A woman goes missing after an argument with her family and her parents later discover her body, stabbed to death, in her car. German officials have recently stated that these events were not as they initially appeared.
The missing woman according to prosecutors and police in Bavaria was actually responsible for staging her own murder in order to “start a new life” by killing a lookalike she found on Instagram. Local news outlets have coined the term “doppelganger murder” to describe this case.
Police in Ingolstadt, a city in southern Germany about 50 miles north of the regional capital of Munich, stated on Monday that arrest warrants had been issued for the woman and her friend on suspicion of murder. The two were arrested several days after the body was found.
“I can confirm that the accused 23-year-old female obviously planned to start a new life due to family problems,” police spokesperson Andreas Aichele told NBC News. She had set up several social media accounts “to find any persons looking as similar to her as possible,”Aichele said.
“Investigations revealed contact to several young ladies during a period of few weeks. Investigators assume that under a pretext she managed to organize a meeting with the later victim. Together with the 23-year-old male she traveled to the Heilbronn region to pick her up and carry out the planned murder,” Aichele added.
The full identities of victims or suspects are not made public in Germany due to strict privacy rules. The parents of a 23-year-old German-Iraqi lady were the first to discover her body in her parked vehicle in Ingolstadt on August 16. The woman had been stabbed to death, according to a statement from police in upper Bavaria north.
Two days later, however, they issued a statement saying that an autopsy had “raised substantial doubts regarding the identity of the woman.”
The father of the young adult was relieved, though not in the way he had hoped. When the police arrived, they brought us good news: our daughter was found alive. Our joy knew no bounds. We believed she was dead,” the woman’s father was reported as saying by the German publication Bild.
Instead, the police announced two days later that they had detained the woman and another Kosovar woman, both 23 years old, on suspicion of manslaughter. Late last week, arrest warrants were issued for the two suspects on murder charges, and they have been in detention ever since.
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Another lady also aged 23 who “looked eerily similar” to the suspect was found dead. The main suspect allegedly made contact with the victim over social media in early August and set up a meeting for August 16. This is according to the Bavarian police. A friend drove her to the victim’s home in the larger Heilbronn area, around 150 miles west of Ingolstadt, where she was waiting, according to the police.
You can check out the below tweet by Today about the case:
A woman is accused of killing an Instagram lookalike in a plot to fake her own death. https://t.co/Kmu5DCy8ha
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) January 31, 2023
The deceased was killed “insidiously and for base purposes” after being enticed out of the car and stabbed in a forested location, according to the statement.
Professor of criminology at the University of South Wales Fiona Brookman described the case as “extremely exceptional,” in part because women only account for 10% or less of homicides. It’s much less common to see female-on-female violence, she said.
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