The "Woman Without A Face" terrified Germany for years

Today, I'm going to tell you two stories that each of them at first glance will appear to be sort of a run-of-the-mill true crime story. But they are not. I promise you, stick to the end of each of these stories and you'll hear two very unique, very sort of unbelievable plot twists. But before we get into those two stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and

Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Like Button's house and log on to their computer and email love letters to all of their work contacts. Also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's stories.

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On the afternoon of April 25th, 2007, a 25-year-old police officer named Martin Arnold and his partner, Michelle, sat in their police cruiser in the parking lot of a public park in Heilbronn, Germany. They were on their lunch break, and Martin was eating a sandwich

and looking out across the park, which was mostly empty because it was a weekday afternoon. So Heilbronn was a medium-sized city in southern Germany, and it was generally a pretty safe area. I mean, for the most part, the worst crimes committed here

were like break-ins or muggings. So Martin and his partner, they didn't have a whole lot of action happening around them. However, something Martin and Michelle and basically all police officers,

for the most part, in Germany were acutely aware of, was over the last 14 years, all across Germany, there had been this rash of crimes ranging from home invasions and robberies to at least two murders that had basically all been committed based on DNA evidence by the same person, this singular woman, whose nickname was the Woman with No Face, and she still hadn't been caught yet. And so, in essence, all police officers in Germany were sort of like always on the lookout for this woman.

She was like the most elusive and sought-after criminal in the whole country. But on this particular day, as Martin sat in his cruiser on his lunch break, he wasn't really thinking about how he might get involved in capturing the woman with no face. Instead, he was just worried about his sandwich. And so he went to take another bite of his sandwich when he heard the doors, the

back doors of his cruiser open up. And he whipped around and he looked and there were these two people who had approached the cruiser and each of them were carrying a gun. And before Martin or Michelle could do anything, these people raised their weapons, and they fired, and everything went black. Within minutes, officers from the Heilbronn Police Department

had swarmed the scene. They found Michelle, who was deceased, from a gunshot wound to the head. And Martin had also been shot in the head, but he was still alive. He was just unconscious. And so an ambulance rushed him to the hospital while detectives taped off the crime scene and began looking for evidence. Some officers immediately began canvassing the area looking

for potential witnesses, but because the park was basically empty all day, there was nobody who had seen the shooting. Other officers looked for footprints in the ground, you know, around the car. They also began looking for fingerprints on the car, bullet casings, hairs, other fibers inside or outside the car, but there was nothing. And so at this point, the investigators are like, okay, all we know is there's been at least one shooter, maybe multiple, because they have not spoken to Martin, who's unconscious.

They have no idea what he's seen. So they're seeing that at least one person has managed to come up to a police cruiser, undetected presumably, open up the doors, shoot both officers in the head, and then get away without leaving behind

any obvious evidence. It just seemed crazy. Like, have we just missed something? Like there's got to be something here that sort of points us in the direction of who was responsible. And so in a last ditch attempt to find something helpful at the crime

scene, one officer swabbed the inside of the car for potential DNA evidence. They knew that if there was DNA, it could belong to Martin or Michelle or anybody else who might have been inside of this car. And any of those people didn't have to be the shooter or shooters, they could just be people in the car. But it was possible that DNA found inside that car could belong to whoever did this. However, they wouldn't know about this DNA sample until the crime lab analyzed the swabs, and that could take a really long time. But it was certainly worth it, and so they sent the swabs off for testing. While they waited for the DNA results to come in, the Heilbronn PD continued trying to find

witnesses or any other helpful evidence, anything, but they kept coming up empty. Their only potential witness here was Martin himself, but he was still in a coma at the hospital. It was not until weeks later that finally the police had something to go on, because the DNA results came back. And not only was there DNA found in the car, but what this DNA revealed sent the media into a frenzy and brought this investigation to the national level. At this time, it's mid-2007, and a 44-year-old German

