German police track DNA of a cotton bud maker for two years

Police in Germany have admitted that a woman they have been hunting for more than 15 years may never have existed. Dubbed the "phantom of Heilbronn", the woman was described by police as the country's most dangerous woman.

Investigators had connected her to six murders and an unsolved death based on DNA traces found at the scene. Police are now acknowledging that swabs used to collect DNA samples may have been contaminated by an innocent woman - possibly during manufacture.

Police suspected the unnamed woman of being a serial killer who over 16 years carried out a string of six murders, including strangling a pensioner. She was alternatively called the "woman without a face" and the "phantom of Heilbronn" after the city in southern Germany where she allegedly killed a policewoman.



Police suspicions were based on traces of identical female DNA they found at 40 crime scenes across southern Germany and Austria. After finding her DNA at the scene of the murder of a 22-year policewoman from Heilbronn in 2007, police offered a 300,000 euro reward for information leading to her arrest.

According to prosecutors in the south-western town of Saarbruecken, doubts about the existence of the "phantom killer" were raised when her DNA appeared on documents belonging to a person who had died in a fire. When police first tried to identify the victim, they found the phantom's DNA on the dead person's ID. But in a subsequent test, no trace of the phantom's DNA could be found on the document.

That was the point at which alarm bells started ringing and investigators began to suspect that the test material itself may have been contaminated with DNA, prosecutors say. Police in the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg are now investigating if the cotton buds used to gather DNA at the crime scenes may have come in contact with DNA before being packed.