Read The Cold Case Files Online
Authors: Barry Cummins
It was into this environment that Inga-Maria Hauser chose to visit Ireland. The 18-year-old German was not deterred by news reports of violence, shootings, bombings, maimings and murder. She saw
a different Northern Ireland, and wanted to soak up the culture and meet ordinary people. While Inga-Maria’s murder had nothing to do with the Troubles, it seems that her killer used the
surrounding mayhem to operate under the radar. While the
RUC
conducted a major investigation into Inga-Maria’s murder, they were faced with dozens upon dozens of other
murders to investigate and there was also the fact that a significant number of nationalists would not engage with police at all.
The
PSNI
represents a new era in policing in Northern Ireland. It’s not just about a name change, it’s about changing mindsets, and the new police service has
been embraced by communities on both sides of the old divide. “We have come across paramilitaries as we have continued our screening process,” Raymond Murray tells me.
We know who they are and they know who we are. That’s the way it is, they have still given their
DNA
sample like anyone else. They’ve
been co-operative and they are anxious that Inga-Maria’s murder is solved. We believe that Inga-Maria’s murder was discussed amongst paramilitaries. We think that they had their
suspicions. We are not where we were in 1988. A lot of water has flown under the bridge and perhaps it is time, be it through whatever means, either direct contact with police or through
intermediaries or whatever, for that seam of information to come through. Could it be the key bit? These are rural communities in east Co. Antrim, they are close, they are tight-knit. People
talk and people know every blade of grass in a hedgerow. They know when something isn’t right.
Raymond Murray tells me that he is not necessarily looking for people to stand up and give evidence in court.
Because we have the
DNA
profile from the crime scene, we don’t necessarily need someone to give evidence. It would be very nice if they
would and it’s the best way, but we don’t need that for the case to stand up in court. We don’t need written statements, what we need is the piece of information which helps
us put all of this into proper perspective, that might help us understand the chain of events that brought Inga-Maria from Larne to Ballypatrick Forest, and that we learn what happened on that
journey, be it on the coast road or an inland road en route which completes the picture.
In 1988 the concept of using
DNA
to identify an individual was in its infancy and there was no
DNA
database in Northern Ireland. The
DNA
process that was used in the late 80s was known as Single Locus Point and the material found at the scene of Inga-Maria’s murder allowed for a 1 in 2,000 match. The science
involved was nowhere near as discriminating or as sensitive as it is today. But with the profile that was raised back then police went and took swab samples from seventy men who had been nominated
for testing as part of the investigation. Most people co-operated and voluntarily gave a sample of their
DNA
. However, all of those who were tested came back negative, and
the investigation eventually hit a brick wall. Because
DNA
profiles are raised through ‘destructive sampling’, the profile originally raised under the Single
Locus Point couldn’t be compared to the developing technologies of Second Generation Matrix Plus which allowed for an astronomical advance in comparing samples. Police investigating
Inga’s murder found that they had a
DNA
sample which couldn’t be compared to the thousands upon thousands of profiles which had by now been placed on databases
for Northern Ireland and for England, Scotland and Wales. It was only in 2005, when Detective Inspector Tom McClure carried out a forensic review of the case that he found more
DNA
from which to raise a profile. It was a massive breakthrough and one which has kept Inga-Maria’s case to the fore ever since.
Detectives have long been aware of the possibility that the name of the killer or killers may be in the investigation file somewhere. It may have been someone spoken to during door-to-door
enquiries but who never raised the suspicions of police. Or the killer may have given a witness statement, or may have been stopped at a roadside checkpoint. There are many high-profile murder
cases throughout the world where it turns out the killer was in the mix very early on but simply wasn’t identified as the culprit until much later. So once the
PSNI
had their new
DNA
profile which would allow for a one in a billion match, they consulted with a behaviourist at the National Crime Operations Faculty in England. He gave
detectives certain parameters so as to ‘score’ every male who featured in any way in the case. The higher the score the higher the possibility that someone might be the type of person
who should give their
DNA
sample. It might be that they had lived in the area of Larne or east Antrim, or that they had worked driving a vehicle around Northern Ireland, or
had come into the mix in some other way. Detectives built up a matrix of what they called ‘male nominals’ and eventually went and took voluntary swabs from 1,000 men. Police put a huge
effort into prioritising which people should be sampled, but after completing what is one of the largest such ‘voluntary swab’ procedures, not one of the men was a match for the
‘crime scene donor’.