prosecutor named Gunter Horn was sitting in his office when he got a call from his boss. And his boss told him, the woman without a face has struck again, this time in Heilbronn. Gunther's eyes went wide and he immediately sat up and listened really intently as his boss explained that two police officers in Heilbronn had been shot in the head while parked in their cruiser near this park, and the woman with no face, her DNA had been found in the backseat of their car. Now, Gunther had always been fascinated by the woman without a face, so he was ecstatic

when his boss asked if he, Gunther, would lead the investigation into this most recent crime in Heilbronn that was potentially connected to this woman and to try to finally identify who she was once and for all. Gunther immediately said he would do it and he got to work. Right away, Gunther organized a task force to investigate this woman without a face. The task force was based in Heilbronn, but at Gunther's command, detectives on the team began reinvestigating all these crimes from all over Germany that

this woman was involved in. They searched for patterns, for evidence, or witnesses that maybe had been missed during the original investigation. And through this effort, this team was able to come up with a very rough idea of who this woman was. They knew that she was very likely a heroin user because police had once recovered a heroin

needle with her DNA on it at a public park. They also knew she had a lot of criminal contacts, because many of her crimes involved co-conspirators. But anytime police had interrogated her co-conspirators, they had refused to say anything about her. It was like they were afraid of her. And there were a couple of other details that struck Gunter as being pretty odd. The only evidence this woman had ever left behind

at any of these crime scenes was her DNA. And they didn't have a match in the database to pair it with, so they only knew she was a woman, but they didn't know who she was. In 14 years, she'd never left behind a fingerprint, a footprint, a hair, or anything else. So it seemed like her crimes were extremely deliberate,

very clean, very well-planned, but also she was clearly leaving behind her DNA at all these crime scenes. It almost seemed like that was her calling card. Also, what Gunter and his task force discovered is that in many of the crimes

committed by the woman without a face, witnesses described seeing what looked like a man at the scene, not a woman. And this was obviously weird because based on the DNA evidence, they knew unequivocally that their suspect,

this Woman Without a Face, was biologically female, not male. And so to Gunther, it seemed like maybe this man that was being seen at these crime scenes was just one of the woman's co-conspirators, or maybe the woman without a face, dressed as a man to

avoid being caught. But it was impossible to know without a first-hand witness who had actually seen the suspect up close. That was what Gunther really needed. And in late May, about a month after the shooting in Heilbronn, Gunther got a call about that exact type of witness that he was looking for. That same day, Gunther walked into a hospital in Heilbronn, and he saw Heilbronn police officer Martin Arnold laying in a hospital bed with his eyes open. He'd been in a coma for a month now after

being shot, but he had woken up. And he clearly was Gunter's best chance of catching the woman without a face, because presumably, before he was shot, he might have gotten a look at her. So he was that witness who might be able to describe her. And so Gunter, he walked over, sat down next to Martin's hospital bed, and he asked him to please tell him everything he remembered about what happened. And Martin, you know, he was very distraught about the whole thing.

He's just woken up, he's just learned that his partner has died, and so he's very emotional. But he ultimately tells Gunther that, you know, realistically, he can't really remember what happened. He basically turned around,

he saw there was, you know, these two figures, but after he got shot, it was like he just didn't remember anything. And so, realistically, Martin had almost nothing to offer, which meant Gunther was back to square one. For the next two years, Gunther and his task force worked tirelessly to try to catch the woman without a face.

They spent millions of euros, clocked thousands of hours of overtime, and even offered a reward equivalent to $400,000 U.S. dollars for information. But none of it led anywhere. And adding insult to injury was the fact that the whole time this investigation is going on, the woman without a face kept committing crimes. The task force connected her to at least six more break-ins, one more robbery, and another

murder. And these crimes weren't even just happening in Germany anymore. They also found the woman's DNA at crime scenes in France and in Austria. So now the entire region was on alert for this woman, who seemed like this impossibly cunning international criminal genius. And Gunther, he couldn't help but start to wonder if he would ever be able to catch her.

