 book “The Peggy case: The story of scandal”. It could be the suspect they refer to is the same family friend I've just mentioned, or they could be different people. It's hard to be definitive, as names were never released. 

The suspect put forward by the authors was 17 at the time Peggy went missing and was friends with neighbours of the Knoblochs. Several times over the summer of 2000 he had visited Lichtenberg and had befriended Peggy. He had spent quite a bit of time with her and they had done various activities together. Jung and Lemmer say that according to those close to Peggy, her behaviour changed after that summer. Peggy started wetting the bed and her mood seemed sad. These were possible indications that Peggy had been or was being abused.

Investigators did look into this suspect and apparently his story often changed regarding his whereabouts when Peggy went missing. Ultimately police dropped him as a suspect because at the time he did not have a car and would not have been able to travel to Lichtenberg from his hometown. He didn’t even have a driver's licence. 

According to Jung and Lemmer this suspect has since been found guilty of possessing indecent images of children and was also convicted of sexually abusing his own daughter and niece. They question the assumption that the suspect did not have access to a car when Peggy went missing. 

The newspaper Nordbayern stated in a 2022 article that three suspects were questioned between February and April 2014. Investigations into these people ceased in February 2015. Two months later searches took place near a dam in Saxony. This location is 40 km east of Lichtenberg. The area had been examined before in connection with Peggy's disappearance. Nothing significant came of this search. 

Fifteen years after Peggy's disappearance, the grim truth of what happened to the little girl was discovered by chance. 

On Saturday 2nd July 2016 a person was walking through a forested area between Nordhalben and Rodacherbrunn searching for mushrooms. This location is only around 14km from Peggy's home in Lichtenberg. As the person made their way through undergrowth they came upon the skeletal remains of a young girl. One hundred police officers were at the scene within hours to painstakingly search the area and complete forensic examinations.

Straight away it was speculated in the press that these were the remains of Peggy Knobloch. By the Tuesday following the find authorities were confident to announce the bones did indeed belong to Peggy.  Personal items were found at the scene which left little doubt as to their identity. DNA tests would later confirm this conclusion.

The wooded location had been searched at the time of Peggy’s disappearance. It was believed that the remains resurfaced after wild animals had traced the scent and dug up the bones. A complete skeleton was not recovered and it was thought that animals could have dispersed the bones. The Nordbayern speculated in 2019 that the body may have been dismembered  prior to being buried. The condition of the remains meant that this could not be determined. A cause of death could also not be discerned.

Speaking in Stern in March 2022, Susanne Knobloch said until that moment she had held onto some hope that her daughter would be found alive. Jasmin Knobloch, speaking in Bunte in October 2020, said that the finding of the remains brought partial relief, as they now knew that Peggy was no longer suffering. This did not lessen the pain the family felt on the confirmation of Peggy’s death.

Four months later, in November 2016, press headlines read that the murder of Peggy Knobloch had been solved. Forensic analysis had found the DNA of far-right terrorist Uwe Böhnhardt on a blanket at the crime scene. Böhnhardt had been a member of a three person terror cell belonging to the National Socialist Underground. He, along with another terrorist,Uwe Mundlos, died by suicide in 2011 after the authorities finally caught up with them. The group had murdered 10 people in total. They targeted immigrants, killing 8 Greeks and one Turk. They had also assassinated a police officer. 

When Böhnhardt’s DNA was found at the burial location, it appeared that Peggy's case had finally been solved. Especially when the third member of the cell, Beate Zschäpe,  who was behind bars and now  condemned the killings she had been involved with and the Nazi ideology that lay behind them, said she would testify about the death of a girl. 

Peggy had been found just over 300 km from Eisenach, the city where Böhnhardt had died. Police began to search Böhnhardt’s computers for connections to Peggy Knobloch and the town of Lichtenberg. The problem was that they could find nothing apart from the DNA that linked him to the crime. It was truly puzzling and left an onerous job for investigators trying to piece together what had happened.

It turned out that investigators were chasing their tails. In 2017 it was announced that Peggy’s burial site had been contaminated and Böhnhardt’s DNA was brought to the scene by the forensic team. A folding rule that was not properly cleaned  is believed to have been the vehicle that carried Böhnhardt’s DNA to the blanket at the scene. Not only was this a blow for the family but the matter was also deeply troubling and embarrassing for the Bayreuth authorities.

The setback didn’t stop the team persevering with the forensic examination of Peggy's remains and other items found nearby. In September 2018, the work they were doing led them to another suspect. This time it was not DNA evidence but microscopic fragments of both organic and manmade materials. This evidence linked to a person who was interviewed about Peggy's disappearance back in 2001. At that time he was questioned after reports came into authorities  that the man had drunkenly admitted to having buried Peggy’s body. 

Tiny particles of pollen were found on Peggy's hair which were inconsistent with the plant life on the ground where her remains were discovered. When the investigative team looked over interview notes from 2001, they came across a person who claimed that on the day of Peggy’s disappearance he had been potting plants with his mother. The suspect was from the Wunsiedel District which is almost 80 km from Lichetenberg. In May 2001, he had lived in Lichtenberg itself.

