The fateful crossword puzzles

In 1981, an event took place in the GDR that was unique in the history of criminal investigation. In order to solve the murder of 7-year-old Lars Bense, the People’s Police collected and evaluated a total of 551,198 writing samples in Halle-Neustadt. One of these samples actually led to the perpetrator. But first things first. Lars Bense, a 7-year-old first grader at the Bernard Koenen School in Halle-Neustadt, wanted to attend the afternoon showing at the nearby cinema on January 15, 1981. But he never arrived. Siegfried Schwarz, head of the homicide division, immediately launched a large-scale search for the elementary school student. Fourteen days later, the boy was found in a brown suitcase by 19-year-old Uwe Theuerhorn, a distance runner for the Deutsche Reichsbahn, on the Halle-Leipzig railway line at kilometer 107.4. The suitcase was lying in the snow next to the tracks. The body of the 1.18-meter-tall boy had been literally squeezed into the suitcase and was lying under crumpled newspapers with completed crossword puzzles. The autopsy performed by forensic pathologist Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Dürwald revealed that Lars Bense had been sexually abused and killed with a blunt object. His upper body had several stab wounds. Since the suitcase was a mass-produced item, the completed crossword puzzles were the only hot lead. According to experts, these came from a middle-aged woman who was probably the author of the writing but not the perpetrator. The People’s Police then searched through over 60 tons of waste paper for newspapers with crossword puzzles. In addition, a total of over half a million handwriting samples were collected in Halle-Neustadt during the course of the investigation and evaluated by hand. To this day, this criminal case is considered the one with the largest number of handwriting samples ever examined worldwide. But the hard work paid off: after ten months of intensive investigation, a handwriting sample was found that was identical to the crossword puzzles in the suitcase. It came from a woman named G., who worked as a seasonal employee in a beach café on the Baltic Sea and lived in the five-story block 398 in Halle-Neustadt. This bull’s-eye handwriting sample led to her 18-year-old son-in-law, Matthias S., who worked as a seasonal employee in a vacation home in Friedrichsroda. When investigators questioned him, he confessed to having lured Lars Bense to his mother-in-law’s apartment on January 15, 1981, with toy cars. There, he sexually abused the boy and then beat him with a hammer in the bathtub. Since Lars was still alive, he took a knife and stabbed him several times in the chest area. He then squeezed the dead boy into the suitcase, covered the body with newspapers he found in the apartment, and disposed of the suitcase on a train journey from Halle to Leipzig by throwing it out of the window. He had no idea that the newspapers contained his mother-in-law’s completed crossword puzzles. During the subsequent trial, it emerged that his girlfriend had to tell him stories about little boys in order to sexually stimulate him. Matthias S. also testified that since watching his grandfather slaughter pigs, he had developed fantasies of killing. In the summer of 1982, Matthias S. was sentenced to life imprisonment with deprivation of civil rights for murder in conjunction with sexual abuse. In 1991, the public prosecutor’s office ordered a retrial because Matthias S. was only 18 years old at the time of the crime. On May 20, 1992, he was sentenced to the maximum penalty for murder, which under the juvenile justice system in force at the time was ten years followed by commitment to a psychiatric hospital. In 1996, Matthias S. was admitted to the Uchtspinge State Hospital for Forensic Psychiatry. He then lived in a supervised housing project for three years. Until his death on January 15, 2013, exactly the day on which he had brutally abused and murdered Lars Bense, he lived with a woman and her son in Magdeburg. He died of a serious illness. Thus ended the life of Matthias S., who had been nicknamed the crossword puzzle murderer by the media and whose mother-in-law’s passion for crossword puzzles had been his undoing.