On May 30, 1998, police in Cloppenburg announced that a 30-year-old man from the district had confessed to killing an 11-year-old girl. His name was Ronny Rieken. The announcement ended a search that had begun in mid-March, and it followed a mass saliva screening in which thousands of young men from the district had given samples to the police in April, Rieken among them. He later confessed to a second killing, that of a 13-year-old girl in June 1996.
Two girls were dead. Christina, 11, from Strücklingen, was killed on March 16, 1998. Ulrike, 13, from Jeddeloh in the neighboring Ammerland district, was killed on June 11, 1996. On November 27, 1998, the Landgericht Oldenburg convicted Rieken of both murders, with other charges, and sentenced him to life imprisonment. It added a finding of "besondere Schwere der Schuld", particular gravity of guilt, which rules out the release after fifteen years that is otherwise possible under a German life sentence.
The case has a second subject that the court record touches only in passing. The screening in the Cloppenburg district was described at the time as the largest of its kind in criminal history, and it was carried out without a clear statute behind it. In the following years Parliament created a central DNA file at the Federal Criminal Police Office (September 1998) and in 2005 wrote the mass screening itself into the Code of Criminal Procedure. Politicians and civil-rights lawyers pointed to Cloppenburg in the debates of 1998 and 1999.
Little is known about Rieken's childhood. A court-appointed psychiatrist told the Oldenburg court that he had grown up in a loosely structured household, in the expert's words "mit Zuckerbrot und Peitsche", with sweets and the whip, according to a dpa report carried by the newspaper taz in November 1998. The same expert found a high level of aggression and an alcohol problem, and described him as of normal intelligence and without a mental abnormality in the legal sense.
By 1998 he was a father of three and had worked as a boatman on inland waterways. He lived in a municipality next to Strücklingen.
His record already held a serious conviction. In 1989 the Landgericht Oldenburg, the same court that tried him in 1998, convicted him of an offense against his sister and imposed ten years in prison. The Federal Court of Justice, the Bundesgerichtshof, set that judgment aside because of a formal error in the reasoning on sentence, and in late 1990 another chamber of the court reduced the sentence to five and a half years. The taz, citing dpa, reported on June 2, 1998 that he had served about three years and been released on probation in 1993. The Nordwest-Zeitung later reported that he left prison without therapy and without a DNA sample being taken, and that he was not in the state criminal office's database of offenders, so he was not among the people checked in 1998 before the screening began.
Ulrike was 13 and lived in Jeddeloh, in the Ammerland district. She was killed on June 11, 1996. Little else about her life has been made public.
After Rieken's arrest in the Christina case, investigators examined whether he was connected to the killing in Jeddeloh. On June 2, 1998 the taz reported that police were checking whether the suspect had any link to the 13-year-old who had been killed on June 11, 1996, that there was no evidence of his involvement yet, and that his alibi for that day was being reviewed. He then confessed. The taz reported on July 27, 1998 that he had admitted the killing early the previous week; the Nordwest-Zeitung later put his confession on July 31, 1998.
Ulrike's parents later stood apart from the trial. According to the Berliner Zeitung, they withdrew from the proceedings as co-plaintiffs and did not attend.
Christina was 11 and lived in Strücklingen, a village of about 3,500 people in the Cloppenburg district near the Dutch border, as the Deseret News described it on May 31, 1998. She was known as "Nelly". The legal magazine Justament, in an article in April 2023, wrote that she was born in 1986 in the former East Germany, that her parents were a bus driver and a sales clerk, and that she served as an altar server in her parish and played the flugelhorn. The same article says her parents moved back to Brandenburg after the verdict and that her father had since died; it gives that as the author's account.
She was killed on March 16, 1998. About a thousand people attended her funeral in Strücklingen on March 28, the taz reported. The police formed a special commission, which took the name "Nelly", and the taz reported at the end of March that it was following more than 2,000 tips. The Nordwest-Zeitung later put the commission's strength at about 100 officers.
The police believed they had one lead of a different kind: genetic traces. They thought the person who killed Christina was the same man who had attacked a girl in January 1996 in the village of Neuscharrel, in the same district; the taz wrote on April 14, 1998 that the police regarded the two cases as the work of one offender. With no suspect, they chose a step that had not been taken before in Germany. They would ask the men of the district in the age group they considered likely to include the offender to provide a sample of saliva.
