Game warden who forced his daughters into his bed — Benno Habrecht’s dark secret…

The wind swept coldly across the Black Forest slopes, as if it had set out to tear every leaf, every branch, every secret from the earth. For generations, people in the scattered villages around the ravine forest had told stories of how these mountains remembered things no one dared to speak aloud.

And sometimes, the old folks said, they released what had been forgotten. Not out of mercy, but out of justice. I am Klara Böhm, a radio journalist in my mid-fifties, and three years ago I began a story that was never finished. A story about a father who believed his daughters belonged to him like game. A story about a village that remained silent for too long, and about a hunting report that found me in an abandoned cabin in the Black Forest, in a room that smelled of damp wood, soot,
and unspoken things. The cabin was situated above an old forest road, about an hour from the nearest town, in a hollow where daylight barely reached the ground, even in summer. The former owner was named Benno Habrcht, known throughout the district as a gamekeeper, trapper, and eccentric.He had three daughters, and all three disappeared the same year as Benno Schwieg. Suddenly, completely, without a trace. Officially, it was said at the time that he had died in the woods. A body was never found, and the girls? They said the family had moved away, perhaps further south, closer to the plains. No one asked for evidence, no one wanted to hear it.
When I entered the cabin, the wood of the door splintering beneath my hand, I could still hear the crackling of the stove from a time when someone had lived there. But there was no scent of life, only dust, mildew, old traces. Next to the rusted wood-burning stove, I found a thin board, its paint too clean to be true.Someone had replaced it years after the rest of the cabin had been left to decay. Beneath it lay a tin box smeared with oil and soot. I opened it with a screwdriver, and the first glance inside took my breath away. Polaroids, 20 of them, maybe three girls, always the same ones, in hand-sewn dresses, faded, still, no smiles, no light in their eyes, and beneath the photos, a leather-bound hunting log.
Its first pages seemed innocuous: game species, weights, locations, until I saw the column on the right. Neatly labeled, nights kept. At first, one or two nights, then more and more. 7, 12, 18. And in the “kill” column, there were suddenly no more animal species, but names. Helena, Ruth, Maria.I remember the chill that ran down my spine, even though spring was already budding outside. The last line of the report was barely legible, as if Benno had written it as the ink ran dry. Taken in Maria in winter, cleaned the cabin, no date, no signature, just those five words.
I should have gone straight to the police then, but first I had to understand what I’d found. I took the box to Markus Wend, a young official at the district office who was supposed to be officially inspecting the cabin on behalf of the municipality. He had the same reaction as me.
A shudder, a breath that lingered too long, a look unsure of where to cast itself. He said, “Kara, this is going to change everything.” And I knew that was just the beginning. The Black Forest had begun to speak, and I would have to listen, no matter where it led. Markus had barely closed the metal box when I saw his fingers tense.
He’d been on the force for six years, young, but not naive. And yet the discovery seemed to shake him more than any corpse he had ever seen. “We’re not going back to the station,” he said, his voice strained. “Not with this, not until we know who we can show it to without it disappearing.” That sentence burned itself into my memory.In some districts, especially those made up of scattered villages, old families, and long-standing memories, evidence disappears, and sometimes witnesses vanish along with it. We drove to Freiburg to the archives of the old broadcasting center, where I sometimes did research. The road led along narrow, icy streets past spruce trees that stood like silent sentinels.
Markus hardly spoke. Once he murmured, “I was a child when the Habrecht affair happened. My father said, ‘Hang in there.’ The forest will sort things out,’ he said. ‘The forest will sort things out.’ A phrase that sounded as familiar as a childhood threat.” Someone I had asked for help was already waiting in the archives.
Gundula Kern, a former court reporter, in her early sixties, a woman whose eye could detect cracks in walls. I placed the Polars and the hunting report on the table in front of her. She studied the photos for a long time without saying a word. Then she opened the report, ran her finger along the column, “Nights Held,” and exhaled slowly.“He kept records,” she said, “like a hunter, but not about animals.” Markus nodded. They are the three Habrcht girls, Helena, Rut, and Maria. Officially moved away. Of course. Gundula looked at both of us as if expecting an answer we couldn’t give. “Did anyone look for them back then?” she finally asked.
Markus shook his head. The local game warden at the time was a second cousin of Benno’s. The Habrchts were practically a dynasty up here. Someone didn’t report three girls missing. That was considered a family matter. I felt anger like a fire behind my ribs. “We have to reconstruct what really happened back then,” I said, and not based on the fairy tales told up here.
The next morning, I began the arduous task of retrieving the girls from the records of that time. I found their school records in a damp basement room of the old Waldstädten elementary school, crammed together among yellowed lists and broken folders. Helena’s records were listed up to the fourth grade. Rud until the third grade. Maria never appeared in the registers. Every time the same note.
Homeschooling, at the parents’ request. No follow-up check, no visit from the youth welfare office, no inquiries, only silence. Later that day, as I stood in front of the hut, surrounded by bare treetops and the scent of earth that already hinted at dew, I tried to imagine how three children had spent their years here.No other farm within earshot, no voices but his, no escape. Behind the cabin, about 50 paces into the woods, I found the old draw well, registered in the land registry. The concrete cover was cracked, as if winter itself had gnawed at it. I knelt down, placed a hand on the cold rim, and felt a trembling in my fingers.
A feeling as if something were down there, wanting to know it hadn’t been forgotten. In the afternoon, I knocked on a door I knew I had to knock on. Ewald Müller, years old, had lived in the wooded corner for almost five decades, only two and a half kilometers from the cabin.
He opened it, looked at me, and blinked as if I were an unpleasant thought that had suddenly taken shape. “I know who you are,” he said. “You do that program where you dredge up old things again.” Old things that were never resolved, I replied, and that don’t rest just because you’re not looking. He let me in, but not out of politeness.
More because he knew that silence wouldn’t work this time. The kitchen smelled of coffee and old wood. On the table lay screws, boxes, and a half-finished knife with a staghorn handle. Ewald sat down, didn’t take off his cap, and stared at his hands. “I didn’t know anything,” he began“A phrase I’ve heard too often to trust.” “I don’t need scapegoats,” I said quietly. “I need the truth.” He pressed his lips together. Then he told how Benno sometimes wandered through the undergrowth at night with a lamp, how people had heard cries, bright, short, strangled-sounding, and how they said, “Those are the wild boars.
” How Rut had once gone with him to carry tools, thin as a candle, the flame almost extinguished. Her eyes, Ewald said, looked as if they had given up hope. Then he told of the winter of ’88 or ’89.
Benno needed help carrying something heavy, but didn’t say what it was. Wrapped in cloths, tied with rope. Ewald thought it was venison. They carried it to the well and lowered it in. Benno paid in cash. “I tried to forget it,” he whispered. “For 30 years.” I left the house, and evening settled over the forest like a hand taking your breath away.
The story didn’t become clearer; it grew darker, and I knew that deep in the Black Forest, we were only scratching the surface. The next morning, I sat amidst stacks of files that smelled more of lost lives than paper. I tried to reconstruct a chronology. Helena’s last school attendance in year 8. Roots disappearing a year later.
