Kurt-Werner Wichmann was never tried. He was a cemetery gardener from Lüneburg in northern Germany who died by suicide in pretrial detention on April 25, 1993, and no court has ever ruled on a killing in connection with him. Since 2017 police and prosecutors in Lüneburg have attributed to him, on the strength of DNA evidence, the two double killings that struck the Göhrde forest in the summer of 1989, in which four people died, and they treat him as the suspect in the death of Birgit Meier, a woman from a village near Lüneburg, in the same summer. Investigators speak of five dead in all.
Every statement about those deaths is an attribution or a suspicion. In the language of the German authorities, the proceedings against him ended with his death, because, as the Lower Saxony interior ministry put it in a parliamentary answer, no one can be investigated once dead. The cases themselves stayed open against persons unknown, and in 2026 police were still describing an inquiry against a living suspect who is thought to have been his accomplice.
Wichmann was a cemetery gardener. A regional paper reported in 2022 that he was born in 1949 in the district of Lüneburg; dpa gave his age at death as 43, and the Volksstimme of Salzwedel gave it as 44 in 2017. His place of residence is given in more than one way. The Lower Saxony interior ministry, answering the state parliament in April 2021, stated that his house was in Lüneburg and not in Adendorf, as the questioners had said. The Volksstimme in 2017 placed an inherited house in Brietlingen-Moorburg, a village near Lüneburg, about 30 kilometers from the Göhrde, and called Birgit Meier his neighbor.
His one court conviction dates from 1970, when he was convicted of rape in Lüneburg and sentenced to prison; the Volksstimme gave the sentence as five and a half years. Lüneburg Aktuell, reporting in March 2026 on the work of a private investigation team, wrote that during that sentence he corresponded with the widow of a dentist and afterward lived with her in Linkenheim-Hochstetten, in the Karlsruhe area, from about 1975 to probably 1978, and that he stayed registered there until 1981. The same report says that he placed personal advertisements and owned several dogs; like the rest of that account, these details come from the private team's inquiries.
The Göhrde is a large state forest in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district of Lower Saxony, east of Lüneburg. Two couples died there in the summer of 1989, in two separate events.
The first pair, Ursula and Peter R., a couple from Hamburg-Bergedorf, were killed in May 1989. The second pair, Ingrid W., a woman from Uelzen, and Bernd K., a man from Hannover, were killed on July 12, 1989.
Police formed a special commission, the Sonderkommission Göhrde. According to dpa, up to 50 officers worked on the case, nearly 2,000 traces were examined and about 5,000 people were questioned. The cases drew national attention and stayed unsolved for 28 years.
Birgit Meier was 41 and lived in Brietlingen-Moorburg, just north of Lüneburg. She died in August 1989, a few weeks after the second Göhrde killing. The Lower Saxony government, in its April 2021 parliamentary answer, corrected the questioners on a point of place: she lived in Brietlingen, not in Lüneburg.
For years her husband was wrongly suspected. Prosecutors in Lüneburg closed the investigation against him in 2008, and the government stated in 2021 that he had never been questioned as a suspect and had not been told of the closure for that reason.
Her brother, Wolfgang Sielaff, was a former head of the Hamburg State Criminal Police Office and had been deputy police president of Hamburg. He is a public figure in the case in his own right, because he pursued it for decades. wendland-net.de reported in January 2018 that in 2003 he learned that the inquiry into his sister's case had not been pursued since 1994, that in 2015 he persuaded the Lüneburg police president to reopen it, and that it was closed again in September 2016 without a result. He worked with experienced criminologists, among them the forensic pathologist Klaus Püschel. In September 2017 his private inquiries led to the breakthrough in the Meier case, and the Lower Saxony government later confirmed that he had been questioned several times as a witness and that his findings were taken into the investigation.
The parliamentary answer of April 2021 sets out what happened to the case against Wichmann. In early 1993 he became a suspect in connection with Birgit Meier in a separate proceeding. On April 25, 1993, the investigation against him ended because he had died by suicide. Police and prosecutors then continued against persons unknown.
The reason for his custody is given in more than one way. dpa wrote in 2026 and in 2019 that he died by suicide in pretrial detention, where he was held on other charges. The Nordkurier wrote in 2026 that it was ten days after his arrest in the Meier case. The Volksstimme in 2017 gave the date of his death as April 25, 1993.