The idea of a mass screening was announced in April 1998. The Associated Press reported from Cloppenburg on April 9 that police would collect saliva from 18,000 men that week, that the tests were voluntary, and that they were "an unprecedented evidence-gathering technique in Germany." About 250 police were to carry out the tests on Thursday and Friday in Cloppenburg, the wire story said.
The target group was men from 18 to 30, the age bracket police believed the offender belonged to. According to the report the Deseret News printed after the arrest, police summoned the men through announcements in the newspapers. Participants had to appear in person and show identification, and they signed a declaration that allowed the state criminal office, the Landeskriminalamt, to create a genetic profile from the saliva, the taz reported from Cloppenburg on April 14. Men who did not appear were also to be checked, the paper wrote, without describing how.
The cost was estimated at 4.5 million marks, about 250 marks per test. Asked about it, the spokesman of the special commission, Gerrit List, answered with a question the taz printed: "Wie viele Millionen ist Ihnen denn ein Menschenleben wert?", how many millions is a human life worth to you? Of the measure itself he said: "Jede polizeiliche Maßnahme ist sinnvoll," every police measure makes sense. Asked what legal basis the police had to check men who stayed away, he said the answer depended on the individual case and had to be examined carefully.
The taz also recorded how the men themselves saw it. One 19-year-old said he had come to avoid trouble. An 18-year-old said a man who refused would look suspicious. A local man called the test the best chance to find the offender. Girls at a school in Sedelsberg told the paper they wanted to know who had done it.
The word "voluntary" was disputed from the first day. The Nordwest-Zeitung wrote in 2008 that no legal basis existed for the screening. The taz interviewed the lawyer and Green politician Hans-Christian Ströbele on April 14, 1998. He said it was not possible to subject all citizens of a certain age to a compulsory examination, that a measure like the one in Cloppenburg would need a law that permitted it, and that without one it was "rechtsstaatlich nicht in Ordnung", not in order under the rule of law. He questioned how voluntary the test was when the police had said they would examine refusers carefully, and he asked who would check that such samples were not kept.
The Grundrechte-Report 1999, an annual civil-rights review published by the Humanistische Union, took up the same points. It said that about 18,000 men from the Cloppenburg region had been called on to take part, that the police described the swab as voluntary while saying they would follow up on those who did not comply, and that public outrage over the killing had been used to make the measure seem acceptable. The Bremen lawyer Rolf Gössner, interviewed by the weekly Jungle World in October 1999, made the same argument: the men had not been free to say no, he said, because refusing placed a man among the suspects.
The statutory ground was thin. The Grundrechte-Report noted that the Code of Criminal Procedure had been amended in March 1997 to give DNA analysis in criminal proceedings an explicit legal basis, after years in which it had been used without one. The report did not name a provision for a screening of thousands of men against whom nothing was alleged. The bill that finally addressed the question in 2005 said that courts and prosecutors had disagreed about the legal basis for a molecular-genetic screening of this kind, and that its aim was to remove the uncertainty.
The main day of testing was Good Friday, April 10, 1998. The taz reported on June 2 that Rieken took part with two relatives. The Nordwest-Zeitung put the setting in Elisabethfehn and wrote that men aged 18 to 30 from the villages of the district had been asked to come. According to the same paper, about 80 percent of them came on the first day.
The Associated Press gave 18,000 men as the number to be tested. The taz wrote in mid-April that police had obtained about 12,000 samples, and at the start of June that about 15,000 men had been planned for and about 14,000 samples had been analyzed. The Deseret News, writing after the arrest, put the figure at 16,400 men and called it "the largest such mass genetic testing to date." A later taz report, from Berlin in 2002, also gave 16,000. About 2,000 of the samples were analyzed in Berlin as official assistance to Lower Saxony, the same report said, and the decisive sample was analyzed there.
The samples were compared with the genetic profile taken from the traces connected to Christina. The taz reported on June 2, 1998 that by the end of the previous week the state criminal offices had analyzed about 14,000 samples, and that number 3,889 matched the traces from both crime scenes, the one in Strücklingen and the one in Neuscharrel. It belonged to Rieken. The probability of a coincidental match was given as one in 6.5 billion.
The Nordwest-Zeitung placed the match at the state criminal office on May 29, 1998, with the arrest the next day and a confession around midnight. The Berliner Zeitung and the Deseret News gave May 29 as the date of the arrest. The Deseret News reported that police announced the confession on Saturday, May 30, through the police chief of Cloppenburg, Hans-Juergen Thurau.