Maria’s complete invisibility. The more I gathered, the clearer the pattern became of a house no one had wanted to see for years. I drove back to the city, laid everything out on my kitchen table, and underlined the dates that felt like holes in the fabric.
Then I began scouring church records. In an archive in St. Mergen, I found the entry for the mother, Anna Hab. She died of pneumonia, barely in her early thirties. The funeral took place on a snowy January day. No mention of children, no reference to a parish that had offered any condolences. From this point on, the family began to vanish.
I worked late into the night, the quiet hum of the heating system the only sound around me. Again and again, I was drawn back to the sentence from the hunting report: “Maria, taken in winter, cabin cleaned.” I wondered who besides him had ever seen those words. The next day, I met with Gundula in the small reading room of the city archive.
She had been digging through the newspaper archives from the 1990s. “There were a few reports about Benu’s disappearance,” she said, sliding the copies toward me. He had probably had an accident in the woods. No search, no thorough investigation. I saw the headline of a 90-year-old experienced game warden, not returned, accident suspected, and below it a short paragraph consisting of three sentences.
Not a word about the daughters, no mention of any irregularities, as if a man who had carried three girls like shadows for years had simply ceased to exist without anyone giving it a second thought. We needed more than old newspaper scraps. We needed voices. So I went around to the few houses surrounding the ravine forest again.
Some residents claimed they couldn’t remember. Others remembered too well, but wouldn’t say so. Until I stood before Judith Fechner, who had run the small post office in Waldstädten for three decades. She looked at a copy of one of the Polars, and I saw the corners of her mouth curl into a barely perceptible smile.
“I always knew something wasn’t right,” she said. Benno had regularly picked up packages. Orders, girls’ clothes, first small ones, then bigger, but he never saw the children themselves. He said they were sick, always sick. I asked if anyone had inquired. She snorted softly. Up here, you don’t ask questions.
Everyone has their reasons, and those reasons are nobody’s business. I felt the old anger rising in my throat again, the anger at the silence, at the habit of rationalizing things because truth is more dangerous than silence. As I sat back in the car, my phone rang. Markus’s voice was vibrating. “Kara, I think we’ve got something.
A renovation company was at an old farmhouse 5 km from the Habrhütte. They found something in the wall. I was there in 20 minutes.” The house was half-demolished, the wooden beams exposed. The smell of lime and dust hung heavy in the air. Markus led me upstairs to a small room where large sections of plaster had been chipped away.
On a windowsill lay a cassette, wrapped in a plastic bag as if for protection. The label read, in neat, girlish handwriting, Helena’s Report. A cassette from the spring of 1990, a voice from the night before her disappearance. We got into my car because it was the quietest place. I put the cassette into my old recorder, and a shiver ran down my spine as the tape started.
Hissing, crackling, then a young, cautious voice. “My name is Helena Harbrecht. I am 17 years old. Today is April 12, 1990, if you’re listening.” Her voice broke briefly. Then she continued, softly, deliberately, each word like a drop falling into cold water. She spoke of the house, the woods, of nights when her father said there were rules only families were allowed to know, of doors he locked, of tasks he gave them. She told how Ruth had once tried to escape, how Benno
caught up with her, how something inside her died afterward, and she told of Maria, the youngest, who never knew that life could be different. At the end, Helena said that she wanted to run away, that she already had a plan, that she would follow the stream south, far enough until she reached a road.
She also said that she couldn’t take her sisters with her. They were too afraid. And then there was a noise, a door, footsteps, a deep male voice. “What are you doing?” A clinking sound. Then the tape cut off abruptly. I sat there, my fingers clenched around the recorder, and felt the world shrink inside me.
Markus looked at me, his gaze fixed on himself. “She must have made it,” he whispered. “Otherwise, the tape would never have ended up here.” But all I felt was the apprenticeships the other two girls had taken. Ruth, Maria, and the question of whether Helena had truly escaped or whether only her voice remained, trapped behind a wooden wall that only now, after decades, gave way.
Helena had said, “If you hear this, it means I’ve gotten out. Or someone else has found it.” The mountains had kept their secret. But now she began to speak. I knew the tape was only the beginning. It was a spark in a long-dormant case, and sparks have the power to rekindle embers in something thought to be dead.
For three days, I worked nonstop, comparing files, phone numbers, old records, searching for leads that hadn’t been pursued back then. Helena had disappeared in the spring of 1990. At some point, she must have been found somewhere. Injured, hungry, without papers. Girls don’t just appear invisibly on a map.
I started searching in the hospitals. First in the Black Forest district, then in the surrounding regions. No results. So I expanded my search radius. Badenbaden, Karlsruhe. Then further across state borders. The Palatinate, Hesse, even Bavaria. Everywhere the same answer. No record, no unknown young woman at the corresponding time.
Finally, I contacted institutions that had run shelters for girls and women back then. Emergency shelters, church-run facilities, small initiatives, many of which no longer existed. On the fifth day, I found something, a clue from an archive in southern Hesse, more precisely from a former women’s shelter in Darmstadt.
A thin memo dated April 19, 1990. Unknown young women, around seventeen years old, injuries from cold and malnutrition, silent, no information about their origin, no name, only a fingerprint, poorly documented. But the date was too close to Helena’s recording date on the cassette to be a coincidence. I tracked down the former director.
Therese Refeld, now retired, lived in a small terraced house on the outskirts of Darmstadt. When I visited her, she opened the door with cautious eyes, like someone who had spent her life paying attention to the experiences of violence in others and wasn’t used to anyone coming because of them. I showed her a copy of Helena’s photo.
She stared at it for a long time before tilting her head slightly. “That could be her,” she said. She was so quiet, she hardly spoke, but she read constantly, always with her back to the wall. I asked for details. Therese told me the teenager had given a false name: Sarah Meinhard. But no one had believed it.
The wound on her wrist, her thin build, her avoidance of eye contact—everything pointed to extreme isolation. “She stayed for six weeks,” Therese said. Then one morning she disappeared, leaving only a blanket and a note. “Thank you, I have to go.” We hadn’t even been allowed to register her because she was an undocumented minor.
We weren’t allowed to detain her. I made a copy of the old group photos, in which a slender young woman stood at the edge, arms crossed, her gaze alert but no longer entirely born of fear. With this picture, I went to the police in Stuttgart, to an officer who still owed me a favor. He ran the photo through a matching program, though without any guarantee.
After three days, the software spat out a match. A woman named Helena Braun, living in Cologne, a library employee, 48 years old. I stared at the result. Helena had survived. Not just as a voice on a tape, but as a person with a new name, a new life, unrecognized for three decades. I had to contact her, but not by phone or a sudden encounter.
Women who have survived something like that have a vulnerable inner world that you don’t want to pry into. I wrote a letter—factual, respectful, and empathetic. I explained who I was, what we had found, that her sisters might never have had a chance, but that their story was now coming to light.