Whether investigators in 1993 considered him in the Göhrde cases is not on record. The government's 2021 answer states that strong evidence of his involvement, in the death of Birgit M. and in the Göhrde killings, came only from DNA analyses, and that such analyses were not technically or legally possible at the time of the crimes.
The Lower Saxony government names two investigation groups in its 2021 answer: "EG Iterum" in 2015, which took up the Meier case, and "EG Göhrde" in 2017. The Volksstimme in June 2017 reported that four officers were re-examining the Göhrde evidence with modern forensic methods, and that a spokesperson for the Lüneburg prosecutors would not confirm a press report of a DNA match and said a statement would follow once there were concrete results.
On December 27 and 28, 2017, the Landeszeitung of Lüneburg reported that the Göhrde cases appeared to be solved, and the dpa agency carried the report. The prosecutors' office confirmed that DNA findings matched. The prosecutor Wiebke Bethke was quoted by dpa as saying that this "allows the conclusion that he could be connected with the Göhrde murders." Investigators knew of no other connection between him and the victims that would explain the match.
Investigators told dpa that they linked five dead to the man, among them Birgit Meier, whose death they held him responsible for. The report said that he probably had an accomplice who was still alive.
In January 2018, wendland-net.de reported that police were examining whether he had an accomplice and would review old cases across Germany, and that a clearing office had been set up at the Lüneburg police directorate to compare cases with other forces. The Lüneburg police president, Robert Kruse, was quoted as saying that officers had to consider a large number of offenses in Germany and perhaps beyond, and prosecutors and police did not rule out that Wichmann had committed more than the five killings known.
In May 2019 police appealed to the public for help. dpa reported on May 8, 2019, that police were examining possible links to 236 offenses, among them homicides and rapes. The head of the investigation group, Jürgen Schubbert, said that the responses so far had produced no decisive lead.
The Landeszeitung also reported in July 2019 that the former Göhrde group had been replaced by a seven-person cold-case unit under Schubbert, and that Lüneburg police had opened two further investigations into killings from 1968 and 1969. Steffen Grimme, the chief of the criminal investigation department, was quoted as saying there were new leads in both. No link to Wichmann was announced.
Wolfgang Sielaff compiled a list of more than 20 unsolved cases around Lüneburg that he thought could fit the same offender. wendland-net.de put the figure at 21 and the Landeszeitung at more than 20 in 2019. The Landeszeitung reported in 2019 that police were checking selected cases, among them two killings of women in the district in 1984 and 1989, and a tip from the Karlsruhe area, where Wichmann had lived for a time. Police did not disclose the content of the tip.
Investigators have raised the possibility that the Göhrde killings were not the work of one man. dpa wrote in 2017 that he probably had an accomplice. In October 2022 the Uelzener Nachrichten reported that the Göhrde investigation group had been attached in March of that year to the cold-case unit of the police directorate, and that a spokesperson, Julia Graefe, had said the inquiry continued against "an alleged and still living accomplice." She added that the Göhrde killings and the Meier case are separate proceedings. A police appeal in July 2022 for a copy of the 1989 Hamburg telephone directory brought a copy and about 100 tips, according to local reports, and the head of the cold-case unit, Thilo Speich, thanked the public. The leinetal24 site reported in September 2022 that police had received 1990 and 1991 directories as well.
The Nordkurier reported in December 2021 that the person suspected as an accomplice was represented by a lawyer and had declined to comment, and that a DNA comparison was still under way. dpa wrote in 2019 that the man was silent and did not want to speak to police. In July 2026 a spokesman for the Lüneburg police directorate told dpa: "We are investigating a living suspect." The spokesman said that the search for an accomplice had so far been unsuccessful.
The Nordkurier reported in December 2021 that Lüneburg police officially treat Wichmann as the suspect in the Meier case. It also wrote that the file held over 2,000 trace files, and that about 700 new leads had been added. In October 2022 the Uelzener Nachrichten reported that the Lüneburg prosecutors considered the Meier case closed. He was never charged or tried in any case.
The Lower Saxony parliament was told in April 2021 that evaluation of the seized items was not complete and had produced no significant new findings. The Landtag members who asked the question wrote that five killings were demonstrably linked to Wichmann. The government neither disputed nor confirmed this and cited the continuing investigation.
