Germany: Female serial killer whacks poLICE officer bitch

A heroin addict who can cover her tracks has police on the hop, writes Allan Hall in Berlin.

Lieselotte Schlenger loved cats, her churchwarden job, small children and baking. She had put lemon cakes into the oven on May 23, 1993, but never got to eat them.

Germany: Female serial killer whacks poLICE officer bitch Police_wideweb__470x322,0

Germany: Female serial killer whacks poLICE officer bitch Police_wideweb__470x322,0

When a neighbour popped around for a cup of Earl Grey tea later that day at her apartment in the town of Idar-Oberstein in Germany, she saw a bouquet of flowers strewn across a table and the wire that had been used to bind them wrapped around the neck of her friend.

Schlenger, 62, had become the first victim of that rarest of criminal predators: a female serial killer, who became known as "the woman without a face". The only clue in that room to her identity: DNA left on a delicate Meissen china teacup.

To date 14,000 police man hours, thousands of knocked doors, hundreds of thousands of phone calls and $18 million in costs have failed to find the phantom killer who moves through Europe like a wraith and leaves dead innocents in her wake.

Since that first murder she has killed twice and her DNA has been found at the site of a triple-execution that she may or may not have been involved in. Her genetic calling-card has also been found at the sites of numerous break-ins and petty robberies, upon a drug-filled syringe on a leafy pathway and in garden sheds in Austria.

Conventional thinking brands the woman without a face as a drug addict who kills and robs to feed her habit. But if that is so, police say she exercises an extraordinary restraint not usually found in junkies, whose craving normally causes them to implode, to make mistakes that throw them off their selfish, lethal quest.

Last week German police resolved to step up the efforts of "Special Commission Parkplatz" - parking place, after the spot where a female police officer became one of her victims - in a bid to close the file on one of the new millennium's most baffling cases and to redeploy the 50 detectives now working on the case to other crimes.

But good intentions cannot mask the fact that the phantom killer remains a mystery, and unless she is shopped by an accomplice or slips up, the chances are that she may well become the Jack the Ripper of her age: unknown and unaccountable for her terrible crimes.

One reason for the intensity of the hunt is that police want to avenge one of their own. She is the only suspect in the cold-blooded murder of Michele Kiesewetter, 22, a German policewoman who was killed in a car park at Heilbronn in April last year. Police believe the officer approached the woman and she panicked, killing her with a bullet in the face. Inside the BMW squad car: a DNA calling-card of "Frau Ohne Gesicht" ("woman without a face").
LNK

Germany: Female serial killer whacks poLICE officer bitch

Germany: Female serial killer whacks poLICE officer bitch

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