But then, in March of 2009, Gunther got a call from a police officer in France. And what this officer told him would change everything. According to this officer, the French police were currently investigating a potential murder. They told Gunther that a badly burned body had been found in France, and it was so disfigured that, for a while, all police knew was that it was a man. However, an asylum seeker who had come to France had recently been reported missing,

and police wondered if maybe the body belonged to him. So, on hunch, they had gotten his asylum application paperwork, which included his fingerprints, and they'd been able to lift a DNA profile from those prints. But when they had the DNA analyzed, the results didn't make any sense. And the French police were so baffled by these results that they were now calling Gunther because they knew if there's someone who needs to know about this, it's Gunther. And so Gunther, after being fully filled in about the baffling results that they had found, he was also at first very confused, but at

the same time, he felt this new surge of hope. Because to him, it felt like, you know, as bizarre as this was, maybe this was the break he'd been looking for for the past two years. Maybe this was the time he was finally going to figure out who this woman really was. So he thanked the French police officer and then brought this new information to his team. And within just a few days, this new information from France did lead Gunther and his team to the woman with no face. It would turn out this woman, the international

criminal mastermind behind dozens of crimes, including at least four murders, who had evaded capture for 16 years all across the entirety of Germany and beyond, appeared to everybody who actually knew her as a totally normal person. Like nobody suspected she was actually responsible for all these horrible crimes. She was a young woman who lived in southern Germany, who during the day she appeared to work at a factory, and at night, she appeared to just go home.

Like, she lived a very ordinary life. And so again, nobody ever suspected her. But what the French police found when they analyzed the DNA from the missing man's asylum application was that that man's fingerprints

somehow contained this woman's DNA. This was clearly impossible. I mean, primarily because the man was biologically male and the woman without a face was biologically female. They knew that. So even if the asylum seeker had secretly been this woman,

that wasn't really possible. And so when the French police saw this, they knew they had to tell Gunther because he was in charge of the woman without a face investigation. And when he and his team looked into this, they knew they had to tell Gunther because he was in charge of the Woman Without a Face investigation. And when he and his team looked into this, they figured out something shocking.

It was precisely this woman's normal-seeming life, in particular, her very normal-seeming job at the factory, that made everything she did possible. Because at this factory, this woman sat on an assembly line, helping to manufacture the very cotton swabs that police use in DNA testing. On any given single shift, this woman would touch hundreds or even thousands of these swabs and would accidentally leave her DNA behind on each one. There was no international serial killer, you know, woman criminal mastermind parading

around the whole country. No, there was just a lot of contaminated cotton swabs. And so in essence, police had wasted all this time, nearly two decades, millions and millions of euros and thousands and thousands of hours of overtime chasing a criminal who didn't exist. It was later determined that the police officer Martin Arnold and his partner Michelle were shot by two members of a neo-Nazi group.

However, many of the other murders previously attributed to the Woman Without a Face are still unsolved, primarily because police spent so long chasing the wrong suspect. Today, the case of the woman without a face is considered one of the biggest embarrassments in German police history. Everyday life is full of moments that you plan for

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On the afternoon of May 2nd, 1930,

a middle-aged woman named Kim Soo-jin walked into her farmhouse in a small village called Bi-bong-myun in what is now South Korea. She had spent the whole day working outside on her farm, and now all she wanted to do was grab some water, sit down, and finally just rest for a second.

But before she could do any of that, she heard a knock at her door. And even though she was exhausted, the sound of this knock actually sort of energized her because she was pretty sure that her 16-year-old son, Bak Chung-Soo, had finally come home.

So Soo-Jin and her son ran this farm together, just the two of them, and they really barely made any money doing it. In fact, a lot of the time, they didn't even grow enough food to feed themselves. So to try to make ends meet, Soo-Jin's son had recently started a full-time job at an inn in town, and he also frequently did odd jobs in the village for extra cash. The problem was, Soo-Jin's son would sometimes go straight from his job at the inn to one

of those odd jobs, and he didn't always have time to stop by to tell his mother where he was going first. And remember, this was 1930 in rural Korea, so it wasn't like he could just call her. And so basically, this mother was left to worry about her son kind of frequently. And over the past six days, that is all Soo-Jin did,

because she had not seen or heard from her son at all. And even though he did go, you know, days at a time in the past, doing these different odd jobs, this stretch was a pretty long time for him to be gone. But she told herself what must have happened is he must have found work with a family

who was having him work and live with them full time. Like this was just a great opportunity and he had taken it and surely he would be home soon. And now it seemed like maybe, just maybe, he was home. So Soo Jin, she rushed to the front door, she opened it up, and the smile on her face faded immediately.

