Stuff You Should Know - True Crime: The Phantom of Heilbronn

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

After the murder of a cop in southwest Germany in 2007 a massive hunt was launched across Europe. The suspect was a female serial killer who had left DNA behind during a number of crimes. She was so slippery, she was known as The Phantom of Heilbronn.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Dave C is here with us and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Before we get started though, we want to quickly plug our friends at co-ed because we're trying to get the Stuff You Should Know army and their donation pool up to $1 million. Yeah.

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And now on with the spooky show. That's right. So what a dish is this, Chuck? A spooky phantom addition. That's what Dave thought, but no. And you can understand how you would get that impression from the title, but the phantom of Heilbronn. Heil, sorry.

Is it Heil? It is. I just goofed. In German, you do the second syllable for an EI. Okay. So Heilbronn. Yeah, Heilbronn, sorry. Double N at the end.

And the phantom of Heilbronn would prove to be essentially what amounts to a criminal mastermind as far as police were concerned for being able to evade the police for so long despite being so sought after. I mean, like they made international news, this case did, it was that vexing. So we love cold cases, we love true crime cases and this one is like really great. Yes. So big thanks to Olivia for helping us out with this one. And she very astutely starts with a brief overview of DNA forensics, which we've covered

a lot of times, but just as a reminder, this started out, DNA forensics and collection and using it for criminal cases in the 1980s in the UK, notably, I think the first case was the exoneration of a 17-year-old suspect in a rape and murder case of two girls back then before they had, this is like pre-DNA database, their idea, which worked pretty well in this case, was to basically do a big genetic sweep and ask for 5,000 local men to give up DNA samples of blood or saliva and there was a local baker there named Colin Pitchfork who told his friend, he said, okay, mate, would you mind donating your blood for me?

And his friend, I guess, word got around like, hey, that's a weird thing to do, someone overhears this in a pub and all of a sudden Colin Pitchfork is in fact arrested and another gentleman is exonerated. Yeah, through the use of DNA and it was the guy who actually invented using DNA for forensics, Alec J. Jeffries, who became knighted and he discovered it by accident and he was trying to find how heritable diseases pass through families and realized like, oh, wait, I can actually identify every single participant in the study because of their DNA and a light bulb went off and that was an amazing first case.

He exonerated somebody who was innocent and caught the bad guy and the murder and rape of two girls, like, it doesn't, you can't possibly have a better first outing than that. And so as a result, DNA profiling took off like a rocket, particularly in the UK at first but then it spread very quickly to other European countries and the US and by 1989 the FBI said, hey, all of you police departments in the United States, you start sending your samples into us, we'll create profiles, we'll run them against the database and we will catch your bad guy for you. So it became much more standardized within three years of that first case.

Yeah. And all the private companies who were doing that before the FBI stepped up said, thanks a lot. Yeah. Now we're bankrupt. Thanks a lot, FBI. We had a pretty good racket going. But it did need to be codified and the database became a very big part of it because like

I said, pre-database, they were doing, and as you'll see in some of these crimes, even with the phantom, things like genetic sweeps and genetic drag nets and things like that. Yeah. There was another guy who enters the picture in 97. He was from Austria. His name was Roland van Urschacht. I think I got it. And he said, hey, you know how we only thought we could get DNA from blood, saliva or semen?

It turns out we leave DNA everywhere. Everything we touch has little bits of DNA left behind and here's a way to extract that and identify and profile it basically. And so now all of a sudden DNA goes from this is a really useful tool kind of to we can use this in basically every case we come across. Somebody like steals a can of Coke out of the Honor System Coke machine. You could like profile their DNA and probably catch them from that. It was like, it opened it up that much.

It sure did. Yeah. It decreased Honor System Coke machine crime by like 500% almost overnight. Those genetic drag nets were happening more and more and then they eventually built up the database such where they were less and less necessary, especially when countries started sharing data across their borders, which here in the United States, we do that in an interstate fashion and maybe with Canada and Mexico. I'm not really sure actually, but if they're lucky if we're feeling like it today.