When investigators looked into this connection further it was discovered that the pollen found on Peggy's remains matched peat found on the paving stones of a garden path in the property where the man had lived in 2001. 

Fragments of paint were also identified on Peggy's clothes that were found with her remains. Tiny specks of brown, yellow-brown, violet, and green emulsion were all identified. In May 2001 the suspect was renovating his apartment ready to be let out. Investigators were able to find the online rental advert that the suspect had created back in 2001. Photographs clearly displayed that the paint fragments matched the newly decorated interior of the apartment.

Two properties owned by the man, one in 24.06  Marktleuthen in Wunsiedel and the other in Lichtenberg itself, were searched and the man was brought in for questioning.

The suspect was a 41 year old who sometimes worked as an undertaker. He was said to be part of a group of people who were looked into when Peggy first disappeared. He was reportedly a friend of Ulvi K, the man who was wrongly convicted of the crime in 2004. In 2001 the suspect's mother was a witness in the case, saying she saw Ulvi K waiting in the square at the time Peggy was walking home from school. The full identity of the man was not made public and he was referred to in press reports at the time as Manuel S.

At first Manuel S claimed he was at home on the afternoon Peggy went missing, but investigators found CCTV footage from a bank that put him out and about in Lichtenberg at 3.17pm on May 7th 2001. On 11th December 2018 after a partial confession, Manuel S was arrested in connection with Peggy's murder. Yet again there was no lawyer present during the interrogation or confession. In the alleged confession Manuel S made it clear that he did not kill Peggy but admitted to driving her body to the forest and burying it.

He told police that he had been driving in his gold coloured Audi 80 when a man who was an acquaintance flagged him down at a bus stop on Post Straße, in Lichtenberg. Manuel S said that inside the bus shelter lay the body of Peggy Knobloch. He said he tried to resuscitate the girl but his efforts were to no avail as she was already dead. At the request of his acquaintance, he wrapped the body in a red blanket and placed it in the boot of his car. He then drove to a nearby forest to bury the body. He claimed that he took the little girl's jacket and satchel back from the woods and burned them three days later. 

Daniel Götz of the Bayreuth prosecutor's office was quoted by Focus online news site in 2018 as saying they were convinced they had found the person who had taken Peggy's body to the forest.

Manuel S withdrew his confession only a few days later. The lawyer working on behalf of Manuel S, Jörg Meringer, lodged an appeal against the arrest warrant. He claimed there was no evidence proving his client murdered Peggy and that the confession had been given under pressure. 

Even if the confession was true, the evidence backed up Manuel S's story. Although by driving the body and burying it he had committed a criminal offence, the statute of limitations for these actions had expired. There was no statute of limitations for murder but there was no forensic evidence explicitly showing that he had murdered Peggy. On Christmas Eve 2018 Manuel S was released from custody. The Public prosecutor's office immediately lodged an appeal against his  release as they said there existed enough suspicion that he had killed Peggy to warrant further questioning. In February 2019 the appeal was turned down by both the District court and the Bayreuth regional court.

Although Manuel S named the man at the bus stop he said had given him Peggy's body, the police said they were not investigating anyone else in connection with the crime.

Within a year or so it began to be reported in Nordbayern online newspaper that Manuel S had told investigators it was Ulvi K who had given him Peggy’s body. The man who had already spent 10 years behind bars for her murder and had been acquitted in 2014.

Gudren Rödel, a trained paralegal and supporter of Ulvi K, acts as his official advocate. She thinks the version of events outlined by Manuel S makes no sense. The bus stop is very busy and it is implausible that a body could have been there without other people seeing it. In her opinion Ulvi K was a covenant scapegoat for Manuel S.

Over the next two years, police continued their investigations into Manuel S but they could never produce any evidence to charge him with murder. His lawyer Jörg Meringer told RTL in 2021 that the experience had ruined his client's life and that his family life would never be the same again. 

A new lead emerged in Peggy’s case following the announcement by German authorities that they had a main suspect in another unsolved child disappearance. After thirteen years of investigation by Portugal and UK based detectives, it was law enforcement officers from Braunschweig in Lower Saxony who stated Christian Brueckner was their main suspect in the abduction and assumed murder of 3 year old Madeleine McCann. The British toddler disappeared in May 2007 whilst on holiday with her family in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

Brueckner, originally from Wurzburg in Bavaria, had a history of paedophilia and was first convicted of such an offence in 1994 at age 17. Over the years he had been found guilty of a string of other offences and was in and out of prison. When not behind bars he split his time largely between southern Germany and the Algarve in Portugal. He had spent time living in Praia da Luz and his name first came up in connection with the McCann case in 2013, but he was not not seriously investigated until 2017. 