I waited two weeks, then she called. Her voice was deeper than on the recording, more composed, but I recognized her immediately. “I don’t know if I’m ready to talk,” she said, “but I know that silence took our lives back then. Maybe it’s time for me to reclaim something.” We arranged to meet in a small café in Cologne, an unassuming place with red cushions and subdued lighting. Helena arrived with a scarf around her neck, her gaze first fixed on her shoes, then briefly on me. She was shorter than I had expected, delicate, but firmly grounded. We sat in a corner far away from the other customers. “I recorded the tape when I was 16,” she said. “
I thought if I die, at least someone should know it’s true. The world outside was so alien to me, like another planet, but the forest, the forest knew me.” She didn’t smile. It was a sentence filled with something you can’t heal, only carry. Then she told me how she had fled that night, how she ran barefoot through the stream to cover her tracks, how at some point she felt that the trees weren’t so much watching her as protecting her, how she heard the gunshot echoing through the woods, a single, cold shot, and knew that one of her
sisters would pay for her running. By the time she finished speaking, her cup was long empty. She looked at me, and in her eyes was a mixture of determination and fear. “I’m speaking,” she said, “not because I have to, but because they both deserve it, so that no one can say they didn’t know anything anymore.
” I nodded, knowing that was the moment the silence of the Black Forest was finally broken. As I left Cologne to drive back to the Black Forest, I knew that Helena’s statement contained the kernel of truth, but not its end. There were two girls whose voices had never been recorded, whose footsteps had never led out of the forest. Ruth and Maria.
And if the mountains truly retained what was given to them, then their story still lay somewhere beneath moss, earth, and roots. I resolved to retrace every step Hillen had described to me. But before I could leave, Markus called. His voice was rough, strained. “Kara, we’ve got something here.”
A hunter nearly disappeared into the ground this morning. I heard voices in the background, frantic movements, metallic clanging. A sinkhole directly below the old Habricht plot. I drove off immediately. When I arrived at the scene, the air smelled of wet stone and fresh earth. The forest was still bare, the branches gray like old bones.
Barrier tape fluttered between two spruce trees. Markus stood nearby, his hands buried in his pockets as if trying to protect them from trembling. “Come on,” he said quietly. The sinkhole was larger than I had expected. A crater, perhaps four meters deep, with sharply jagged edges. At the bottom was water, murky and cold, and in it, half-submerged in the silt, lay something that at first glance looked like a knotted heap of fabric.
But the gleam of the wet material was too familiar. Dude, what’s up? The same coarse fiber I had found in the metal box. The forensic investigators worked carefully, centimeter by centimeter. When they finally freed the material completely, the shape of a human body was revealed, crumpled and broken, as if twisted in its fall.
A skull lay askew, the jawbones distorted, as if death had taken it by surprise. A faded name patch was stuck to the kanwas. B. Habrecht. I felt my breaths shorten. Markus said tonelessly, “Beno himself.” But that wasn’t all. To the right of the main body lay smaller pieces of bone. Lighter, brighter. The forensic scientists spoke softly, using technical terms, but I only heard fragments.
Juvenile, female, multiple individuals possible. I closed my eyes. Ruth, Maria. The forest had been silent for thirty years and now revealed everything in one breath. At the edge of the sinkhole, I sat down briefly on a log because my legs gave way. Markus placed a hand on my shoulder. “He fell into his own trap,” he said, literally. I just nodded.
It was a justice that didn’t triumph, but hurt. The discovery spread through the region like wildfire. People who had remained silent for decades suddenly called the district office, claiming they had heard, seen, or suspected something back then. Too late, always too late when it comes to children whom one didn’t want to protect.
I spent the next few days preparing a special episode of my program. I wanted the world to understand that the mountains are not just romantic silhouettes, but witnesses; that silence is not accidental, but sometimes a form of complicity. I wrote down the sequence of events: the hunting report, the Polaroids, Ewald and Judit’s statements, the cassette tape, Helena’s escape, the sinkhole. But the longer I wrote, the more I felt that something was missing.
Helena had survived, but she had never returned, and no one had ever investigated exactly when Benno had died, or whether anyone had helped him, or whether Helena, unknowingly, had set in motion a chain of events that had led him to that hole in the ground. I began to retrace the path Helena had taken.
It was a gray morning when I parked in the valley below the Habrhütte. The stream rushed like an old breath, steady, comforting. I followed the current southward, just as Helena had described. After half an hour, the bank became steeper, more slippery, and then I saw it. A spot where the slope above the stream had collapsed. Fresh earth slid down in long furrows.
I climbed the slope and found, among roots and stones, the remains of an old, collapsed trap. One of Benno’s contraptions. He was known to have built wooden frames that gave way at the precise moment when weight was applied. But this one was broken, as if something heavy had pulled it down from above.
A step away lay a piece of coarse rope. I knew immediately what I saw. Beno hadn’t fallen into the sinkhole because the ground had given way by chance. He had been carrying something heavy, and the trap he himself had set had broken beneath him. The mountains hadn’t simply swallowed him; they had punished him. That evening, I called Helena.
Her voice was calm, but a faint undertone vibrated within it, like a thread about to snap. “You found him?” “Yes,” I said cautiously. “And you found remains, too?” “Sille, I knew it.” She didn’t say it with relief, more like someone whose harsh thought had been confirmed. He always said the forest only takes what belongs to it.
I thought of Beno’s last steps, the two small bones beside him, the profound solitude of the place where he died. I told Helena there would be an identification. I want you to be prepared. “I’ll come,” she said. “If they’ve been found, then someone has to be there for them.” I knew this was only the beginning of the final, most difficult chapter. The forensic analyses took weeks.
I spent that time driving to the district office every single day, reviewing reports, answering inquiries, and simultaneously preparing the broadcast that would bring all of this to light. But something else was stirring inside me, a restlessness that kept me awake at night. The feeling that the story wasn’t complete yet.
Not because facts were lacking, but because something in the forest itself hadn’t yet been spoken. When the results finally came in, Markus and I were asked to come to the institute in Freiburg. The conference room was small, sterile, lit by a ceiling lamp that made the room both too bright and too cold. Dr. Patrizia Moos, the lead forensic scientist, placed three files on the table. One for each find.
The large bones clearly belong to Benno Habrcht, she began. Death by massive trauma, probably instantaneous or within minutes. The fall must have been from a considerable height or due to a sudden collapse of the ground. Then she opened the second file. The smaller bones are from a girl estimated to be 11 years old.
That fits Maria perfectly. I felt my chest tighten, but I said nothing. The third set of remains, Dr. Moos said quietly, belong to a girl between 14 and 15 years old. Very likely Ruth. Markus stared at the table as if he could grasp the truth through its surface. Does that mean Benno has them both? Dr.
Mos nodded. There’s no sign of a second grave. The sinkhole probably uncovered a hiding place he himself had created. We assume he was carrying them out one by one to take them to another location and fell. It was a sober, scientific explanation, but I heard an echo in it, no coincidence, no arbitrariness, a fall that happened precisely where the forest was most fragile, as if the land itself had struck back. Two days later, Helena arrived in the Black Forest. She seemed small in the
train station among the travelers and suitcases, but when she walked toward me, there was something unshakeable in her gaze. I took her to my apartment. We drank tea, spoke little. Words would have been nothing but fragments. The next morning, I drove her to Dr. Mos. The identification was brief, painful, unavoidable.