But in Europe, this started happening in about 2005 when Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands said and Spain said, hey, let's sign this treaty. That means we can share our DNA findings with each other 2007. That was basically all of Europe, all the EU got on board. And the reason we're talking about the EU is because all of these myriad crimes that this phantom purportedly committed were in Europe and mostly around Germany. Yes. And because these crimes were committed after Roland Van Urschot's discovery that you can

get DNA samples from just about anything. The European police had become well versed in lifting DNA from crime scenes. And so they were able to track who would come to be called the Phantom of Heilbronn through the DNA left behind at these crime scenes. And apparently they were already tracking this person for a few years in a much more isolated way. But the whole thing blew up and the nickname that the Phantom of Heilbronn all happened in I think April of 2007 when a 22-year-old policewoman named Michelle Kaiswetter was murdered

while she was taking a lunch break. Can I correct your pronunciation? Yeah. I believe that would be Kaisaveta. That's much better. What did I say? Kaiswetter. Yeah, but that's okay.

She was murdered in cold blood. She was 22 years old on lunch break with a cop named Martin Arnold. And they were sitting in their patrol car in Heilbronn and a couple of people jumped in the back seat, shot them from behind. They stole their handcuffs. They stole their guns. And Kaisaveta died. Martin was only 25 and was in a coma for weeks.

And if you read any interviews with Martin Arnold that just like completely wrecked this guy's life. He lost memory from the point where he parked the car to eat and literally doesn't remember anything else except waking up in the hospital. So all that to say there was no identification of anything. Right. Yeah, I saw that he couldn't. And I can imagine if you're in a coma until they dislodge a bullet from your brain, it's

a pretty good bet you're not going to be able to remember anything. Is he able to remember stuff now, do you know, like from that point on? Yeah. I mean, I think he recovered, but it was just, you know, one of these sad stories of this young guy who was always wanted to be a cop early on the job and, you know, just gets – and this was not a – it's not like this crime happens a lot in the U.S., but it was a very huge big deal crime and it like rocked Germany. It was such a big like scary thing.

Yeah, because Heilbronn is not a huge bustling metropolis. It's a small town and the fact that the murder of a cop in the small town in Germany caught the entire country's attention and outrage, you know, it does go to show you like that's a really big deal in Germany or it was at least in 2007. And also I think the manner of the murder too where the perpetrator, the criminals got the drop on them so quickly that the cops weren't even able to like get their weapons out. Yeah.

Like they just completely – I was by surprise. So it was an enormous deal and it turned out that they were able to find some genetic material on the rear seat of the car and on the center console of the car and they found something really, really surprising that the only genetic material that they could work up a profile from belonged to a woman. And that did not fit the idea of Germans at the time of somebody who had jumped in the back seat of a cop car and murder a pair of cops or murder one and try to murder the other one.

Yeah, it was shocking but it was confusing at the same time. Like no one understood sort of the findings that happened. A few months later, they are working with the DNA and they said, hey, wait a minute, these samples match some other crimes that are happening, two other murders in particular. The first was from 1993, it's a cold case. This woman, I'm going to say, it's Lieselot Schlanger, was 62 years old, again in Germany. And it's about 100 miles west of Heilbronn and on May 23rd of that year, had put some cakes in the oven, her neighbor came by to have tea, knocked at the door, no one answered

and it turned out that she had been – Schlanger had been strangled with the wire from a flower bouquet in her sitting room. cops investigated a bunch of witnesses, no one saw anything, no one heard anything, but we have this DNA on the rim of a teacup that matched the DNA from the killer of Michel Kaiser Wetter. Yeah, from a 1993 cold case, right? That's right. And then there was another 2001 cold case in the murder of a man named Joseph Walsenbach.

How was that? That's great. He was an antique stealer and he too was murdered with a weapon of opportunity, some garden twine that happened to be handy, strangled. So both Lieselot and Joseph were strangled and he was strangled in his shop and they found DNA on his body, a few items in the shop and then the back of a clothes sign, which is so creepy that they assume that the phantom who would come to be known as the phantom put the clothes sign out and left.

That's just cold, you know? Oh yeah, for sure. That kind of calculation? Yeah. It's like a movie shot right there. Yeah, it's just scary. So now we have three murders and an attempted murder. Two of the victims were cops.