Police have repeatedly said that they are not building a case around him alone. The July 2026 dpa report quotes a spokesman for the Lüneburg police: "We investigate by offense, not by offender." Tips arrive from across Germany, in the high double digits over twelve months, and police have also received hints about two women killed in Schwerin in 1991 and about unsolved cases involving young women in the Cuxhaven area in the 1970s and 1980s. The spokesman said police are in contact with Cuxhaven but have not taken over that inquiry. The Cuxhaven police had earlier said Wichmann had no anchor point in the region.
Lüneburg Aktuell reported in March 2026 that a prosecutor in Bremen, Frank Passade, called questions about a possible link to two killings in Bremen and Bremerhaven in September 1991 "justified" and said Wichmann "is an option." The Lower Saxony state criminal police office's case-analysis unit estimated that he could be responsible for violent crimes "in the high double-digit range", according to the same report, and Lüneburg police confirmed that his DNA has been stored as an anonymized trace in the national database since 2018. In the Palatinate, police told the Rheinpfalz that there was no concrete evidence that he killed two teenagers there, but that a link could not be entirely excluded. A police spokesperson in Lüneburg said that Wichmann was considered unlikely in the case of Gitta Schnieder in 1989.
A private investigation team led by a former Hamburg criminal police chief, Reinhard Chedor, has put forward further suspicions, including cases in Schwerin in 1991. A spokesperson for the Schwerin prosecutors said the information was known and was being evaluated (Nordkurier, 2026). The team's claims are its own and are not findings of police or a court.
No court has ruled on any of these deaths. Wichmann was never charged with the Göhrde killings or the death of Birgit Meier, so the words "murderer" or "killer" describe an attribution by the police and not a legal fact.
The number of dead is contested. Police and prosecutors speak of five dead linked to him (four in the Göhrde, one in the Meier case). The wider figures in the press, such as 20 or more victims, rest on Sielaff's list, a private team and an estimate of "at least 20 murders" quoted by the Nordkurier in 2026 from the private team. Police have said only that they cannot rule it out and are checking cases.
The question of an accomplice is open. The 2017 report that he "probably" had one, the 2022 statements of the police spokesperson and the 2026 report of an inquiry against one living suspect are consistent, but no one has been charged.
The 2017 DNA match has been called strong evidence. The government's 2021 answer speaks of strong evidence of his involvement; it is not a finding of guilt, because he died before any charge.
In July 2026, dpa reported that the files on the Göhrde killings remained open, that police were investigating a living suspect and that an investigation group was re-examining old traces with new methods. In November 2024 police had said there was no "hot lead" and that six officers at the Lüneburg directorate handled 181 cold cases. The Nordkurier reported in 2021 on a four-part documentary series on Netflix that follows Sielaff's inquiry.
1949: Wichmann is born in the Lüneburg district (Uelzener Nachrichten).
1970: convicted of rape in Lüneburg and sentenced to prison.
About 1975 to 1978: lives in Linkenheim-Hochstetten near Karlsruhe, registered there until 1981 (Lüneburg Aktuell, 2026).
May 1989: first Göhrde killing, a couple from Hamburg-Bergedorf.
July 12, 1989: second Göhrde killing, a woman from Uelzen and a man from Hannover.
August 1989: Birgit Meier, 41, dies.
Early 1993: Wichmann becomes a suspect in the Meier case.
April 25, 1993: he dies by suicide in pretrial detention; the investigation against him ends.
2003: Meier's brother learns that his sister's case has not been pursued since 1994.
2008: prosecutors close the investigation against Meier's husband.
2015: "EG Iterum" takes up the Meier case after her brother persuades the Lüneburg police president to reopen it.
September 2016: the inquiry is closed again without a result.
September 2017: Sielaff's private inquiries bring a breakthrough in the Meier case.
December 27 and 28, 2017: reports that DNA ties the Göhrde cases to the gardener; prosecutors confirm the match.
January 2018: police say they will review old cases across Germany and open a clearing office.
May 2019: police appeal to the public; 236 offenses are being checked.
December 2021: the Nordkurier reports that Wichmann is officially treated as the suspect in the Meier case.
March 2022: the Göhrde investigation group joins the cold-case unit.
July 2022: police appeal for a 1989 Hamburg telephone directory.
October 2022: prosecutors regard the Meier case as closed.
July 11, 2026: police say they are investigating a living suspect.