Disappearance and death of Peggy Knobloch

Peggy Knobloch was a nine-year-old girl who lived with her mother, sister, and stepfather in Lichtenberg, Bavaria. Because her mother was often still at work when she arrived home from school, Knobloch would wait at a neighbor's house until her mother returned.

On 7 May 2001, Knobloch disappeared while walking home from school. She was last seen about fifty yards from her home at approximately 1:20 p.m., carrying a Barbie doll, a school satchel, and a jacket. Law enforcement searched all land within four kilometers of Lichtenberg within the first week without success. Army aircraft equipped with cameras capable of detecting unusual objects on the ground were also used, but dense forest and rugged terrain made it impossible to properly analyze the resulting photographs. Two boys reported seeing Knobloch get into a red Mercedes bearing a Czech license plate, prompting investigators to extend the search into the Czech Republic; neither Knobloch nor the car was located.

Later in 2001, a man with an intellectual disability was questioned by his mother after an unrelated incident and admitted to molesting Knobloch four days before she disappeared. He said he approached her afterward to apologize and suffocated her when she tried to run from him. He was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital on 6 September 2001 in response to his confession, and after repeated police interrogations conducted without an attorney present, he was arrested at the hospital in October 2002. In 2004 he was convicted of Knobloch's murder and sentenced to life imprisonment despite having recanted his confession. In 2014, a retrial overturned the conviction after determining that the confession had been coerced.

Knobloch's remains were not discovered until 2 July 2016, when a mushroom forager found them in a wooded area of neighboring Thuringia, less than ten miles from her home, after wildlife had disturbed the burial site.

In October 2016, investigators reported that DNA recovered near the discovery site matched a person linked to an unrelated series of killings; this was later determined to be a false track, with the DNA having been transferred to the scene by a piece of police equipment. In 2018, another man was arrested after telling police that someone else had led him to Knobloch's body near a bus stop. He denied causing her death, said he hid the body in the forest after failing to revive her, and told investigators he had burned her bag and jacket, but he was released after retracting his statement. Prosecutors shelved the investigation into Knobloch's disappearance and death in 2020 without identifying who was responsible, and the case remains unresolved. Some newspapers have referred to Knobloch's case as the "German Madeleine McCann."