The Crossword Murder

Halle-Neustadt was a planned East German city of concrete housing blocks. On January 15, 1981, seven-year-old Lars Bense walked through the snow toward a local community center to watch an animated film. He never arrived, and no one saw where he went.

On January 29, a railway worker found a brown suitcase beside the line between Halle and Leipzig. It had been thrown from a moving train, and Lars’s body was inside, wrapped in plastic. Stuffed in with him were old newspapers, and one page held a crossword someone had completed by hand. That handwriting became the only real lead, and investigators gathered and compared 551,198 samples, from passport applications to an easy puzzle the local paper printed with a prize for entries.

The writing was finally matched to the woman who owned the suitcase. Her daughter’s boyfriend, eighteen-year-old Matthias S., had been allowed to use her apartment. Arrested on November 17, 1981, he confessed to luring Lars there, abusing him, and killing him. In June 1982 he was sentenced to life. After reunification, a court reviewed the case in 1992 under juvenile law, which brought ten years plus psychiatric commitment. He was released in 1999 and died in 2013.