What Happened to Birgit Meier? — Answered Three Decades Later

On August 14, 1989, 40-year-old Birgit Meier vanished without a trace from her apartment in Lüneburg, Germany. Birgit worked as a photographer and was married to a successful entrepreneur named Harald, but they were in the middle of a divorce. Birgit was taking the end of the marriage hard. However, their separation seemed to be amicable to those outside the marriage.

Birgit and Harald met on the night she disappeared to discuss the terms of their separation, including the 500,000 Deutsche marks (about 290,000 U.S. dollars today) the couple had agreed upon as a settlement offer to be paid to Brigit. This made her estranged husband the primary suspect in her disappearance. Police thought the money was enough motive for him to have done Birgit harm to keep from paying her. Though he was rigorously interrogated, he was quickly cleared of any wrongdoing.

Police felt suicide was a consideration due to Brigit’s mental state over her divorce and increased drinking reported by family and friends, but no evidence or body could be found to support this possibility. Police also proposed that Birgit might have simply left on her own. Her family refused to believe this, saying she would never have abandoned her beloved daughter, Yasmine, or her cats. Plus, why would she have left before she received the payout from her divorce? With no real leads or evidence to go on, the investigation into her death quickly grew cold.

It was only after a new prosecutor was placed in office that any further investigation continued and another look was taken at a previous suspect that had been dismissed. Witness statements that Birgit had met a man named Kurt-Werner Wichmann at a party were reviewed. The man had done gardening work for some of Birgit’s neighbors.

Police had questioned Wichmann at the time of Birgit’s disappearance, but he claimed he was walking his dog. Detectives didn’t investigate further, not even bothering to verify his alibi — even after discovering that he had hidden the fact that he was off work on sick leave when Birgit disappeared.

In 1993, police finally got a warrant to search Wichmann’s house for evidence. They found evidence there that indicated he had committed multiple crimes including the open cases known as the Göhrde Murders, but nothing that led them conclusively to Birgit and so, her case began to grow cold again.

I’m not going to get too deep into his case as I want to stick to Birgit’s disappearance, but there is plenty of information out there about him and the documentary on Netflix gets fairly involved, as well. For those who don’t want to watch the documentary, the article below is pretty thorough in outlining Wichmann’s history and purported crimes.

During all these years, Birgit’s brother, Detective Wolfgang Sielaff, had been doing his own private search and following along with the investigation. He continued to push for his sister’s case to be solved. His persistence led to Birgit’s skeletal remains finally being discovered in 2017. They were beneath the concrete floor of the garage in the house that used to belong to Wichmann.

An autopsy completed by the Hannover Medical School on January 19, 2018, revealed that Birgit had been shot. Wichmann did have a “torture room” which he had soundproofed and only he and his brother had access to enter. Inside were a number of videotapes that included pornography, Nazi-related content, and extensive news coverage of both the Göhrde and Meier cases.

There is no way to tell exactly what happened to Birgit in her final hours or days, but it is all but certain that Wichmann was responsible for her disappearance and death, either at his hand or at the hand of someone working with him.

Wichmann was never prosecuted for any of his crimes. He had been apprehended after a traffic accident that occurred while he was attempting to flee once he learned police were searching his home back in 1993. He hanged himself ten days later in his jail cell. He is believed to have killed anywhere between four and twenty-one people, but it is possible that he had an accomplice in some of the alleged murders, so it’s hard to say for certain that he was the killer or killed them alone.

Now, there is a new documentary out on Netflix that explores Birgit’s disappearance and how it led to a likely serial killer in detail. The four-part German series follows the case from the beginning, giving a detailed account of how the search for Brigit unfolded over the many years it took to finally answer the question — what happened to Birgit Meier?