Kidnapping and death of Ursula Herrmann

Ursula Herrmann, a 10-year-old girl, disappeared on 15 September 1981 while cycling home from her cousin's house in Germany, a trip that normally took about ten minutes. An immediate search recovered only her bicycle.

Two days later, phone calls consisting only of the jingle for Bavarian radio station Bayern 3 began reaching the Herrmann household. On 18 September, a ransom note made of cut-out letters demanded two million German marks, explaining the jingle was meant to elicit a yes-or-no answer on payment. Ursula's mother agreed to pay, and a further letter arrived on 21 September referencing payment instructions, but no drop location was ever communicated and the ransom was never collected.

About two weeks after the disappearance, officers began a grid search of the forest, probing the ground with metal rods; after four days they located a wooden box buried in the Weingarten forest containing Ursula's body. The box was stocked with lighting, blankets, food, reading material, a radio tuned to Bayern 3, and a toilet bucket, with a ventilation system of pipes covered in leaves. The wet leaves blocked adequate airflow, and Ursula suffocated between 30 minutes and five hours after being placed inside. An autopsy found no evidence she had struggled, raising the possibility she had been drugged. The 60-kilogram box was too heavy for one person to bury alone, so investigators concluded more than one person was involved.

Investigators' attention turned to a neighbor of the Herrmann family, television repairman Werner Mazurek, who was known to be in debt. Arrested in January 1982, he was questioned for several days — his alibi was that he had been playing a board game with his wife and two friends — then released. The following month, an acquaintance told police that Mazurek had asked him to dig a hole in the forest and had shown him a box in it, but could not lead investigators to the site and later withdrew the statement. Aside from a length of wire found in the forest, apparently used to signal during the kidnapping, the investigation then stalled for years.

In 2005, DNA testing of evidence from the box produced no useful match. As the statute of limitations approached, investigators re-examined Mazurek: an October 2007 search of his home yielded a non-matching saliva sample and a tape recorder; a forensic report found technical irregularities in the recorder matching the 1981 jingle calls. Mazurek and his wife were arrested and charged on 28 May 2008. Their trial, opening in February 2009, rested on circumstantial evidence — a 2004 fraud conviction, Mazurek's monitoring of police radio during the search, his discussion of the statute of limitations with a friend, and the acquaintance's earlier, later-withdrawn statement, unsigned and written down by investigators weeks after it was given. On 25 March 2010, the court found Mazurek guilty of extortionate kidnapping resulting in death and sentenced him to life imprisonment; his wife was acquitted.

Ursula's brother, Michael Herrmann, became convinced the conviction rested on flawed evidence and, in 2013, filed a civil suit against Mazurek in Augsburg seeking compensation. The civil trial, running 2016 to 2018, heard evidence undermining the tape-recorder analysis and a separate finding that the ransom note's author was an educated native German speaker imitating a foreigner whose handwriting did not match Mazurek's. In May 2018, the civil court ordered Mazurek to pay Michael Herrmann €7,000, a ruling that effectively affirmed he had kidnapped Ursula. In May 2019, Michael Herrmann presented Bavarian authorities with further evidence about the ransom note. Mazurek was released from prison in June 2023, after serving 15 years of his sentence.