Helena saw the X-rays, the ages, the measurements—no pictures, no unnecessary cruelty. Nevertheless, her hands trembled as she studied her sister Maria’s skeletal form on a bright monitor, clinical, clean, yet like a knife in the air. “She was so small,” Helena whispered. “She always wanted to dance. He said, ‘Dancing is a sin.’” I placed a hand on her shoulder.
She remained tense but didn’t flinch. That alone spoke more about her will to survive than words. Later that afternoon, we drove to the gravesite the community had prepared. The ground was fresh, the earth dark and damp. Two small wooden plaques stood there, simply inscribed: Ruth Habrecht and Maria Haarbrecht.
Benno wasn’t buried here. No one had claimed his remains. He would end up anonymously in a mass grave. That was exactly where he belonged. Helena knelt between the two mounds of earth. I took a few steps back and left her alone. A silence reigned among the trunks of the fir trees, so dense and profound that it felt almost like a breath. After a while, Helena stood up.
Her eyes were red, but her gaze was clear. “I want to talk,” she said. “I want everyone to know what they did and what they failed to do.” I took her to the radio station. The recording took two hours. Helena spoke calmly. Without drama, without embellishment. That made it more gruesome than any detail I had previously had to reconstruct.
She spoke of the nights when her father forced her to sit in front of the stove, supposedly receiving lessons. Of words that were like commands, of hands that left no room for doubt, of a darkness that didn’t reside in the hut, but within him. When the recording ended, I switched off the microphone, but we both remained seated.
“Kara,” Helena said softly. “My sisters are where you see them now. That’s enough for me. But there’s one thing I want to know. Why didn’t anyone help?” The question hung in the room like a shadow. I couldn’t answer it. No one could. When the program aired a week later, something happened that I hadn’t expected.
People from the region called, emailed, and sent letters. Some asked for forgiveness, others admitted they had heard noises. Many said they had been afraid to intervene. A few spoke of Beno’s reputation, of traditions, of misplaced respect. All excuses, all too late. But one letter stood out. No return address, just a sentence.
The forest knew, and the forest did what the people didn’t. I placed the letter next to the Polaroids, the cassette, and the hunting report. And I understood: the mountains never forget. And sometimes, when the snow melts and the earth gives way, they tell the truth even when no one wants to listen anymore. The letter haunted me for days.
It lay on my desk among documents that had long since been sorted, and yet it felt like the only real object. I reread the line again and again, as if I were missing a clue. The forest knew, and the forest did what people didn’t. It sounded like a confession, or a warning, or something written by someone who had seen more than they could reveal.
Meanwhile, something began in the Black Forest that is rarely seen in such places. People were talking, some whispering in the shops, others speaking loudly in the market square. Some went to the police and provided additional information. But none of these statements really got us anywhere.
Everything went in circles, like the seasons, which reliably follow their course in these mountains. And yet, something was different. The silence that had hung over the case for decades was crumbling. One evening, Markus called me. “Kara, you should see this.” He seemed strangely tense. We met at the station, where the windows were dark and the corridors smelled like old paper. Markus opened a folder from which a yellowed form protruded. “This is something we overlooked, archived under the wrong year.” The sheet was a missing person report, dated December 1990, filled out by a woman named Greta Hermann, who had run a small guesthouse in the valley south of the station at that time.
Missing, young woman, about 16 or 17 years old, traveling alone, exhausted, injured, later disappeared. Description: Dark hair, very thin, hardly speaks, easily startled. I looked at Markus. He nodded. That must have been Helena. She was probably there for a short time after her escape. The report had never been processed.
There was a stamp on the back. Not responsible. Forward. But there was no indication of who it had been forwarded to. Nothing. Just silence. Once again. We searched for the woman. But the guesthouse was closed, the property sold, and Greta Hermann had long since passed away. Her son, however, still lived in the valley.
A man in his mid-50s, articulate, with weather-beaten eyes. He opened the door for us as if he had known all along that someone was coming. “You’re here because of the report,” he said. It didn’t sound like a question, had I known what had really happened. He shook his head and stared at the wooden floor of his hallway. My mother took in a girl back then. Barefoot, shivering.
She brought her food, a blanket, and the next morning she was gone. Did she say anything? I asked. He considered only one sentence; one couldn’t remain, otherwise he’d find me. I felt my stomach clench.
So, after her escape, Helena had at least spent one night under a safe roof, but fear had robbed her of any possibility of asking for help. We left the house, and as we stood outside, Markus looked at me. There were so many moments, Kara, so many people who could have done something. Yes, I said, and no one did. This realization burned like frost.
The next day I wanted to talk to Helena about it, but before I could call her, another clue reached me. A woman from the neighboring village, Emma Linde, 80 years old, insisted on meeting me. She said she knew something about the Habrcht case. We sat in her kitchen, which smelled of lavender and old marmalade, while she carefully stirred her tea.
I saw the girls once, she said, years before they disappeared. They were standing at the edge of the woods, all three of them. They weren’t playing. They were just staring at the path, as if waiting for someone. Who? I asked. The old woman took a deep breath. They looked as if they were hoping for rescue. She looked at me with dull eyes, but I sensed a sharpness in them that her age hadn’t dulled. It was like a silent cry for help, Clara.
And do you know what I did? She lowered her gaze. I kept walking. I told myself it was none of my business. Her hands trembled as she put down the tea. One carries one’s guilt for a long time, but some guilt carries oneself. I left her house feeling as if the wind had blown the bones dry.
I got into the car and wrote a note with trembling fingers. No one helped, everyone looked away. Everyone knew something, and the silence was the rope the perpetrator held. That same evening, I met with Helena. We sat in the living room of my apartment. The rain lashed against the windows. I told her everything:
the missing person report, the old woman’s words, the sentence. “I mustn’t stay, or he’ll find me.” Helena stared into the darkness. “I remember the guesthouse,” she said. “It was warm there, too warm. I was afraid to fall asleep. I thought if I fell asleep, I would die.” I asked cautiously. “He was looking for you.” “Yes,” she said tonelessly. “He walked the paths.
I heard him call, not my name, but I knew he meant me. The forest hid me, not the people.” Then she looked at me. A glance. So clear that it shook me to my core. Clara, she said, you must tell the final part, not just what he did, but how everyone allowed him to do it. It was as if the ground beneath us had cracked open a second time.
The truth didn’t just come from the bones, not just from the tape recording, not just from the sinkhole; it came from the collective failure of an entire valley, and that was perhaps the most gruesome part of the story. I spent the next few days systematically documenting every instance of silence, not to expose individuals, but to show how a crime of this magnitude had even been possible.

In a valley small enough that everyone knew everyone else, yet large enough to make three girls vanish. I searched for clues in the municipal records of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Among building applications, hunting licenses, and church records, I found something that pierced my soul like a splinter.
An application for family support, submitted by Anna Habrecht the mother a few months before her death. She had asked for someone to check on the children regularly because her husband was sometimes strict. The application was rejected, without explanation. Just a red stamp. Not necessary. I stared at that piece of paper for a long time. A single visit might have been enough to prevent a tragedy. But no one came.
I showed it to Helena when I saw her the next day. She read the application, and although no tears fell, I saw her shoulders slump. “She tried to protect us,” she whispered, “and she heard. We were sitting in my living room while a cold wind whistled through the rooftops outside.