Because it was not her son standing at the door. Instead, it was two police officers. And the first thing they asked her was if she knew of any teenage boys who were missing from the village. And Soo Jin told them that, you know, she had a son of her own who was a teenager. He was 16. And the reality was is she didn't know where he was and he'd been gone for the past week. But don't worry, you know, he wasn't

missing. He was very likely just working for a family somewhere and he'd be home soon. But after she said this, the police looked at Soo Jin with clear pity on their faces and told her they were so sorry, but they were nearly certain that her son had been murdered. Soo Jin just stared at them in shock and disbelief as they told her that a few days ago,

during the time her son was gone, a teenage boy's body had been found on a nearby mountain. An autopsy showed he'd been beaten and strangled to death. And for the last couple of days, the police had been traveling all over the village, interviewing people and trying to figure out

who this boy was. And based on everything they'd learned so far, Soo Jin's son was actually the only teenager in the area who wasn't accounted for. But hearing all of this, Soo Jin did not think this could be true.

Her son stayed out of trouble and worked really hard. She couldn't imagine why anybody would want to hurt him. So she just told the police, this has got to be a mistake. But the police didn't seem to think so. They just said that they needed her to come to the local hospital morgue to identify the body. A little while later, Soo Jin arrived at the hospital with the two police officers. And as they led her through the entrance, down a few hallways, and towards the morgue, she kept telling herself that her son was okay, he was still alive, and this really has to

be some sort of horrible mistake. It has to be. But the second she actually walked into the morgue and saw the body lying on the table, her eyes welled up with tears because she knew it was her son. And to Soo Jin, this moment felt like leaving real life and entering a nightmare. Her son's face and body were covered in bruises and wounds, and he was very clearly decomposing.

I mean, it was just awful to see. But as this mother is sort of just staring down at basically a parent's worst nightmare here, she noticed something strange. She turned to the police officers and she told them that this was her son, definitely. But the clothes he was wearing were actually not his. And for some reason, to Soo Jin, the clothes thing felt very important. So she started rattling

off ideas for, you know, where they could have come from. You know, it was like her brain suddenly became fixated on this one aspect to avoid touching on the trauma of losing her son. You know, she began telling them that, you know, maybe the family he was working for let him borrow them, or maybe he bought them without her knowing, or maybe whoever killed him dressed him up for some reason.

But when she said that last part, it was like all at once, the reality of her son being dead just came crashing down on her. She started shaking, and before she knew it, she had collapsed onto the floor and was sobbing hysterically.

Less than a week later, Soo Jin was sitting in her farmhouse, staring out her front window in a daze, when she saw the police walking towards her house again. Over the past few days, she hadn't heard any updates about her son's case, so she'd just been at the farmhouse all alone, trying to make sense of his death. But now, you know, Soo Jin sees these officers and so she goes right outside and she meets them and she asks them, like, do you have news for me about what happened to my son? And they tell her

that she was likely going to have to sit down to hear this. Soo Jin figured it couldn't be worse than finding out your son's been murdered, so she said, okay, let's go inside. And so they went inside the farmhouse, they sat down, and then the police told her that they figured out who had killed her son. They told her they had not one, but two people in jail right now who had both issued full confessions. Both of these suspects were people that Soo Jin's son, Chang Soo, had worked with at

the inn in town. One of them was a young man and one was a young woman, and apparently, Chang Su had gotten involved in the woman's personal life. She was having an affair with a married man, but was planning to run away with a different man from the village soon, and Chang Su had told the married man about it. When the woman found out that Chang Su had done that,

she was furious. So furious that she conspired with her co-worker, the young man, the other suspect, to lure Chang Su out to the mountains under the guise of gathering wild vegetables. And then when they got there, the man and the woman beat up Chang Su and then strangled him to death. This had all happened on the first night that Chang Soo had left the farmhouse. So over that six day period,

he pretty much went out and immediately was killed. And so over those six days, he was never living with a family and working for them. He was just dead on the mountain the whole time. The police told Soo Jin that they had charged both suspects with murder.