The girl's father spoke in a television interview. "I'm happy he's been arrested, but on the other hand, our daughter will never return," he said, in the Deseret News report.
The Deseret News noted the wider significance. Voluntary, blanket DNA testing had been tried only occasionally in Europe and never in the United States, it wrote, and where it had been used it was usually a last resort in communities of a few thousand people. The Cloppenburg screening was far larger.
Rieken confessed to Christina's killing after his arrest. In July 1998 he confessed to Ulrike's.
Before the trial the justice authorities said he had confessed to all the counts against him. They included offenses against other girls: one against a niece in the early 1990s, one in Neuscharrel in January 1996, and a number of other attempted offenses against girls on rural paths that the Berliner Zeitung counted at about a dozen. These were not tried as separate counts. On the penultimate trial day, with the consent of all parties, the court provisionally dropped the prosecution of them, while saying it would take them into account when weighing the whole.
The Cloppenburg samples were not kept. The taz reported on August 5, 1998 that the police planned to destroy the test data in the autumn, in the presence of a data protection officer, but that the samples had to be held as evidence until the main trial. On October 20, 1998 the taz, citing dpa, reported that about 18,000 saliva samples were to be destroyed the next day, along with the data, and added that the data had been collected to find the killer of 11-year-old Christina.
The taz had reported in April that the results were meant to be destroyed afterward. A taz report from Berlin in 2002, on a planned test of 450 hospital staff in the capital, said that the police there reportedly knew of no investigation solved by a saliva test since the Cloppenburg case, and that the Berlin data protection commissioner had named minimum requirements for any such test: voluntary participation and destruction of the data afterward.
Prosecutors in Oldenburg moved in stages. The taz reported on August 5, 1998 that an indictment had been filed with the Landgericht Oldenburg against Rieken, then 30, for murder in the killing of the 11-year-old from Strücklingen, with further counts concerning girls from the Cloppenburg district. The case in Jeddeloh was not yet in it; prosecutors planned a second indictment by November. The court's fifth criminal chamber still had to decide whether to admit the case, and it appointed a psychiatrist and a psychologist to assess him.
On September 28, 1998 the Oldenburg prosecutor's office announced that a murder charge in the Jeddeloh case was being prepared, to be filed by the end of that week and joined with the charge already admitted. The taz carried the item on September 29. On November 3 the court admitted the indictment, and the main hearing was set to begin on November 12, 1998.
The trial opened at the Landgericht Oldenburg, before a jury court chamber of three professional judges and two lay judges, with Rolf Otterbein presiding. Nine hearing days were planned, with twelve witnesses and four psychological and medical experts summoned, the taz reported on November 11, 1998. The parents of both girls were admitted as co-plaintiffs, and the court said it would decide whether the public could attend the whole trial. Extensive security measures were planned to prevent attempts at revenge, and anti-violence groups announced vigils outside the courthouse.
By the time of the verdict the trial had lasted six hearing days, the Berliner Zeitung wrote. The justice authorities said Rieken had confessed to everything charged. The questions left for the court were his mental state and what the sentence should do about the risk he posed.
Two experts answered them for the court. The psychiatrist Norbert Leygraf of Essen told the court that Rieken could not be treated "nach derzeitigem wissenschaftlichen Stand", on the present state of science, and called the prognosis "äußerst düster", extremely bleak, the Berliner Zeitung reported. The psychologist Sabine Nowara assessed a high risk of reoffending. The taz, citing dpa, wrote that the expert found him unable to feel empathy but fully responsible in the legal sense.
The prosecutor, Christian Schierholt, and the lawyer for the parents of the younger girl, Reinhard Nollmann, asked the court to find particular gravity of guilt. The court-appointed defense lawyer, Rolf Sauerwein, argued for therapy and for "eine Chance zur Resozialisierung", a chance of rehabilitation, but made no request on the sentence. In his closing statement Rieken expressed regret, admitted his full guilt and asked for therapy, the taz reported.
The court gave its verdict on Friday, November 27, 1998. It convicted Rieken of two murders and imposed the highest penalty German law allows, life imprisonment, the taz reported in a dpa dispatch from Oldenburg. The court found that he had killed the girls deceptively and deliberately in order to conceal other offenses against them. It found particular gravity of guilt, which excludes release on parole after fifteen years. According to the Berliner Zeitung it also found him fully responsible and fully able to control his actions, and so did not order placement in a psychiatric hospital, sending him to ordinary prison custody instead.