” Helena held the thin piece of paper in her hand as if she could feel the warmth of a mother she had barely known. “I was six when she died,” she said. “He changed after the funeral. Before, he was tough; after, he was…” She searched for a word, found none. He said we belonged to him alone now, and the forest would be our home and our prison. I noted every detail not from journalistic detachment, but because every word she spoke was like a key that unlocked new doors in this story.
In the afternoon, we drove together to the old Habr cabin. The municipality hadn’t locked it. It was too remote, too inconspicuous. The surrounding spruce trees stood like silent witnesses. The cabin looked like something the forest had already half-swallowed.
Helena stood in front of the door, not touching it. “I haven’t been back here since I escaped,” she said. “I don’t know if I can.” “You don’t have to go in,” I said. “Never.” But she shook her head. “I don’t want to, for myself, for her.” She entered. I followed her. The smell was the same as before.
Damp, old, like a memory that won’t go away. Helena looked around like someone stepping into a frozen scene from their past. She pointed to the wood-burning stove. That’s where he’d made us sit, for hours, until we lost track of whether it was day or night. Her fingers trembled, but her voice didn’t.
Then she went to the board under which I’d found the metal box. “He always wrote down the things he did,” she said. He said that whoever writes things down becomes immortal. Her lips curled as if she wanted to spit out the word. But the only thing left of him is a hole in the ground and two graves. Suddenly she turned and walked out.
I followed her into the woods. She stopped by the well, the sealed circle of ancient stone, overgrown with moss. “He threatened to push us in there,” she said tonelessly. “I think he showed it to Ruth once, didn’t do it, but showed it.” I felt the cold not from the wind, but from her words. Then she looked up at the tall fir trees.
“The forest saw us,” she said softly, “but it couldn’t save us. People should have.” We walked back in silence. That evening, I prepared the next broadcast. One that would show not only the actions of one man, but the turning a blind eye of an entire region. I called the chapter “The Silent Guilt.”
When I sent the rough draft to Markus, he called back immediately: “Kara,” he said, “are you sure you want to broadcast this?” Some names, some statements. “You’ll make enemies.” “Perhaps,” I replied. “But silence has cost three girls their lives, and by remaining silent, you repeat it.” A day later, I received an unexpected message.
A woman, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote to me that she had sung in the church choir in the 1990s, together with a woman named Klene, an aunt of Benno’s. The woman reported that this aunt often said that Benno raised his daughters strictly; they had to be proper, not like the city children. And another thing: what he did was his own business. I showed the message to Helena.
She looked at it for a long time. They knew, she said. Perhaps not everything, but enough. Why didn’t you ever say anything? I asked. Helena looked out the window at the dark contours of the Black Forest, because it’s easier to believe a monster than to admit that you lived near one.
I reflected on that sentence long after Helena had gone to sleep, and I knew this wasn’t a story about a man. It was a story about an ecosystem of blindness, an entire valley that had looked away until the forest itself brought the truth to light. The turning point came when I woke up in the middle of the night to someone knocking on my apartment door.
Not loud, not frantic, more as if someone wanted to make sure I heard it. And only me. I grabbed my coat, went to the door, and asked who was there. No answer. Only when I opened the door a crack did I see it. An envelope. Bäch, unmarked. No one in the hallway, no footsteps, just silence.
Inside, I found a dozen densely written pages. Handwritten, old. Someone had obviously given it a lot of thought before sending it. At the top of the first page was just one sentence: Forgive me, Clara. I should have said something. The sender was no one I knew, but the contents chilled me to the bone.
It was a report, a confession, a narrative from the perspective of a man who had witnessed what happened in the hut over the years. He wasn’t a neighbor, but rather someone who worked deep in the forest, a lumberjack who had passed by the hut time and again. He wrote of screams he had ignored, of nights when he heard footsteps, of the day he had seen Ruth with one arm in an unnatural position, broken, as we now know. “I convinced myself it was an accident,” he wrote. “I
told myself I wasn’t obligated to act. I had my own family, and I was a coward. The last paragraph was the worst. Once, the youngest girl was standing by the well. It was winter. She wasn’t wearing shoes. I was maybe steps away. I could have spoken to her. I could have invited her in.
But her father came out of the hut, and she froze. And I did the same. I put the papers on the table and closed my eyes. Every word was further proof of how utterly the world around the three girls had failed. I called Markus. Even though it was just after 1 a.m., he answered immediately. ‘It’s bigger, Markus,’ I said quietly.
‘Bigger than Beno, bigger than the hut. It was a collective petrification. Bring me the letter,’ he said. ‘Now.’ Half an hour later, we were sitting in the station. Neon lights above us, the coffee machine crackling in the background. Markus was leafing through the pages. He seemed tired, older than usual.
If this is true, he said finally, then the perpetrator wasn’t alone.” He was surrounded by people who didn’t want to see his actions. He looked at me. “Will you publish this?” “Yes,” I answered. “Everything.” Markus rubbed his forehead. “This will have consequences.” “It should,” I said. “Otherwise, this story is pointless.”
But before we could officially register the letter, Helena contacted us. She had barely slept for days. It showed. “Clara,” she said on the phone. “I need something from you. Can I see you?” We met early in the morning in the woods, where the stream curved over smooth stones. It was the place where Helena had stood during her escape, before moving on.
She held an old rag doll in her hand. Thin, worn, missing one eye. “It belongs to Maria,” she said. “I hid it when I was a child. I didn’t want him to find it and burn it. I think, I think, I wanted to save a part of us.” The doll was damp with morning dew, but clung to it was a piece of the past as heavy as stone.
“I want you to take it,” Helena said. “I can’t keep it, but you can keep it in the story.” I took the doll gently. It felt like a heart that had stopped beating but was still warm. We retraced her steps, one by one. Helena often stopped, her gaze fixed on the distance.
“I almost fell over here,” she said at one point. I was so afraid I thought I was infecting the forest with my fear. Then, when we came to the crumbling slope at the foot of which Benno had fallen, she stopped.
“I heard the shot,” she whispered, “but I didn’t know where it landed. Maybe it was for the best. Maybe I would have looked back otherwise.” It was the first time I saw her trembling inside, not from fear, but from the realization that the forest, in its own way, had done justice when no human would. “He was strong,” she said.
“He was brutal.” He knew every tree, every stake, and yet the earth took him without anyone pushing him.” I didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. We stood there listening to the rushing water, which sounded like a voice that had been held back for decades and was now finally allowed to speak.
That evening, I showed Markus the doll. He looked at it for a long time, then said, “This story will change everything in this valley.” “It has to,” I said, “otherwise three girls would have screamed in vain.” And as I placed the doll next to the hunting report and the cassette, I knew that we were approaching the last, hardest part, the chapter in which the truth would not only have to be spoken but carried out publicly.
By the whole valley, not just by Helena, not just by me. The days before the broadcast of my big program felt as if the entire Black Forest was holding its breath. The air was heavy, the clouds low, and even the silence among the trees sounded tense. I spent every hour organizing the material.
