The eighteen-year-old who got away took his license number. On March 8, 1984, a man picked her up near Bremen and drove her toward the moor; she asked for a cigarette first, pushed it lit into his face, jumped out of the car, memorized the plate as he drove off and went to the police. The car belonged to Thomas Rath, twenty-four, born in 1959 and a noncommissioned officer in the Bundeswehr, the West German army. Questioned, he confessed.
The confession closed a series that had held the Bremen police for more than two years. On October 30, 1981, Britta Schilling, eighteen, set out to hitchhike home from a disco near Bremen and vanished. Her body was found on November 6 in the Teufelsmoor, the moorland north of the city, naked, with twenty-seven stab wounds and many marks of torture.
Three days after that discovery a seventeen-year-old girl on her way home from school was raped and thrown into the marsh, and survived. On December 3, 1981, Heike Schnier, twenty, was raped and stabbed thirty-six times. Her body lay in the Teufelsmoor until March 24, 1982.
On May 22, 1982, Angela Marks (also spelled Angele), eighteen, disappeared in Bremen. Seven months passed before her skeletal remains were found on the Lüneburg Heath. By then the police were sure they were dealing with one man, and no closer to him. A year went by with no known attack, and then in June 1983 he abducted a seventeen-year-old, forced her at knifepoint into oral sex and let her go.
On December 26, 1983, Martina Volkmann, twenty, from the Bremen district of Vahr, set out to hitchhike to Hamburg and met him. She was stabbed more than a hundred times. Accounts differ on when her body was found.
He was tried at the Landgericht Bremen, and on April 26, 1985, was sentenced to life imprisonment, with treatment in the prison's psychiatric service. Published summaries of the case attribute all four killings to him, but the judgment itself has never been published, and the summaries do not agree on its terms: some add a finding of particular gravity of guilt, which bars the release review a German life sentence otherwise allows after fifteen years, and an order for preventive detention to follow the sentence, while the German summary of the case records only life with psychiatric treatment.
Some writers, among them the criminologist Stephan Harbort, have linked him to other unsolved killings of young women who disappeared after nights out in the region between the Elbe and the Weser. No such link has been proved. In September 2012 the Weser-Kurier reported that the police inspection for Osterholz and Verden still had eight unsolved murders on its list of old cases, among them three women from Bremen and Bremerhaven whose bodies had been found in the early 1980s at Oyten, Hüttenbusch and Tarmstedt. Its spokesman, Jürgen Menzel, said the list was taken out again whenever staffing allowed, to see whether new information or refined DNA testing could move the cases on. The paper did not name the women.
He is not known to have been released. Where he is held, and whether he has applied for release, has not been reported.
1959: Thomas Rath is born.
October 30, 1981: Britta Schilling, eighteen, vanishes hitchhiking home from a disco near Bremen; her body is found in the Teufelsmoor on November 6.
November 1981: a seventeen-year-old girl is raped and thrown into the marsh, and survives.
December 3, 1981: Heike Schnier, twenty, is raped and stabbed; her body is found on March 24, 1982.
May 22, 1982: Angela Marks, eighteen, disappears in Bremen; her remains are found on the Lüneburg Heath seven months later.
June 1983: a seventeen-year-old is abducted, sexually assaulted at knifepoint and released.
December 26, 1983: Martina Volkmann, twenty, sets out to hitchhike to Hamburg and is stabbed to death.
March 8, 1984: an eighteen-year-old escapes from his car and reports his license number; Rath is questioned and confesses.
April 26, 1985: the Landgericht Bremen sentences him to life imprisonment, with psychiatric treatment.