Preventive detention, the Sicherungsverwahrung, was not ordered. The Berliner Zeitung reported that the court regarded it as unavailable alongside a life sentence, a view it attributed to the court's own reading and to the Federal Court of Justice. The earliest review of release would come after fifteen years, and only if later experts found no remaining danger. Otterbein's words, as quoted by the Berliner Zeitung, were: "Deshalb wird wohl lebenslange Haft tatsächlich lebenslang bedeuten", so life imprisonment will probably mean life in fact. In the taz's account, the court said it could not see a positive prognosis and considered him likely to reoffend.
The court did not order therapy, although he had confessed. The 2005 taz review of a book on the case quoted the judge as saying that his lack of compassion and his entrenched tendency to serious violence could not be remedied by therapy.
On December 3, 1998 Rieken's lawyer filed an appeal on points of law, a Revision, against the life sentence. The taz reported on December 4 that it was filed without grounds, which under German procedure are due within one month of service of the written judgment.
The taz reported on February 25, 1999 that Rieken wanted to appeal in order to obtain therapy in prison. A Hamburg lawyer chosen by Rieken and paid by his family was preparing the grounds. The court-appointed defender, Sauerwein, stayed on and filed a one-sentence protective statement, "Gerügt wird die Verletzung materiellen Rechts", asserting a violation of substantive law, while saying he did not consider the appeal promising. The paper described the verdict as not yet final.
The outcome of the appeal was never made public. Later accounts describe him as serving a life sentence, and none mentions a retrial or any change to the judgment.
A taz review of Heinrich Thies's 2005 book on the case said the author had visited Rieken several times at the high-security prison in Celle. Thies himself writes in the front matter of the book that he met Rieken about ten times in Celle, beginning in early 2003, and that Rieken had been in custody since his conviction in November 1998.
The Nordwest-Zeitung wrote in 2008 that Rieken was still in custody. In an April 2018 article on the case the same paper reported that he was held in Celle and that a request for early release in 2012 had been refused; he was to remain in prison until at least 2021, when a possible suspension of the remaining sentence would be reviewed. Justament wrote in April 2023 that in 2021 the Landgericht Lüneburg had refused an early release because the judges still considered him dangerous.
When he will next be reviewed has not been made public.
Christina's parents were supported by a local priest, according to Justament, which wrote that he still finds it hard to speak about the case.
Ulrike's family is less visible in the record. Her parents withdrew as co-plaintiffs and stayed away from the trial, according to the Berliner Zeitung, and a funeral limited to relatives was held in July 1998.
The screening took place in the middle of a legislative change. According to the Grundrechte-Report 1999, the Code of Criminal Procedure had been amended in March 1997 to give DNA analysis in criminal proceedings a statutory basis. On September 7, 1998, while the Rieken case was still being prepared for trial, the DNA Identity Determination Act (DNA-Identitätsfeststellungsgesetz) was enacted (Federal Law Gazette I, p. 2646). The Report described it as permitting the Federal Criminal Police Office to store DNA identification patterns centrally for people suspected of offenses "von erheblicher Bedeutung", of considerable significance, and criticized it for setting no deadlines for keeping or deleting the data. It wrote that the government had created the central database first and added the legal basis afterward: "Ein Gesetz wird nachgeschoben."
In October 1999 the Jungle World interviewed Rolf Gössner about a draft by the governing Social Democrats and Greens that would amend the 1998 act. It would give the gene file at the Federal Criminal Police Office a firmer statutory footing, he said, and extend DNA testing to about forty offenses, where the first law had been narrower. He argued that the draft left untouched what he called the "genetische Rasterfahndung", the genetic dragnet: the screening of a whole group of people, as in Cloppenburg, still lacked a specific legal basis.
That gap was closed in 2005. The Social Democrats and Greens introduced a bill on June 14, 2005 (Bundestag paper 15/5674), and the Law on the Reform of Forensic DNA Analysis (Gesetz zur Novellierung der forensischen DNA-Analyse) was signed on August 12, 2005 (Federal Law Gazette I, p. 2360). The Bundestag's own news item on the bill, on June 29, 2005, carried the headline "Breite Mehrheit für Reihengentests zur Aufklärung von Verbrechen", a broad majority for mass gene tests to solve crimes.