Helena’s voice, the cassette, the doll, the hunting report, the statements from Ewald, Judith, and Emma, ​​the anonymous confession, the archival findings. What I had pieced together was no longer just a report about a crime. It was a mirror in which a valley would have to see itself, and nobody liked such mirrors. On the afternoon of the day of publication, Helena stood in my study, her hands pressed together.
She wore the same scarf as on the day of our meeting in Cologne. She seemed calm, but there was a thin, taut thread in her eyes, ready to snap at the slightest disturbance. “How many people will listen to the broadcast?” she asked. “1,000? 50,000?” More, I said, and even more when the press gets involved. But you don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say, and you don’t have to justify anything.
Your existence is enough. Your truth is enough. She nodded. And then the broadcast began. First, I played Helena’s recording. Her calm but unwavering voice, recounting the nights her father forced her to sit by the stove, her hands folded as if in a prayer service meant only for him.
Then came the hiss of the tape, Helena’s own trembling voice from back then, the words everyone in the valley should have heard when she was a child. It was the hardest part. The innocence betrayed in the recording itself, the helplessness in the girl’s breath, the fear that I didn’t dare speak louder, for fear that even the forest might be listening.
When I ended the broadcast, the room around us was silent. Helena sat there, her hands in her lap, her eyes red but dry. “It’s out,” I said. “Now it can’t be made to disappear.” But the valley reacted faster than I expected. That same night, my phone rang. Unknown number. I answered. A gruff male voice.
“You shouldn’t be out alone, Ms. Böhm.” Then a click. The connection was cut. I stood for a long time in the dark hallway, cell phone in hand, while the cold crept into my back. But fear was a luxury I could no longer afford. The next morning, all hell broke loose. Journalists were gathered outside the station, and people from the valley were discussing the case in the market square.
Some called for answers, others claimed I was overreacting. Still others said, “I should be grateful the perpetrator is dead.” Helena stayed with me. We didn’t leave until it was clear which reactions were just words and which could be dangerous. Around noon, Markus arrived. He had dark circles under his eyes.

“We have over 20 new leads,” he said. Some are useless, others could help. I followed him into the station. Printouts, notes, and reports lay on the conference table. One in particular stood out. A woman from the neighboring village, who wished to remain anonymous, testified that in the 1980s she had seen Benno standing with one of his daughters in front of the well, and how the girl had tried to step backward away from him. He grabbed her arm, she said, and she suddenly became completely rigid.
At the time, I told myself that was just strict discipline. Today I know it was fear. I stared at the text. It was a pattern that ran through all the testimonies. No one wanted to see it. Not because they hadn’t seen it, but because the truth would have been inconvenient. Toward evening, something unexpected happened.
Helena received a letter, this time with a return address. Lukas Habrecht, a cousin of her father, a man who had never spoken publicly about the family. She opened the letter with careful fingers. I sat beside her and felt the air in the room grow heavier. The letter was short. “Helena, I knew about your injuries. My father said you shouldn’t interfere. I was too young, too cowardly, too compliant.
I heard everything that happened in the forest. But I did nothing. Today I am ashamed of that. If you want to talk, I am ready.” Helena held the paper for a while, then put it down. “It’s too late,” she said. “But at least it’s here.” That night I went to the Habrhütte alone, even though Markus had warned me not to go out in the dark.
I took a flashlight and trudged through the remaining snow until I reached the cabin. The forest was dark, but not hostile, more like alert, as if it were watching me. I went inside. The cabin was empty, but it didn’t feel that way anymore. Something had changed, not in the room itself, but in what history had made of the room. It was no longer a prison, no longer a pit. It was a piece of evidence and a memorial.
On the floor, where one of the boxes had lain, the wood was lighter than the rest. I ran my fingers over it and then said it aloud into the darkness, to the walls that had heard everything: You have not disappeared. I stayed there until the cold seeped through my clothes.
Then I left the cabin, knowing the forest had gained new witnesses. And this time they would not be silent. The morning after the broadcast, the Black Forest felt different. Not because the trees were moving or the paths weren’t It wasn’t that its course had changed, but rather that something invisible had shifted. Bakeries were no longer just selling bread rolls, but opinions.
At the weekly market, amidst the apples and Black Forest ham, one suddenly heard phrases like, “I always knew it,” or “Something should have been done back then.” The story was no longer my concern. It now belonged to everyone, and that’s precisely what made it dangerous. A state of emergency prevailed at the district office.
The district administrator, usually a man of measured speech and controlled demeanor, seemed as if the ground had been pulled out from under his feet. Journalists wanted to know why Anna Hab’s application had been rejected, why the missing person report from the small guesthouse had never been processed, why no one had checked whether three girls had actually left. No one had good answers.
Phrases were circulating that I knew by heart in such moments. Responsibilities were unclear back then. You can’t apply today’s standards to the past. There was no indication of imminent danger. Words like fog. They looked like something, but dissolved as soon as you touched them.
The public prosecutor’s office in Freiburg announced it would investigate the events, not to hold Benno accountable—he was dead—but to determine whether there had been any breaches of duty. Officials who had regarded me with suspicion just a few months earlier were now sending me copies of files, anonymously, without comment. Some with yellow markings that seemed like silent screams. Here, back then. Look.
Helena’s name was now not only in my program, but in national newspapers. She had become the survivor of the ravine forest, a symbolic figure, whether she wanted to be or not. When we walked through the village one of those days, people stopped. Some nodded respectfully at her, others looked away,
as if she were a mirror they didn’t dare look into. The worst were those who felt the need to comfort her by saying, “You survived. That’s the main thing.” Helena would smile politely then, but I saw her fingers clutch at the pockets of her coat. That afternoon, we sat with Markus in a conference room at the police station.
On the table lay the anonymous report from the lumberjack, next to it the landlady’s note, her mother’s application, the old missing person report. Markus ran a hand through his hair. “When you put all this together,” he said, “this case should never have gone cold.” “It was never a cold case,” Helena replied quietly. “Only for you.
For us, it was hot every single day.” She was right. Markus nodded slowly. “The public prosecutor’s office wants you to testify,” he said. “Not just about your father’s actions, but also about how the authorities reacted, or rather, didn’t react.” Helena took a deep breath. “I nurtured my fear long enough,” she said. “
It saved my life, but it also held me captive.” I will testify. In the following days, I prepared another broadcast. It was different from the previous ones. Less narration, more analysis. I juxtaposed documents, read passages from rejected applications, and gave experts the opportunity to explain how a functioning system should have reacted.
A psychologist spoke about the importance of taking unusual behavior in children seriously. A former social worker explained how overwork and a lack of accountability lead to blind spots. But most striking was an older social worker who said: “Sometimes the worst thing isn’t evil itself, but the indifference of decent people.”
Meanwhile, the past was also drawing closer institutionally. A former game warden, who had been in charge back in the late 1980s and was now retired, appeared on the news. They showed old photos from hunting trips, in which he stood laughing next to Benno, surrounded by trophies and beer steins.
“We were distant relatives,” he said on camera, “but I knew nothing about his private life. It sounded hollow, too polished, too much like self-protection. Stories circulated in the village about how he had dismissed any mention of the Habs back then with a dismissive “family matter.” Officially, this remained unproven.