That year an abandoned factory owned by Brueckner was searched following an alleged drunken confession he made to a friend about Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Police found a store of hard drives and USB-Drives containing child abuse images. Brueckner became a suspect in various sexual assults and was jailed in 2019 after DNA evidence showed he was responsible for the rape of a 72 year old woman in Portugal in 2005. 

After naming Brueckner as their main suspect in the Madeleine McCann case, German authorities said they were looking into him for a further five murders or disappearances. These were Rene Hasee, 6, who disappeared on holiday in Aljezur, Portugal in 1996 - only 40 km from Praia da Luz where Brueckner was living at the time - Carola Titze, 16, who was murdered in Belgium in 1996, five year old Inga Gehricke who disappeared from Wilhelmshof, Germany in 2015, Monika Pawlak, 24 who was murdered in Hanover in 2010, and the murder of Peggy Knobloch.

Bayreuth Chief public prosecutor Martin Dippold told Bild in June 2020 that although there was no evidence connecting Brueckner to Peggy’s case, he was being re-examined. The choice of words here is interesting and implies that they may have looked into Brueckner in the past. It was known that Brueckner would regularly drive from the Algarve to Bavaria. He was out of prison when Peggy went missing, having been released at the end of 2000 in Bavaria. 

Although on paper Brueckner is a good suspect in Peggy's case, following investigation Chief prosecutor Martin Dippold concluded there was no local or personal connection between Brueckner and Peggy Knobloch. No evidence had been found that he was responsible for her murder. 

Brueckner remains in prison but is due for release in 2025. Investigators understandably do not want to see him out on the streets. He has recently been charged with five separate sexual assaults that took place between 2000 and 2017. These are due to go to court in the spring of 2023. Brueckner denies the charges and claims he is being framed. As of yet he has not been charged in connection with Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. German prosecutors are confident he is responsible but Brueckner continues to deny any involvement. 

In July 2020, case analyst Axel Petermann said he thought the case would benefit from a complete overhaul. Petermann led the Homicide department in Bremen for two decades until his retirement in 2014. He established a special unit that utilised FBI profiling methods to hunt down killers and solve cold cases. To Petermann it was clear that the investigation had reached the point where it was running out of steam and he felt that the whole operation should be started again from scratch, rather than simply recycling tried and tested ideas. Speaking to Nordbayern online newspaper he said that some people working the case continued to be suspicious of Ulvi K, the man who had been acquitted of Peggy's murder in 2014. He believes this tunnel vision was hampering efforts to find the real culprit.

There was evidence to back up this theory, as in November 2019 it was made public that Ulvi Ks’ advocate,Gudren Rödel, and some of her family and friends, had their phone calls monitored following the finding of Peggy's remains. This had been done on the basis of a court order requested by the Bayreuth Prosecutor's officer. The recordings were later destroyed and the public prosecutor's office never said whether the operation had been useful. 

Only a few months after Axel Petermann’s remarks, in October 2020, the investigation into Manuel S was finally put to bed when the case itself was closed. Bayreuth senior public prosecutor Martin Dippold said that numerous things point to Manuel S’s participation in the crime but there is no reliable evidence pointing to him being the killer of Peggy Knobloch. Peggys’ father Mario was angry and frustrated at the decision to close the case. In a short interview with RTL news in 2021 he said it feels like the last two decades spent pursuing those responsible for his daughter's murder have all been in vain.

Speaking in May 2021, psychologist and criminologist Rudolf Egg says there is still hope that one day those responsible for killing Peggy will be caught and brought to justice. However he admits it is very unlikely that after such a long time there will be a confession. He argues that in these circumstances, those responsible for Peggy's death will have developed ways of dealing with what they have done. He says this usually involves the murderer downplaying what they have done or excusing their own actions in some way. This way they are able to live with the evil they have perpetrated.

Supporters of Ulvi K and Gudren Rödel are calling for the state parliament to hold an enquiry into the various mistakes that were made during the course of the investigation and to seek to explain why the case remains unsolved. Gudren Rödel herself believes that not enough attention was paid to the numerous witness sightings of Peggy during the latter part of the afternoon and early evening. According to RTL news in 2021, Ulvi currently resides in a mental health facility and has a job and fiance.

Kristan Von Waldenfels is the current mayor of Lichtenberg. He was only one year old when Peggy Knobloch went missing. He recognises how traumatic the ordeal was for the community but says the murder of Peggy no longer dominates the small town as it once did. He is trying to help Lichtenberg move forward by encouraging young families to settle there and is trying to attract more tourists.

The fallout of Peggy’s murder remains ever-present in the lives of those most affected. Susanne has said she had nine amazing years with Peggy but she would have liked so many more. She has simply had to live with the suffering. Participating in therapy has helped her manage to cope with life.

21 years after her eldest daughter disappeared, the family was finally able to bury Peggy in a private ceremony in the spring of 2022. After the case was closed and all forensics leads had been exhausted, Peggy's remains were laid to rest on April 6th 2022, what would have been her 30th birthday. The burial location was not made public.