But after hearing all this, Soo Jin still had one question. What about her son's clothes? Was there anything in the suspect's confessions about that? But the police just shook their heads no and said the clothes didn't really seem relevant to the case anyway. And this time, even though Su Jin, you know, did feel like the clothes have to mean something, she didn't argue or even, you know even try to come up with other theories about the close. She just sort of accepted what the police had told her.

As horrible as it was to know that her son was murdered over something so petty, she was at least glad to know that his killers were behind bars. Soo Jin eventually got her son's body from the police, and she was able to bury him in the local cemetery. And then after that, she did her best to try to move on. But she never

could. And as this nightmare kept happening night after night, Su Jin slowly became convinced that her son was haunting her dreams. And so Su Jin basically stopped sleeping, couldn't really eat, certainly couldn't work. Her farm fell into disrepair. She actually began to think she was just going to wither away and die here unless something changed. I mean, this was horrible.

She was overcome with grief and sadness and also just scared. These dreams were terrifying. But then on the night of October 18th, 1931, so about six months after her son was killed, Soo Jin woke up from yet another nightmare. And when she opened her eyes,

she saw this shadowy figure at the foot of her bed. And she immediately realized that it was her son's ghost coming to visit her. But Soo Jin, she wasn't scared. She actually felt tears welling up in her eyes. And she actually just began speaking. She told the ghost, I love you, but you have to move on.

You have to rest in peace now. You have to move on. You have to to rest in peace now. You have to." Now, Su Jin really didn't know what she expected to happen here when she began speaking to the ghost. But what did happen was definitely not something she would have considered. Because suddenly, the ghost opened their mouth and they spoke. And what the ghost said changed everything. It would turn out, Chong Tzu, Tzu-jen's son, had been viciously attacked by that man and woman up on the mountain.

They really had beaten and strangled him and left him for dead. But he didn't die. He survived the attack. And when he came to, he fled the area because he was fearful if he went back home, they would finish the job. They would attack him and kill him. So he didn't have a chance to tell his mom that he was basically on the run. And so for six months, he's living in random towns, doing odd jobs to survive. But eventually, you know, six months in, he misses his mom, he misses home, and he goes back and he

walks into a room in the middle of the night. He is the ghost. And when she said to him, you need to rest in peace now, he just says to his mom, I'm not dead. And he was just being honest. I'm here, I'm back, I survived. It would turn out the body that was found on the mountain was just some other teenage boy who was never identified by the way, who happened to be in the same area where he had been attacked. And so when word got out about this body

being found on the mountain, the man and the woman who had attacked Changsu, they're like, shoot, that's him, that was us. And they confessed to killing him because that's what they tried to do. They tried to kill him.

It just, they didn't kill him. It was some other body. And then when Su Jin went to the morgue and saw this body, you know, it was decomposing and he basically looked like her son. And so she misidentified him. She thought it was her son, but it really wasn't.

And she fixated on his clothes and she was like, something's off. Well, she was right. It wasn't her son. It was someone else's close. And so in the end, the man and woman who had attacked Chang Su had their murder charges dropped because they didn't commit a murder. And they were both ultimately released from jail after serving about a year

in prison for the assault. As for the actual person who was found dead on the mountain, they were never identified, and they were buried in a sort of unmarked grave. And the location of that grave has been lost to time. And so even though we have the ability today to test for DNA, we're not able to exhume them because we don't know where their grave is. And so very likely, we'll never know who that person was. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know what you thought of today's episode in the comments.

And remember, we have hundreds of videos for you to binge right now. But if you're looking for a recommendation from me of that one video that's worth your time, well, it's this one right here. So give it a watch. So give it a watch. All right, until next time, see ya.