All of them linked to the same woman over the course from 1993 to 2007, all in roughly the same general area of Germany. Yeah, and two of the murders are similar enough in that they were strangled with some kind of wire and I think both were missing just little amounts of money. It didn't seem like a huge robbery kind of thing, but they were close enough to where there were some similarities to where they said, okay, these make a little bit of sense together, however, except that it was a woman who was strangling, which is not common at all.

And then the cop one, though, that many years later was really kind of threw everyone for a loop. Nevertheless, the DNA all matched and so the media started in with this story. Like you said, the Phantom of Heilbrom or the woman without a face. Yeah, and apparently she'd been known as the woman without a face before when they were tracking those two cold cases that they'd matched the DNA to before. And then with the murder of the police officer, she became the Phantom of Heilbrom. So now German investigators were like, we have a woman serial killer on our hands who's

been active at least since 1993, and no one has seen her. And we need to find this person ASAP because she's now a cop killer. All right. I think it's a great cliffhanger. Yeah. Should we take a break? Yep. All right.

Let's start with the Phantom of Heilbrom right after this. I'm Mange Shatikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it.

So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is a risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, I have to say, I just want to say this. There was a part where we're talking about DNA profile sharing across the EU in 2007. They also were sharing license plate information and that occurred to me that the font on those plates was Falsung Sher Shwende Shrift. Yeah. And I just, I spelled it out, I sounded it out, by God, I was going to say it in this

episode, come hell or high water. Good job. Thanks. All right. So where we last left you was there is the murder of a police officer, the serious wounding of another, and then two cold cases from many years before, all tied to the same DNA of what they know is a woman. All of a sudden, they start matching this DNA with these, you know, people start sharing

databases and crime particulars around the EU, and they said, wait a minute, this person's DNA is everywhere, and it's not murders, there are a dozen break-ins, and there are car thefts in Austria, and in France, and in Germany, and there's a break-in in an office in Germany. There's a burglary in Mainz, Germany. The gas cap of a car that was stolen had this DNA on it in 2003. There was a toy pistol used in a robbery in France with this DNA on it. And everyone is like, that's why this name Phantom of Heilbronn locked in so much because all of a sudden, you could go on for an hour listing the crimes that this DNA was found

at. Yeah. So we've got a female serial killer in Germany who also appears to have a taste for just common crimes as well. So much so that it seemed like she may have been more of a burglar or robber who was totally fine with murder, but didn't need to murder all the time, more than a serial killer that liked to engage in petty crime. And one of those, I just have to say, one of those burglaries, a break-in at an office

in Dietzenbach on New Year's Day 2003, one of the prosecutors in this case who was tracking the Phantom named Günther Horn said that this was a professional job, it's a quote, but it was the theft of a can of loose change. So I thought it was kind of hilarious that he was like, this person's evading us, it's a professional job, no matter what she's doing, even if she's stealing loose change in a coffee can from an office, doesn't matter, she's pro. Well, I mean, that's the kind of interesting thing about this case, I think, is once you have this DNA at all these crimes, your cop masterminds are going to start trying to

piece together, and they did in this case, like, we got a profile of this person and what kind of a person would, I don't think we mentioned that was also the DNA was found on a heroin needle. Yeah, that was a big turning point too. That a seven-year-old stepped on in Germany and his parents said, hey, couldn't you investigate this, my kid stepped on this needle, they swabbed it and found that DNA. So all of a sudden this profile was like, this is a drug user, maybe she steals little bits to fund the drug habit and maybe like you said, the murders just happen out of necessity

because of these petty crimes. So kind of the point is, like, once you've got all these weird, disparate crimes, you're still going to have cops that are trying to tie them to a single sort of brain. Right, they were just trying to figure out who they were after, basically. So yeah, that heroin syringe from 2001 really kind of explained things like the coffee can of loose change, you know, those kind of robberies and break-ins. And then there was another thing that kind of added to the puzzle as they were on our trail.

In 2005, in Worms in Germany, a Roma man shot his brother and so the police were getting stuff from the crime scene, what's it called? Swabbing. They were collecting evidence from the crime scene and the DNA they found on one of the bullets was the phantoms. So now they're like, okay, this kind of explains how she's making her way back and forth around the EU in France, Germany, Austria. She's basically hooked up with the Roma community, if not Roma herself.

