Wife confesses to husband's unsolved 2008 murder
February 11, 2019
Investigators in the German city of Cologne on Monday announced they had arrested the wife of a man who went missing in 2008, after she confessed to his murder.
The victim, identified as Peter J. from Bergheim, near Cologne, vanished without trace in 2008 and was never officially registered as missing. He was 46 at the time.
His torso was found wrapped in a plastic bag which had been dumped on the banks of the Meuse River near the Belgian city of Amay. Police in Cologne said the body had been discovered with stab wounds, and with its arms and legs missing.
The case had baffled investigators in Belgium for more than a decade. They initially focused their murder probe on the local area where the body was discovered.
The breakthrough in the decade-old case came late in 2018, when an episode on the murder was again aired on a popular German TV show about unsolved crimes.
A tattoo on the man's right shoulder of the names Sabine and Peter ultimately led to the man's identification. At this point, Cologne investigators took up the case, as it was becoming clear that the corpse had most likely merely been disposed of across the border in Belgium.
After several hours of police interrogation, the victim's 37-year-old wife, whose identity the police withheld, confessed to the murder.
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