The discovery of Mieze’s body in the Freienwalde forest turns a suspected murder into a material, publicly reported case, but not through a single clean revelation. Police first dig at a hollow identified by Karl the tinsmith and find signs of disturbance without finding her. Two days later, witness accounts lead them to another hollow, where an initially misleading box gives way to the corpse itself. The search makes the landscape a field of clues, while the gap between Karl’s directions and the body’s actual location deepens suspicion rather than resolving it.

The First Hollow

Karl the tinsmith walks with the police and points out a hollow where he says the girl was buried. The soil is loose and churned over; fir cones lie at the bottom. The officers dig, but Mieze is not there. A scrap of pink lace, dirty and slimy with soil, is brought up and shown to the magistrate. It might have come from a sleeve, and its color appears to fit the description of the missing woman’s clothing, but the fragment does not establish where the body is or who moved it.

The excavation has a peculiar evidentiary force: the disturbed earth indicates that something had been buried, while the empty hollow suggests that the search has arrived after another act of concealment. The officers consider that someone may have dug there only the previous day or that day. They question Karl about when he last saw the girl. He says she was alive when he saw her that afternoon, denies being with her later, and acknowledges that he helped carry her. The exchange puts him close to the disposal of the body without, by itself, proving that he took part in the killing.

Karl’s Account Under Question

The magistrate presses Karl about his movements on the night after the incident. Karl says that he left with a passport Reinhold had given him, intending to secure an alibi in case the matter came to light. He explains that Reinhold paid him and that they had been on friendly terms. That explanation is unsettled by Karl’s further admission: he is in prison because Reinhold informed on him over a night watchman affair. Their association, as Karl describes it, contains both practical cooperation and betrayal.

Karl also characterizes Reinhold as brutal and says that Reinhold wanted to get rid of him, though he does not claim that Reinhold physically attacked him. The questioning therefore leaves several matters unresolved: Karl has helped carry Mieze, has an account of her being alive earlier in the day, and has an alibi connected to Reinhold, a man he now says betrayed him. His directions take the police to disturbed ground, but not to the place where the body will be found.

Witnesses and the Heavy Box

Two days after the first search, Mieze’s body is found roughly a mile from that hollow, elsewhere in the same forest. The report in the newspapers prompts two horticultural workers to come forward. They recall seeing a man alone in that part of the forest carrying a very heavy box. He sat down in a hollow to recover his breath; when the workers returned about half an hour later, he was still there, in his shirtsleeves, but the box was gone. Their account supplies a route and a distinctive action, though it does not yet identify the man or prove what the box contained.

The workers describe him as about five feet nine inches tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a black bowler hat and a light grey summer suit with a pepper-and-salt jacket. He dragged his legs as if in poor health and had a high forehead marked with horizontal lines. Since the area contained many hollows and police dogs could not help, investigators dug up the likeliest sites. In one, a few spadefuls down, they found a large brown cardboard box tied with string.

The Box and the Confirmation

The first box does not immediately disclose the body. It contains pieces of women’s clothing: a torn blouse, long light-colored stockings, an old brown wool dress, dirty handkerchiefs, and two toothbrushes. Though wet, it is not soaked through and seems not to have been there long. The clothes make the find look relevant, but the discrepancy is decisive: Mieze had been wearing a pink blouse, and the dead woman is not yet in this box. The search has encountered another piece of concealment, not its conclusion.

Soon afterward the box is found in a different hollow. This time the corpse is inside, crouched and tightly bound with window-blind cord. The physical details—the box, the cord, and the body’s cramped position—confirm that Mieze has been hidden and transported through the forest. That night, police stations throughout the districts and their outlying areas are busy circulating descriptions of the suspect. The discovery thus produces both confirmation and a new investigative problem: the body is recovered, but the person seen carrying the heavy box must still be identified.

Narrative and Investigative Significance

The sequence delays certainty by separating signs from their explanation. Loose soil and pink lace point toward a burial but yield no body; the workers’ account narrows the search to a man and a heavy box; the first box offers clothing that seems incriminating but is not the corpse; only the second hollow gives the investigation its central physical confirmation. Each clue changes the meaning of the previous one without making the search effortless or complete.

The forest is rendered less as an empty backdrop than as a difficult investigative space: it has many hollows, the dogs provide no help, and the body’s concealment forces repeated digging. The eventual recovery also sharpens the uncertainty around Karl. He directed the police to evidence of a burial, but not to the place where Mieze lay; his statements and history with Reinhold leave him entangled in the case without settling his responsibility. The discovery establishes the crime’s concealed aftermath and sets the police pursuit in motion, while leaving the suspect’s identity and the chain of responsibility to be pursued beyond the hollow.