Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
A mysterious disappearance occurred in 1995. During the night of April 10 to April 11, 19-year-old Sonja Engelbrecht from Munich disappeared. Sonja Engelbrecht, a technical college student, had been out enjoying Munich’s nightlife with her friend Robert that evening until they parted ways at Stiglmaierplatz at around 2:30 a.m. Her friend wanted to take the tram home from there. Sonja, on the other hand, wanted to call her sister from a phone booth to ask her to pick her up. Her acquaintance Robert gave her his phone card to make the call. But Sonja never called her sister. Since that night, Sonja seemed to have vanished into thin air. What had happened to Sonja that night, and was she still alive? The last question was answered 26 years later when, at the end of 2021, a forestry worker discovered a thigh bone in the Grösdorf forest area near Kipfenberg, 70 kilometers from Munich. The forensic examination revealed that it belonged to the missing Sonja Engelbrecht. It was now clear that Sonja was dead. In November 2021, over 140 police officers and Croatian cadaver dogs searched for Sonja’s body. But they found nothing. It was only when they resumed their search after the end of the frost period at the end of March 2022 that they found Sonja Engelbrecht’s remains in a hard-to-reach crevice on a steep slope. Sonja’s killer knew that hardly anyone would stray there. For over 26 years, the crevice was the perfect hiding place for Sonja’s body, which was presumably the victim of a violent crime. Since two missing skeletons of a missing couple from Ingolstadt were found by walkers in May 2020 at eye level on the hill where Sonja’s thigh bone had been found, there were also theories of a serial killer. Was it a coincidence that, seven years apart, two different murderers chose the exact same remote forest area to hide their bodies? The missing couple were 23-year-old Eugen S. and 21-year-old Sabine P., who had planned to celebrate Sabine’s birthday in a restaurant on September 20, 2002. After that, the couple was never seen again. According to Munich forensic medicine, the couple was killed with extreme violence. Four suspects were quickly arrested but were released again because there was no urgent suspicion of guilt. Eugen S. and Sabine P. are said to have been involved in the drug scene and allegedly had drug debts. Were they murdered because of this? There was speculation that the murderers were Russian-Germans who controlled the Ingolstadt drug market at the time and were not squeamish when it came to collecting debts. Had Sonja encountered one of these drug dealers at Stiglmaierplatz that night, who then took her away? Or had Sonja fallen victim to a serial killer, as three women who were active in Munich’s nightlife suddenly disappeared without a trace between 1991 and 1997? The fact is that in the case of Sonja Engelbrecht, the police are investigating at full speed and will hopefully soon solve the mysterious murder case as well as the murder of the young couple from Ingolstadt. This would at least be a small consolation for the bereaved.
