Local Investigation

Three or four miles down the road from me....is Sonnenberg.  It's half-way to Wiesbaden.

In the past week or two....cops have come out with various public statements and noted a possible murder of a local guy there in Sonnenberg.  The problem is....while they have blood, and a missing old guy....there's no body.  They actually have a prime suspect, but he's not talking.  And no, there's no blood apparently in the car of the prime suspect, but there is blood in the old guy's house....which leads cops into a circle.

The old guy?  Rainer Muller.  Single guy....I guess in his sixties.  He has a dog....which is the interesting tie-in of this second guy.  After Muller disappears....the younger guy appears at a local animal shelter and turns the dog in....claiming the owner has gone off on his yearly trip to Switzerland for an extended period....and won't be coming back soon (or so the story goes).  Cops find the dog, and that leads them onto the second guy.

You'd think....if the younger guy had murdered this guy.....the last thing on Earth that you'd do....is turn the dog in and have your image memorized by the dog shelter boss.  Yet, this guy was stupid enough to do that?  Or he turned the dog in as requested and just didn't figure it mattered much.

Cops have been holding the younger guy now for weeks.  The trouble is.....nothing really ties the guy into the case except turning the dog in.  The blood stains?  All in the old guy's house....but nowhere else.

This past weekend.....cops used HR (the local state-run channel) to note the mystery and ask folks if they remember anything from around 16 August.  Yeah, it's virtually an impossible thing for anybody to remember some particular car, person or event.....six months later.  But the cops are basically at the end of this search, with nothing much left they can prove.

The second guy?  Well....this is an interesting thing, he lives in Niederhausen.  If you draw a map for hiking purposes.....it's a straight line from one village to the other.....and it passes through where i usually hike.  The odds that I met up with this old guy or young guy back in July and August?  Well....it kinda makes me wonder.  Three or four hikes a week....all along the same walking area.

Might the younger guy have no involvement....other than the dog?  Yeah, that's a fair possibility.  They simply may have known each other....end of the story.  Any video of the Wiesbaden train station to show the guy leaving for Switzerland?  Strangely enough....no.  At least not yet.  The number of trains leaving out?  Forty a day would leave Wiesbaden for Frankfurt....where at least four trains a day would venture south toward Switzerland.

I kinda noted all of this to the wife.  She says I've been watching too much Tatort (the Sunday night crime series show).  Well....she might be right.