And then there was one other thing too. She had accomplices in some of these crimes and they were, none of them would say a word about her. They just clammed up whenever the cops went to them and said, hey, you know this crime you got busted for? We just found out that you had an accomplice. They would just stop talking. Yeah.

And I think it was the Gunter Horn talked about the fact that I think his frustration and police's general frustration that even after these people are behind bars, they're still not talking and they're not saying anything. So they basically said what we kind of did was basically wait for reports to come in with this DNA turning up again. And then we would have a new lead and between I think 2007, summer 2007 and spring 2008, there were like garden shed break-ins, sometimes food and drink was stolen. Nothing real big happened.

But again, lots of more crimes start trickling in. And they think also that those garden shed break-ins that she was spending the night in those garden sheds. So that would suggest also that she was aware she's being hunted and on the run. Yes. Look right there. You can see a depression in the haystack. Right.

So there was another one too. And I believe this was the last crime they, yeah, I think it was the last crime. No, it wasn't. There was another crime. It was a little odd. It took place near the Luxembourg border where a woman who was the manager of the cleaning staff at a fishing lodge, someone snuck up behind her, hit her on the head hard and made off with 300 euros that I guess she had on her.

And when they did, they collected evidence in the room at that fishing lodge, they found the phantom's DNA there. Now from what I saw, it wasn't on the woman or any weapon or anything like that, just in the room. So they didn't know whether she had been there before or whether she was involved in this. But either way, they were like, okay, now she's over by Luxembourg too. I flew out of Luxembourg once. Oh yeah?

How was the airport? I threw up in a trash can at the airport. Sweet. Long story. Does it have to do with rope trauma? No. We have two mysteries. I almost got you.

So the biggest crime aside from that initial police murder in these cold cases came in 2008 with a triple murder. This was in January 2008, the bodies of three used car dealers from Georgia, European Georgia not here, were found in the Rhine River in Germany and two men were arrested, a 40-year-old Iraqi and 26-year-old Somalian citizen. So they looked at these guys and said, we know what happened. These car dealers were in town getting cars to sell back home, and they had a lot of cash on them, so you murdered them for their money.

They searched the one suspect, the Iraqi suspect, and they found traces of you guessed it, the Phantom of Heilbronn DNA was in that car. He's questioned the guy, and again, he's not talking, he has nothing to say to the police about who this mystery woman is. Yep. So now she's shown that she's capable of, if not participating in, at least presiding over triple homicides. That is not that many people are capable of triple homicides, you know?

But it's also kind of not surprising if you look at her past, that she's also willing to get up and close and personal and strangle elderly citizens with garden twine. So it's not that big of a shock, but it's a big addition to the profile of her that the police are coming up with. And so they started to put all this stuff together, like the syringe suggested that she used drugs, and some of the pettier crime suggested that she was committing them to probably get drugs. She generally stuck around Southwestern Germany, but she also was capable of moving over to

Austria and France. And so they said her connection with the Roma probably helps her do that. So they were putting this together, and they still weren't finding anybody. No one was emerging, like she just kept eluding them, crime after crime after crime. And one of the big problems was, is there was either no eyewitnesses to the crime or no eyewitnesses saw her. And then one day, one day, there was a attempted break-in in Sahrbrucken in 2006. By the way, I'm expecting you to be like, you're way off if I'm way off.

And if you say nothing, then I nailed it. That's how I'm taking these. Correct. Okay. And in Sahrbrucken, somebody saw the person attempting to break in. And in that break-in attempt, they found the phantom's DNA. But the puzzler was that the person, the eyewitness who saw the attempted burglar, described a man with a soul patch, even a terrible, terrible soul patch.

And this added a whole nother twist to the mystery. And one interesting thing notably though is none of the crimes, even though there are crimes committed all over this area, none of them happened in Bavaria, which is a little unusual because it's right there, but just put a pin in that one. Which suggested then to the cops that it was possible that the phantom, who they knew to have the sex of a female, but had a soul patch conceivably, may have actually been a transgender man. So they added that to the profile as well.

That's right, which I'm sure added a whole other layer for them. Another layer that was added that we should mention was that Germany had, I guess you could call a very, I guess to put it kindly, rocky historical record of identifying races and ethnicities as a country. So because of that, there were pretty strict laws on how Germany could use DNA and how much insight they could get from it. So in other words, an investigator in Germany was not allowed to determine race or ethnicity or hair or eye color using DNA.

