As of: March 26, 2024, 2:28 p.m
By: Maximilian Kettenbach, Jennifer Lanzinger
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Rebecca Reusch has been missing for more than five years.
Now a police officer is making serious allegations against colleagues in Berlin.
Did the investigation miss an opportunity?
Berlin - One of the most puzzling criminal cases in Germany still has no peace.
Maybe the case of the missing Rebecca Reusch is even picking up speed again.
The student from Berlin has been missing for more than five years.
The public prosecutor's office is now looking for a body.
The girl's brother-in-law has been a suspect for years, but the crime against Rebecca has not yet been proven.
The presumption of innocence still applies to him.
Now
IPPEN.MEDIA
was given access to explosive emails from the authorities through an official.
To protect his identity, we will call him Dirk B. He expresses the suspicion that there was gross neglect during the investigation.
Rebecca Reusch is still missing: Video does not provide investigators with any new information
The circumstances under which the then 15-year-old Rebecca Reusch disappeared remain mysterious.
February 2024 marked the fifth anniversary of the student's disappearance.
On the anniversary of her disappearance, a published video and two arbors in a forest came into focus.
Upon request, the public prosecutor's office confirmed that measures in connection with the Rebecca Reusch case were being examined.
A few days later, the arcades again came into the public eye: According to
Bild
, amateur detectives had gained access and were looking for the missing Rebecca Reusch there themselves.
The fifth anniversary of Rebecca Reusch's disappearance not only brought the case back to the minds of observers.
We reported on this in a five-part series.
Dirk B., who works in another police department in the country, is also closely watching the Rebecca Reusch case from a distance.
As a “policeman by conviction,” he is now going public to “wake up” his colleagues, as he says.
Cell phone data in the Rebecca Reusch case – the police and public prosecutor’s version
In conversation with us, his allegations against the investigations in the capital quickly become clear.
He couldn't understand that the investigators involved in the Rebecca Reusch case were only able to get the necessary cell phone data from Google years later.
But why did B. become suspicious?
According to a report in the Berliner Zeitung,
the Berlin investigators stated, among other things
, that they could not use cell phone data to determine whether Rebecca had left her sister's house in the morning - as her brother-in-law Florian claimed.
Investigators are said to have only submitted an investigation request to Google Europe in Dublin in autumn 2020.
Among other things, Rebecca's Google calendar was interesting, as were search queries typed in, voice notes or Google pages accessed by the student.
As an investigator confirmed
to the
BZ at the time, the student's location data had also been requested.
However, it was not until spring 2021 that Google delivered an elaborately encrypted USB stick with the important data.
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The decoding by the social department of forensic science took almost two more years until 2023.
This is the extent of public knowledge about the Google data.
One can assume that the focus in Berlin was already on other cases.
The personnel situation in the capital is tight - and with it the resources.
In summary, the data was only officially requested in autumn 2020.
Even that seems late; Rebecca disappeared around a year and a half earlier.
When the data was finally there (around six months after the possible request), the evaluation of the fundamentally important data in one of the largest missing person cases in Germany took almost two whole years.
“These are all frightening periods of time.
I wonder what my colleagues were doing there.
Especially in such a case where a girl did not leave the house alive.
Such data must be viewed as quickly as possible.
“That’s very irritating,” says Dirk B., who is himself active in particularly serious criminal cases.
Findings from the data lead to a new house search of Rebecca's brother-in-law
The Google insights gained caused a huge public stir in 2023.
It became known that brother-in-law Florian was said to have googled strangulation practices on the morning of the disappearance.
A house search followed in April 2023.
The former murder investigator and case analyst Axel Petermann also criticizes these periods: “The results about the brother-in-law's search history on the Internet only came four years later, and that during such relevant investigations.
And then it turns out that the brother-in-law was interested in breath control during sex." These are extremely important findings that could indicate the brother-in-law's sexual preferences and at the same time raise the question of "whether he tried to become intimate with Rebecca and also to realize his sexual fantasies,” Petermann told
IPPEN.MEDIA
back in February
.
“Unfortunately, four years later, there are no longer any traces that could confirm this suspicion.”
“That made me suspicious”: The version of police insider Dirk B.
But behind the scenes, the timeline might have looked a little different.
And that might leave observers a little more sobering.
After the student disappeared in February 2019, Dirk B. was surprised almost two years later that nothing had been known about the analysis of his brother-in-law's data.
B. reports that this made him skeptical in the spring of 2021: “At the time, I read media reports about Rebecca’s two-year-old disappearance.
The investigators said so casually that they couldn't read anything, that made me suspicious," said the insider in the conversation with
IPPEN.MEDIA
.
He knows of a case in which his unit was able to get ALL of the perpetrator's data from Google within hours through an emergency call.
As the email history shows, B.'s concerns ended up with the Berlin investigators.
Everything had long since been initiated and exhausted, but the data from Google had not yet arrived, it said - but then the turning point actually followed.
“Exactly a month later it is publicly stated in the press that they have the data,” B wonders. The temporal context makes his doubts grow.
Did the investigators in Berlin perhaps only ask Google for the important location data and the decryption of the Google account because of this impetus?
B. cannot explain why the investigators in Berlin only received the Google results in spring 2021 when they claimed to have requested them long ago.
“I can’t imagine for the life of me that they actually requested the data immediately after the disappearance.”
Google is much faster, “for such an offense they need a maximum of two to four weeks.”
That's how he knows it. In urgent cases, the emergency call would give you the data practically after hours.
The public prosecutor's office is keeping a remarkably low profile in the Rebecca Reusch case
The Berlin public prosecutor's office responded cautiously to our numerous questions.
“To protect the ongoing investigation, no information is currently being released,” the press office says.
What exactly is at risk is unclear.
Apparently, Dirk B.'s suspicion that he waited too long to make a query to Google cannot or will not be brushed aside in Berlin.
That is at least remarkable.
After all, the public prosecutor's office tells us that the duration of answers from Google can vary.
"This depends on the case by case, urgency and [...] other commitments that Google has made - for example in its collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children."
“My experience with Google is different than that of your informant,” says an employee from the Berlin investigative environment.
“In most cases this can take much longer.
Sometimes you don't get an answer to a query at all.
But the Rebecca case has been processed, it is truly unparalleled, I can guarantee that.”
We also asked the internet giant.
However, when asked, Google stated: “We cannot comment on ongoing investigations against third parties.” The company then did not respond at all to further questions about the general length of time it takes to answer such inquiries.
Lots of questions, few explanations – that's what fuels B.'s theory.
For him, technical queries in investigations should now be standard, but there are still many “old-school investigators”.
The police are only slowly adapting to new circumstances.
The routines are generally not particularly progressive.
That has to change.
In Rebecca's case, B. believes there was a failure.
“The only way I can explain it is that they didn't think about it or weren't keeping up with it.” You wouldn't hope so.
Can the Rebecca Reusch case still be solved?
At the beginning of the year, experts spoke to IPPEN.MEDIA about the Rebecca Reusch case.
Christian Matzdorf, an expert in criminal science, is convinced that the mysterious criminal case from Berlin can still be solved.
However, he shows little understanding for the Reusch family's behavior.
The editor wrote this article and then used an AI language model for optimization at his own discretion. All information has been carefully checked.
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.