In people’s homes, however, the verdict had long been in. One evening, while we were watching the news, Helena saw a reporter standing in front of the old cabin, talking about the dark side of the Black Forest. She grimaced. “It’s not about the forest,” she said. “The forest is just a backdrop. What happened here made people.”
People who chose not to look or to look away.” “What do you wish for?” I asked. “Now that everything is out in the open?” Helena considered this. “Not revenge,” she said. “That won’t bring my sisters back. I wish that every time a child disappears somewhere, someone would remember this story and that someone would then act, not look away, not say again, ‘That’s none of my business.’”
Later, when I was alone, I listened to the old recordings again. Helena’s trembling, youthful voice. The uninterrupted, heavy-breathing seconds between the sentences. I thought of the listeners somewhere in the country, in kitchens, in cars, in quiet rooms. And I hoped that at least some of them had understood that this story could have taken place not only in the Black Forest, but anywhere where silence is more comfortable than truth.
The next morning, another letter was in my mailbox. Not a threatening letter this time, but a letter from the local hunting association. They informed me that Benno’s name had been removed from their records. His hunting awards would no longer hang in their hall. “We want to distance ourselves from him,” it read.
I placed the letter next to the doll, the hunting report, and the cassette tape, and I thought it was a start, not compensation, not a replacement. But a start. The atmosphere in the valley remained tense, but it was beginning to change. People were no longer just whispering. They were asking questions, real questions. Questions that should have been asked 30 years ago.
Why did no one check whether the girls actually moved to another city? Why was no youth welfare office ever there? Why was the mother’s application simply stamped and rejected? Why had so many people seen something, but no one said anything? But while the village slowly awoke, the hardest part began for Helena.
The public prosecutor’s office summoned her for an official hearing, not as a suspect, not even as a victim, but as the key witness in a case that should never have gone cold. I accompanied her to Freiburg. The walk through the long, bright corridors felt like a march through a past that had finally been forced into the light.
Helena sat down at the table, her hands folded, her scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. The public prosecutor, a man with a calm voice, greeted her respectfully, but matter-of-factly. Then the questions began. Helena told her story piece by piece, without shouting, without trembling, but with an honesty that took the breath away from the room.
She spoke of Beno’s fits of rage, of the punishments, of the nights he locked the house, of the fear she had carried in her chest like a second heart, and of the two sisters whose lives had unfolded somewhere between the wood-burning stove, the well, and locked doors. Sometimes she faltered, but she didn’t need encouragement. She knew why she was there.
When she finished, the prosecutor looked at his notes for a long time. Then he said, “Ms. Braun, your survival wasn’t a matter of chance; it was strength.” But Helena shook her head. “No,” she said. “It was escape.” We drove back to the Black Forest, in silence, as the mountains glide past the window.
Like mute witnesses who knew more than any human being. And again I thought of the sentence from the anonymous letter: “The forest knew. Perhaps that was true. Perhaps the forest knew everything.” But it was never responsible. People were. That evening, I prepared the next broadcast.
I wanted to give voice to the residents. Not only the confessions and apologies, but also the contradictions, the repression, the sudden outrage. I spoke with a group of young people in the village who told me: “Their parents have been nervous for days.
” “My mother says the matter should have been left alone,” said one, “but I think it’s right this way.” Another boy recounted how his grandmother had said years ago that something wasn’t right with the Habrechts. But no one took her seriously because she always talked so much. A third girl said quietly: “You always think monsters look like monsters, but he was a hunter, a woodsman, one of us.” That sentence stuck with me.
The next day, while I was editing the recordings, I received a call from the district office. A woman from the administration, in her mid-60s, with decades of service. Her voice was shaky. “I was there back then,” she said, when Anna Habrecht’s application had landed on my desk.
“I remember him. I remember you, and I thought at the time that she was exaggerating, because many women exaggerated when they complained.” That’s what I thought back then. Her voice broke. I want to tell you this because I know that my silence came at a price, and I can’t change it now.
But I can tell you. After I hung up, I had to sit down. Not because the content was new, but because it had finally been spoken. Finally, someone from the system that had failed had named the responsible party. That afternoon, I went with Helena again to her sisters’ grave.
She stood for a long time in front of the two small wooden plaques, then she said, “He took them from us, but they brought them back.” I shook my head. “Not me,” I said, “the forest and the truth.” She smiled weakly. Perhaps, but someone had to listen. We stayed there until the shadows lengthened.
The wind rustled through the spruce trees, and I had the feeling that the mountains themselves had grown quieter, not peaceful, but alert, as if waiting to see how the final chapter would end. That evening, my phone rang again. Markus, his voice tense. “Kara, you have to come to the station immediately. There’s something new, and it doesn’t involve Beno.” “Not directly, but who?” He hesitated, the former station chief, the man who claims he knew nothing. I froze. “
What happened?” “Someone leaked information to us,” Markus said quietly. “And if that’s true, then he wasn’t just blind, he was involved.” I felt cold, very cold. It took me a moment to catch my breath. “I’ll be right there,” I said, and I knew the story wasn’t over, not even close.
When I entered the hunting grounds, the atmosphere was tense, like before a thunderstorm. Markus was already waiting in the meeting room, arms folded, his gaze hard. On the table lay a folder, which he examined with a mixture of anger and caution. “This arrived anonymously this morning,” he said. “By courier, no return address, no fingerprints.” I sat down. He slid the folder toward me. Inside were three documents.
The first was a hunting report, similar to Beno’s, but this one wasn’t from him. The name at the top was clearly legible: Erwin Schober, the then-head gamekeeper and Beno’s distant relative. The second document was a handwritten letter, crumpled, old, probably decades old.
The handwriting was shaky, strained, as if the writer had been afraid someone might be looking over his shoulder. Erwin has known for years. I warned him. He said, family is family. No name under the sentence, only initials. JH. The third document was a photograph, faded but clear. It showed three men standing in front of the hut.
Beno, the old district manager Erwin, and a third man I didn’t recognize. And in the center of the picture, barely visible but undeniable, two children’s heads in the doorway. Ru and Helena, maybe nine years old. I felt my breath catch in my throat. “That’s proof,” I said quietly. Markus nodded darkly. Schober was there often, much more often than he admitted.
And this, he held up the hunting report, contains notes on domestic discipline, family matters. These are code words. You don’t use them by accident. I felt dizzy. He covered it up. Markus ran a hand over his face. At the very least, he knew and did nothing. And perhaps he even helped to cover it all up.
I sank against the back of the chair. My head was full of voices: Hellena’s, Ruth’s and Maria’s, who were never allowed to speak. And now a new sound. Anger. Pure, unadulterated anger. He’s still alive, isn’t he? I asked. Markus nodded. Yes, and he’s not happy about the reporting. He complained in writing. He claims you’re slandering him. I laughed bitterly.
I haven’t said anything about him yet. But you will, Markus said. And he knows it. He looked at me seriously. Kara, you have to be careful. I nodded, but My gaze remained on the photograph. The girls were looking out, as if hoping someone would see them. The station chief was standing less than two meters away and he did nothing.
