27-year-old Murder Case Solved With the Help of enaio®

Digital data comparison helps investigators to check countless old records and track down a perpetrator after decades. The case shows how important meticulous police work is – and what document management can contribute to it.

“The case processing system was the key to success”

In 1991, ten-year-old Stephanie D. disappears from Weimar and is found dead shortly afterwards. She was the victim of a crime. A man on the police’s radar for other crimes is suspected of having killed Stephanie. However, this can’t be proven.

Twenty-five years later, the case is reopened and the special commission for old cases is called into action by police in Thuringia. Its mission is to close old investigations using new methods. This also includes comparing large databases such as perpetrator and case records using forensic software from OPTIMAL SYSTEMS.

“It was a puzzle as I’ve never experienced it before – the case processing system was the key to success,” says Jena police chief Thomas Quittenbaum. What was impossible in the analog age is now possible thanks to digital document management. This is how the suspect’s link to Stephanie’s murder case can be revealed. In March 2018, after a lot of monitoring, a Special Deployment Commando in Berlin breaks into the apartment of the now 65-year-old man and arrests him. He confesses to the murder.

The success of the operation is due to committed police officers who have worked tirelessly on the case for years. The result also shows what modern digital information systems – such as forensic securing of evidence with enaio® – can achieve in police work.

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