The discovery and identification of Elisabeth Gertraud Bräuer’s remains turns a concealed death into a documented case without resolving who was responsible. The remains were found at an abandoned factory near Zeißstraße in November 1971; a fingerprint identified Bräuer, while the subsequent failure to prove the case against the principal suspect left the central question unanswered.

Discovery at the abandoned factory

On November 2, 1971, at about two in the afternoon, caretaker Herr Engel was raking leaves in the courtyard of the Abandoned Chocolate Factory on Gaußstraße. Near an empty wooden barrel, two tables had been stacked one atop the other. Several empty, partly rotted cardboard boxes lay beside them. Beneath the boxes, among leaves and loose earth, Engel saw a head. After noticing a hand as well, he called the police.

At half past two, patrol car Peter 23 was directed to the construction site on Gaußstraße; the homicide squad arrived shortly afterward. The precise findspot was a cluttered corner at the southern end of a corrugated-metal garage. The remains lay beside a large wine barrel, directly against the property’s boundary fence. The sequence—from ordinary groundskeeping to the discovery of a head and hand, then the arrival of police—marks the abrupt transition from an overlooked pile of debris to a murder investigation.

The remains and their identification

Investigators found six severely decomposed body parts belonging to a woman. They were wrapped in newspaper and, in some cases, plastic. The reported parts were the head; the left thigh with part of the lower leg attached; the right arm, with the rounded end of the upper-arm bone exposed; the left arm; and the right foot with parts of the lower-leg bones still attached. The last established newspaper issue among the wrappings was the Bildzeitung of November 4, 1970.

The remains were estimated to have been at the site for about a year, but investigators thought the factory was probably not where the woman had died. The surviving physical details were fragmentary: the skin had turned mainly dirty brown and yellow-brown, a trace of fine hair may have been present above the upper lip, and remnants of medium- to dark-blond hair remained on the scalp. The hair appeared to have been cut roughly to about three centimetres, not styled into a particular coiffure. These observations helped describe the unidentified woman but did not, on their own, establish who had killed her.

A usable fingerprint was recovered from the right little finger. Comparison with the police fingerprint collection matched it to Elisabeth Gertraud Bräuer, who had previously been fingerprinted after a theft. She had been 42 at the time of her death, 1.75 metres tall, and slim. After her fiancé died, she led an unsettled life, often choosing men with homes of their own and living with them for a time while keeping house. Identification thus joined the forensic evidence to a brief outline of her circumstances, though neither her past living arrangements nor the location where her remains were deposited answered where she had died or who had killed her.

Suspicion and an unresolved case

Winfried Schuldig initially became the urgent suspect. Bräuer had been the principal witness in a separate case against him for bodily injury resulting in death. In that case, she had testified that during a dispute between Schuldig and Stern on January 19, 1970, Schuldig struck Stern on the head several times with the back of a chair; Stern was dead the next morning. Schuldig was placed under surveillance for several days after the discovery of Bräuer’s remains.

The surviving account of Bräuer’s interrogation includes her description of a later confrontation with Schuldig. She said he threatened to finish her off so that no one else could have her, and that she fought free of his grip around her throat. According to her account, he then calmed down and ordered her to leave. The interrogation was stopped because she was exhausted and unable to continue; it was to resume the following day. Her testimony therefore supplied a specific history of conflict and violence, but it did not by itself establish that Schuldig had killed her.

Schuldig was acquitted because the killing could not be proved against him. The acquittal closed the case against that suspect for want of evidence, not the question of responsibility. The narrative leaves the reader with the same unresolved problem that follows the identification: Bräuer’s remains have a name, and suspicion has a history, but her killer is not established.