It was possible in Austria, so they were a little less strict there at the time. And they were able to take a closer look at this DNA and say, hey, we think we can't be sure because it's 2000, what year was this, seven or eight? We're pretty sure though that this woman probably has blonde hair and blue eyes. So we got that going for us. Yeah, but they also said in some interviews that they're like, that's, I mean, we're talking about Germany for one, but also they said that it was 80% accurate. So the margin of error left the possibility of falsely arresting hundreds of thousands

of Germans. So they essentially, they might as well have not had any idea what her hair or eye color was. Yeah. Again, this is the early days of DNA, such that they also did a DNA dragnet. This is pretty big long shot, but they did saliva swab of about 3,000 women in Belgium, France and Southern Germany and Italy. They focused on drug users, unhoused women, women with criminal records that were pretty

serious. They offered up big time money. I believe it got up to about 300,000 euros, a lot of dough, but nothing was helping out. And in total, I think they ended up spending what they guessed to be about 16,000 hours of police over time pursuing the phantom of Heilbronn. And yet she kept eluding them, Chuck. And I say that we take our second break and come back and talk about how she was finally apprehended.

Let's do it. I'm Mangesha Tickler. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look

for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Like the Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so now we're in March 2009. This is finally the case that kind of breaks things wide open for the Phantom of Heilbronn, and police were investigating the death of a man who died in a fire and thought maybe he was an asylum seeker who had disappeared years before. And so they were trying to find out if this was the same, the burned body that they found

was the same as this asylum seeker. They tested a card where they know that this asylum seeker had given fingerprints. Like here is my fingerprint, DNA right here, and it matched the Phantom. And they said, well, that, all right, I know these Phantom matches have been crazy, but this is literally impossible. We know who this man was, and it is a man. It is not a woman who had committed these crimes. So they said, let's retest it, and the DNA has disappeared from the card.

And then everyone went, well, what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on here? And before they could answer that question, a German magazine named Stern came out and said, guys, there is no Phantom of Heilbronn. What? Yeah. They've been chasing false positives from DNA matches, likely from contaminated equipment or swabs. Right.

And what they realized they had literally been tracking were cotton swabs. They had been tracking the DNA of a woman who worked in a cotton swab factory that they used to take DNA samples from. That was the Phantom of Heilbronn, was a, I think, a 71-year-old Polish grandmother who worked in the factory of the cotton swab maker. Yeah. So I tried to find out who she was specifically. I couldn't.

And I also found that it was, there were quite a few older Polish women, I guess that kind of thing happens sometimes, where you hire a bunch of people out from an area. So it could have possibly been from other women in that same area who worked at the factory because I couldn't find her actual name. Did you? Not that it matters. I feel like I did see it somewhere in one of the articles. Okay.

I didn't know if they tried to grant her an anonymity. Wow. I swear I saw it. I'm almost positive. Because I could see why they'd make her anonymous, but then in retrospect, she didn't do anything wrong. It wasn't her. Sure.

But just to avoid people from bothering this old lady. Sure. But as a matter of fact, the cops, the first thing the cops did was throw the maker of these cotton swabs right under the bus, because as you can imagine, everybody, the Phantom of Heilbronn, this internationally described criminal that the cops had been after for years, that the Heilbronn police alone spent 16,000 overtime hours trying to catch, didn't exist. There was no Phantom.

It was such egg on the cops' faces that they're still peeling it off. And so of course they said, this is the manufacturer's fault. What the heck is going on? Why is there other people's DNA on these cotton swabs when you're double-packaging them? We considered these one when cops said the Mercedes of cotton swabs. And the manufacturer is like, well, we never said you could use them for DNA collection. Yeah. They fired back pretty quickly and said, these are for testing food, guys, or medical

testing, hygienic tests, like definitely not collecting DNA. I don't think we mentioned either before this even happened. As soon as it sort of came out from Stern, the magazine, there were investigators that said sort of on the down low for at least six months, we've been kind of wondering and investigating whether or not this could have been a contaminated evidence case. Yeah. The other investigators were like, well, thank you for even mentioning that to us. They kept that pretty quiet though.