That evening I met Hellena. I had to tell her what we had found. We sat in the kitchen. The lamp cast a warm light on her hands, which repeatedly closed and opened around the cup. “I can show you something,” I said carefully. “But it will be difficult.” “It always is,” she said. I placed the three documents in front of her.

She saw the photograph first. Her breath caught in her throat. Her fingers traced the small faces in the doorway. Her voice was barely audible. “That’s the day he forced us to stack wood.” Then she saw the district chief. Her gaze hardened. “He was often here,” she said quietly. “He saw us. Always.” “What did he say?” I asked. Helena smiled bitterly. “
He once said: ‘Strictness makes good girls.’ I thought that was normal at the time.” Her hand trembled. “He was the only one allowed in my father’s house, the only one who didn’t have to knock. I had to hold onto the table.” It was one of those moments when the story took on a new, darker depth, one you’d hoped didn’t exist.
“You don’t have to process this today,” I said. “Yes,” said Helena, “because if I don’t, I never will.” The next day, the public prosecutor’s office requested a second meeting. This time not only with Helena, but also with me and Markus. The former precinct chief had been officially summoned for a hearing. He hadn’t appeared.
Instead, he had his lawyer announce that he felt publicly prejudged. The investigators presented us with the new documents and asked many questions. Where did the folder come from? Who could have sent it? Why now? I heard the questions, but my mind was on the letter with the initials GH.
Who was that? A distant relative, a neighbor, someone who had wanted to speak much earlier and then fell silent? During the break, Markus and I stood in the hallway. I asked, “What if the third person in the photo also knew something?” Markus sighed. “The photo is old. Some people may no longer be alive or may no longer want to talk.
And what if they did talk?” I looked at him. The anonymous lumberjack, the old guesthouse owner, the churchwoman, the cousin. They’re only speaking now, Markus. Why? Markus was silent for a moment because you had forced them to look. I shook my head. Not me. The truth.
That night, I sat at my desk for a long time, looking at the doll, the photograph, the hunting report, the letter, the missing person report, the mother’s application. Each object was a splinter of a shattered world, and they all fit together to form a pattern larger than any single perpetrator. A system that allowed someone like Benno to emerge.
A system that let him get away with it, a system that looked the other way. Shortly before midnight, I received a message, an unknown number, a single sentence. You are in danger, and below it, Erwin still has friends. I felt cold, very cold, because now the truth had not only a past but a present. And it was moving. I couldn’t put the message down for hours. Erwin still has friends.
The sentence burned like something you notice too late because it seems harmless at first. It looked like a spark that transformed into something bigger. I ran through every possibility in my mind. Who would protect an old game warden? Who had an interest in keeping the story from coming to light? Old hunting buddies, neighbors who felt complicit, officials who had looked the other way back then and were now afraid their own names might surface. Anything was possible.
The next morning, Markus called. His tone was terse, tense. “Kara, you’re not going anywhere alone today. Not at all. We’re coming to get you.” I didn’t answer immediately. I stared at the cabin, barely visible from the window, but a dark stain that lingered in my mind. Then I nodded, even though he couldn’t see it.
He and a colleague took me to the station. Helena was already there. She hadn’t slept well. You could see it in the tension in her face. But her eyes were clear and determined. “I’m not leaving,” she said as I entered. “I won’t run away again. Not from him, not from those who protected him.” More documents were laid out in a conference room.
New leads, new statements, new pieces of the puzzle that were inexorably coming together. An anonymous tip from a nearby community. The station chief was alleged to have unilaterally refused to allow an inspection of the cabin in the late 1980s. A retired hunting leaseholder testified that Erwin had often spoken of the strict but necessary handling of children, and a former administrative employee, whom no one had suspected, suddenly volunteered.
He prevented us from investigating at the time. He said the family didn’t want any interference. Then came the crucial clue: “Someone had recognized the identity of the third man in the photo. A certain Rolf Bacher, a member of the forestry association at the time, now deceased.
But in old records, an entry was found about a special inspection of the property, which both Erwin and Rolf had attended. There were no notes about what they had seen, only their signatures. They were there, I said. They were standing at the door. They saw the children and they said nothing.” Markus closed his eyes. “
If we can prove this, for the first time in 30 years there will be real, tangible accountability.” We decided to contact Erwin again. This time not through his lawyer. In person. Markus and another officer drove to his house, an old hunting lodge on the edge of the valley. Helena and I stayed at the station. It wasn’t half an hour before Markus called back.
“He didn’t open the door,” he said. “He was there. We heard him, but he didn’t let us in. Did he say anything?” “Yes,” Markus replied tonelessly. He said: “You have no idea what it was like back then. I felt a bitter knot forming inside me, a knot of anger, grief, and the knowledge that some people would rather die than accept the truth.”
But that same evening, another witness came forward, a woman who had worked in the village shop decades ago. She said Erwin had once said that Benno had three daughters who needed to be kept under control. I didn’t know what that meant, or perhaps I didn’t want to know. She wept on the phone, not loudly, but deeply.
I recorded every statement, every syllable, not to destroy anyone, but because every word was a step on the path to the truth. And then something happened that no one had expected. Erwin turned himself in. Early the next morning, his lawyer contacted me. The former station chief wanted to make a statement. Not a full statement, not a confession, but an explanation.
We gathered at the Markus station: two officers, the public prosecutor Helena, and myself. Erwin entered. An old man, but not broken. He was someone who had remained silent for too long and now felt the weight of his silence. He sat down, didn’t look at Helena, didn’t look at me. Then he began: “I knew Benno was strict.” Too strict. I saw that the girls were afraid.
But back then, things weren’t the way they see them today. People didn’t interfere. Families had their own affairs, and Benno was a Habrecht, a man of the old school. The prosecutor interrupted him. You saw the girls. You were standing behind them. Why didn’t you do anything? Erwin was breathing heavily.
Then he said the sentence that still haunts me to this day because I was afraid of him and because I believed it wasn’t my responsibility. Helena stood up. Not loudly, not angrily, just upright. “It was their responsibility,” she said quietly. “They could have saved us.” Erwin looked at her for the first time, and something in his face broke.
Not a dramatic collapse, not a tear, just a tiny crack, like a chip in cold glass. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but being sorry is worthless when you’re thirty years too late.” Then he fell silent. The prosecutor explained that he was under investigation for failure to render assistance, obstruction of justice, and possibly even active cover-up. But many of these offenses were long past the statute of limitations.
Legal justice would be limited, but public truth would not. In the following weeks, every major media outlet reported on the case. People spoke of systemic failure, of cultural silence, of perpetrators through inaction. Helena was not made into a heroine, and that was a good thing. She was shown for what she truly was.
A girl who survived because she ran away, and a woman who returned to speak. On the day of her final testimony, we stood together on a hill overlooking the valley. The wind rustled through the fir trees, and the sun lay low over the mountains. Helena said, “My sisters never had a voice. Now they do.” I looked toward the forest.
The Black Forest, dark, deep, ancient. A place teeming with life and full of shadows. And yet, it had done one thing. It hadn’t buried the truth forever. It had given it back. As we left, one thought lingered in me, clear and final. It wasn’t the forest that had failed; it was the people who had failed, and history existed so that it would never happen again.