As of: March 28, 2024, 5:05 a.m
By: Jennifer Lanzinger, Maximilian Kettenbach
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Even five years after the disappearance of student Rebecca Reusch, there is still uncertainty. A police officer is “irritated” by the investigation period and makes allegations against his colleagues.
Berlin – One of the most mysterious criminal cases in Germany cannot be put to rest. On the contrary. Maybe it's just picking up speed again: The missing Rebecca Reusch from Berlin was last seen alive in February 2019. The public prosecutor's office is now talking about the search for a body. The student's brother-in-law, Florian R, is still a suspect. He is still presumed innocent.
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. Based on these emails, he expresses the suspicion that there may have been crucial neglect in the course of the investigation.
Missing Rebecca Reusch from Berlin has been missing for five years
What happened to Rebecca Reusch, then 15, remains unclear. On the anniversary of her disappearance on February 18, 2024,
Bild.de
published
a video that was previously unknown to the public. However, this does not represent a new approach for the investigators. “We know the video, we have evaluated it and there are no new findings from it,” said a spokesman for the Berlin public prosecutor’s office to the German Press Agency. And an arbor discovery in a forest also poses further puzzles.
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 newspaper 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 claimed by brother-in-law Florian. 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 and Google pages accessed by the student.
Fall 2020 is already coming out late. Rebecca disappeared about a year and a half earlier!
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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.
So Google apparently needs half a year to send the data to the investigators!
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.
The evaluation of elementary data in one of the largest missing person cases in Germany took two 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.
“That made me suspicious”: The version of police insider Dirk B.
But behind the scenes, the timing may have been a little different. 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: “Back then, 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 cannot imagine for the life of me that they actually requested the data immediately after the disappearance.” Google is much quicker, “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.
Rebecca was reported missing on February 18, 2019. Numerous searches followed - to this day the young woman has not been found. (Archive image) © Montage:Merkur.de/dpa
Evaluation of the data provides extremely important insights – which would have been needed years earlier
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.
Former homicide detective and case analyst Axel Petermann fumes at the time period: “The results about the brother-in-law's search history on the Internet only came four years later, and that was 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.”
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 no longer responded to general 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.
Missing Rebecca Reusch: Experts commented on the fifth anniversary of the student's disappearance
It was only in February that several experts spoke to IPPEN.MEDIA about the Rebecca Reusch case. Criminal scientist Christian Matzdorf firmly believes that the Rebecca Reusch case will be solved. However, Matzdorf has little regard for the family's behavior. In addition to the harsh criticism of the authorities, he accuses the family of “offensive self-marketing.”