To put a button on the Bavarian thing is Bavaria did not source their swabs from this company. So that explains why there was never any DNA, even though Bavaria is right there where all these crimes were happening. Yeah. And the company was Griner Bio One International AG. And the thing that claimed that they were like, well, we never said this is for DNA collection. It's for food stuff sampling and stuff like that.

The cops were like, well, then why have you been selling them to police departments all over Austria and Germany? What did you think we were using them for? Yeah. And the company was just like, I'm out. The money spends the same, you know? Yeah. And a PR spokesperson shaped dust cloud just left at the podium and that was it.

Well, they were like, I thought you were testing your, give a Coke, take a Coke, saying in your offices. Your Coke machine honor system. Your honor system. All right. So I guess we should talk a little bit about what happened because of this. It was, like you said, a big humiliation for the German police. It was also a bit of a hit on DNA sampling.

You know, we've talked about DNA a lot over the years and DNA is great and collection of DNA for exoneration and for proving someone is guilty is amazing and it's really come a long way. But DNA has always sort of giveth and taketh away in certain cases. It's not perfect. Like Libya says, it's not a silver bullet. And I think it was sort of, has always kind of been painted that way, especially for juries or like, you know, when they see DNA evidence, I think the first thing you think is that's

like as ironclad as it gets. And that's not necessarily always the case. No. And as a matter of fact, if you zoom out a couple of orders of magnitude and look at this case, the Phantom of Heilbronn case needed to happen because people were being convicted on circumstantial DNA evidence alone. Like their DNA had been found at the scene. Not on the murder weapon, not on the body, just at the scene.

And people were going to prison for that kind of stuff because judges, juries, prosecutors saw DNA as like infallible basically. If your DNA was there, you were guilty essentially. So the Phantom of Heilbronn case really slowed that down. And like you said, it didn't say there's a lot wrong with DNA in using that for forensics. It's, hey, this is a really good way to come up with evidence, but you need to also do the old fashioned police work to fill it out, to make sure you have the right person. So it just kind of slowed everybody down and like, it was, I think it was really necessary

because this was like the time when CSI was at its peak, that TV show was huge in 2008. And that was because everybody thought of DNA in that way. So it was good it happened in a sense. Yeah. Absolutely. It was nice if you want to get specific from 2011 that Olivia dug up for us where there was an English cab driver whose DNA was discovered from the fingernails of a murdered woman. And you know, a jury hears that and they're like, fingernails.

Like of course he did it because she was sliding them off and got his DNA under her fingernails. But it was someone who rode in his cab and got a little bit of that DNA on him, killed this woman and got that DNA on her. And I believe the cabbie spent eight months in jail before they found out the truth and acquitted him. So that's a tough one though. Well, sure. I mean, that's an outlier, but it's just a good example of how it needs, you need to

tread a little lighter, I think. One of the other things though is it's not like this should have been a surprise for everybody that DNA wasn't infallible because back in 1997, our friend or shot, the guy who said, hey, you can get DNA off of everything. This research also showed you can also really, really easily contaminate anything with DNA. So we should all be very careful. Everybody's like, all we heard was we can get DNA samples off of anything. Yeah.

There's like, we didn't hear all that. We weren't with an or shot. Oh man. That was amazing, Chuck. Holy cow. Oh boy. I'm so ashamed. I hate ponds, but that filled my heart.

Very ashamed. So there's an international standard, the international organization for standardization, I should say, an international organization. They published a new standard called ISO 18385 that basically says, this is how you collect forensic evidence with DNA to minimize contamination, that kind of stuff. And I read a forensic blog who said, were the DNA analysts not even doing control samples? And I went and looked it up, and a control sample is one of the most basic things you can do where you take your cotton swab that has like say a blood stain on it and you pull

off a little bit of the cotton swab that's not stained and you test them both to make sure that the cotton swab that's not stained doesn't come back with any genetic material. If it does, your sample is compromised and they weren't doing that apparently or else they would have figured this out almost immediately. So they were not doing very basic stuff and maybe it's because it hadn't been standardized like this is what you're supposed to do by that time, but you know, in 2016 finally they got around to saying, here's how you do it, right? It's like when you put on a Band-Aid, you take off the peely part and you hold it by

the sticky part, you don't hold it by the bandage. Right. And then you take a sample of the bandage and then you run it through your DNA profiling machine. Sure. So, and there's actually, those things exist now. There's something called rapid DNA machines. Yeah, 90 minutes.