The new section 81h of the Code of Criminal Procedure set the conditions. As proposed in the bill, a screening required a suspicion based on specific facts of a crime against life, bodily integrity or personal freedom, among others, with a minimum penalty of at least one year; it had to be proportionate to the gravity of the offense; and each participant had to consent in writing after being told in writing that the measure could proceed only with consent. A court had to order it, in a written order naming the criteria that identified the people involved, and the order itself could not be appealed. Profiles were to be deleted once they were no longer needed, and participants' profiles were not to be stored in the national DNA database. The law as passed kept the court order and the written consent, as Bliwier's later account shows. The bill's explanation added that refusing to take part could not, by itself, create an initial suspicion, and that the measure was meant to be exceptional: it "kann damit keine Standardmaßnahme sein", could not be a standard measure.
Critics did not accept the safeguards. Thomas Bliwier wrote in the Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst in December 2008 that the 2005 reform, in his view, had hollowed out data protection. The measure was exceptional by the legislature's intent, he wrote, but the circle of people affected was vaguely drawn, and public pressure weakened the judicial safeguard. He also noted that the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Peter Schaar, had warned in 2006 against using screenings routinely. In June 2008 the conference of Länder justice ministers, meeting in Celle, took the opposite view of the 2005 law as a whole: the amendments to the Code of Criminal Procedure had, in the judgment of the courts and the police, proved their worth.
The courts then had to say what happens to a screening's by-products. In a decision of December 20, 2012 (3 StR 117/12), the Federal Court of Justice ruled on a screening of 2,406 men in a district in Lower Saxony. The laboratory had flagged a partial match with two participants, the defendant's father and uncle, which led police to the defendant, who had been too young to take part. The court held that using the relatives' data to build suspicion against him went beyond the purpose limit in section 81h and was unlawful, but that the evidence was still usable because the law on such near-matches had been unclear. Judge Jörg-Peter Becker said that near-matches and results based on them would from then on face a bar on use, the taz reported, and Lower Saxony's justice minister, Bernd Busemann, called for a change in the Code so that they could be used. The national DNA file held about 770,000 offender profiles at that point, the taz noted.
Whether the Cloppenburg test was voluntary is the main question that the case leaves open. The police called it voluntary, and participants appeared and signed declarations. A legislator and a civil-rights lawyer argued at the time that a man who stayed away would be treated as a suspect, and the investigators' spokesman said that checks on men who stayed away would depend on the individual case. The 2005 bill itself described the legal basis for such screenings as having been disputed between courts and prosecutors.
Whether Rieken could be treated is another. The defense lawyer asked for therapy, and Rieken himself asked for it in his closing statement and later in his appeal. The two experts who testified held that treatment was not possible on the current state of science, and the court agreed.
The outcome of the 1998 appeal has never been made public, and nothing has been reported about his custody since the 2021 decision.
1989: The Landgericht Oldenburg convicts Rieken of an offense against his sister; ten years.
Late 1990: Sentence reduced to five and a half years after the Federal Court of Justice set the first judgment aside.
1993: Released on probation.
January 1996: A girl in Neuscharrel is attacked; the later DNA match links the offender to this case.
June 11, 1996: Ulrike, 13, of Jeddeloh, is killed.
March 16, 1998: Christina, 11, of Strücklingen, is killed.
March 28, 1998: Funeral of Christina.
April 9 to 10, 1998: Saliva screening in the Cloppenburg district; Good Friday is April 10.
May 29 to 30, 1998: Sample 3,889 is matched; Rieken is arrested and confesses; police announce it on May 30.
July 1998: Rieken confesses to the killing of Ulrike.
August 1998: First indictment filed with the Landgericht Oldenburg.
September 7, 1998: DNA Identity Determination Act enacted.
September 28, 1998: Prosecutors announce the second murder charge.
October 1998: About 18,000 samples and the screening data to be destroyed.
November 3, 1998: Court admits the indictment.
November 12, 1998: Trial begins.
November 27, 1998: Life imprisonment with a finding of particular gravity of guilt.
December 3, 1998: Appeal filed.
August 12, 2005: Law on the Reform of Forensic DNA Analysis signed; section 81h regulates mass screenings.
2012: Early-release request refused, according to the Nordwest-Zeitung.
December 20, 2012: Federal Court of Justice rules on near-matches in a screening.
2021: Review ends in refusal, according to Justament.