Yeah. Because DNA is not going anywhere, nor should it. You can look no further than the Golden State Killer case where they actually caught the serial killer who killed like scores of people or raped scores of women and killed I think a dozen or more people just through his DNA. They found it through like a genetic genealogy site. They discovered this guy. So yeah, you don't actually want to get rid of DNA, but what seems to be problematic is

we're going a different way where now police stations have these rapid DNA machines where you just throw a cotton swab in and it spits out a genetic profile that you can run in CODIS, but that you're taking the professional analyst out of the equation and that seems dangerous to a lot of people. Yeah. Absolutely. To button up the original case that sort of got this all started, which was the murder of Officer Michel Caizovetta, it was Nazis.

What they found out, it was a very small terror cell of just three people, the National Socialist Underground, and they were tied to the larger Nazi movement, but they carried out a series of murders throughout Germany from 1999 to 2007, and all, except for the officers, all the other victims were immigrants, one Greek citizen and eight of Turkish origin, and it was two members of that group, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Bernhardt. The two Uwe's. The two Uwe's. They robbed a bank in Eisenhower in Germany.

They were spotted, and this was after the murder. This is in 2011 and how they got caught, well, not quite caught, but they were spotted and as police approached their burned out caravan where they were hiding out, Mundlos killed Bernhardt and then himself, and what looked like a murder suicide, even though I think Bernhardt's last words were, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Man. That's dark. That's dark, but these are Nazis.

But they also, they linked these guys to her murder directly using DNA analysis. They found sweatpants that had been stained with blood that matched Kaiserwetter's DNA, and that's kind of neat how it came full circle like that, but at the same time, it also strongly suggests that these guys were wearing sweatpants with the policewoman's blood on them for three years. That's how gross these stupid Nazis were. Yeah. And you know what's even funnier is I believe it's Kaiserwetter after I had my whole thing

at the beginning about the I and the E in German. Oh, Kaiserwetter's even better. Yeah. I think that screwed up the whole thing. Should we just rerecord it all? Let's start from the beginning. So there were two other outcomes from this. One was, hey, you guys ignored the murder of eight Turks and one Greek citizen, but yet

you spent 16,000 overtime hours chasing the phantom. How does that work? Why are you doing that? And then also it really showed and revealed just how much investigators will bend and shape their theories into really weird, ridiculous shapes just to make it fit the DNA evidence rather than stopping and being like, wait, what? What is this again? This doesn't make any sense.

Do we have the right, are we on the right track? Yeah, totally. So that's it, everybody. Good one. That's the Phantom of Heilbronn. It was a good one. That's an amazing story. And if you want to know more about the Phantom of Heilbronn, you can search that on your

favorite search engine and jump down that rabbit hole. And since I said rabbit hole, as always, that means it's time for Listener Mail. This is a very kind of cool little addendum from Eve in Libertyville, Illinois. Hey, guys. I was listening to the Selects episode on invasive species, and one of you kind of joked that it'd be crazy to shoot invasive plants to eliminate them. I know it's been years since that episode, but get this. I recently watched a nature documentary, Green Planet with David Attenborough, which

is awesome, and there's a section on shooting invasive plants. No. In Maui, there's an invasive plant called the Myconia that's native to Mexico, and sharpshooters and helicopters are being used to shoot the plants growing on steep hill sides with herbicides without affecting the entire ecosystem. Just another example of creative ways people have found to fight invasive species. I attached a link. Thanks for all you do.

Thanks to Eve in Libertyville, Illinois. Amazing. Thanks, Eve. Did we create that chuck? Did we cause that? I don't know. Let's say we did. Okay.

Between you, me, and Eve, we did. We came up with that. I know I got Jared of Subway arrested. Yeah, you did. And boy, did I misjudge him. So that was from Eve. Eve. Eve, thanks a lot for that one.

We always love hearing new facts about all episodes, and you can send us an email like Eve did to stuffpodcasts at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Shatikler, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the

White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.