“One of the issues of working with
DNA
is that the science is advancing so quickly,” says Detective Superintendent Raymond Murray.
Once we didn’t get a match from the 1,000 men that we prioritised for sampling, we then got high-level approval from our head of Crime Operations to ask the
DNA
overseer in England to do a familial trawl on the database. This is where a certain process can be used to search for siblings or a parent or child of the crime
scene donor. Basically if his
DNA
is not on the database, the science is so advanced that we can possibly identify a close relative of his if they are on the database,
and perhaps they can in turn lead us to the man we wish to identify. We did 500 such tests, we did a third of that number of tests looking for a brother or sister of the donor and the other two
thirds looking at the parent and child list, but again we didn’t get a match. Just as we are wondering what we are going to do now, the scientists tell us about a new development called
Y
-
STR DNA
which relates to the male chromosome. Your
Y
-
STR DNA
should be the same as your father,
grandfather, your brothers, your sons. This new science allowed us to eliminate not just individuals but entire male lines in a family.
But before they could do any test under the
Y
-
STR
analysis, scientists had to again raise a new profile from the crime scene
DNA
material. There was by now just a small amount of the crime scene stain left but the Forensic Science Service in England managed to raise a profile.
Each time you raise a profile it is destructive sampling, but we managed to get a sample under this new method of
Y
-
STR
DNA
. Again we don’t get a match with anyone, but what we do get are ‘inconclusives’; at the last count we had 44 men who were ‘inconclusives’. If you are a
male, your
Y
-
STR DNA
should be passed directly to your son, and half your
SGM
+ should also be passed to him, but every
so often, and we’ve been quoted a figure of one in every 300 generational events, something happens and the
DNA
changes slightly, it mutates. So what the
scientists have told us is that within those ‘inconclusives’ it is unlikely that it is a match but it may be a mutation and they cannot be totally eliminated. Within those 44
samples, there are some that are as absolutely close to the
Y
-
STR
profile without being an actual match. That is something we have to consider
and have long considered. In one particular case over in England it turned out that one of the ‘inconclusives’ in a
DNA
trawl was indeed a male relative of
that ‘crime scene donor’ who was being sought.
It is a distance of 40 miles from Larne to Ballypatrick Forest. The most direct route is on the
A
2, which travels along the coast through Ballygalley, Carnlough and
Cushendall before heading inland slightly. Just a few miles on and a turn off to the left is Ballypatrick Forest. Driving within the speed limit, and allowing for a number of vehicles leaving Larne
from the ferry that evening, it is likely that a straight journey to Ballypatrick Forest would have taken about an hour. There is also another possible route to the forest, which is less direct but
which police have also had to consider. Whoever drove Inga-Maria away from Larne could have driven west towards Ballymena before heading north on the
A
26 heading for
Ballycastle on the north coast. This journey would have brought Inga-Maria close to Cloughmills and Loughguile and then through Armoy before the driver could have gone through Ballycastle and
travelled south to Ballypatrick Forest. It’s a more roundabout journey involving a distance of almost 50 miles and a journey time of 80 minutes. It seems less likely that this is the way
Inga’s killer travelled, but it’s a possibility nonetheless. Even if it wasn’t the way Inga-Maria was brought to the forest, it could have been the route which served as a return
journey for the killer or killers as they made their escape.
Whatever vehicle the killer or killers used to travel into the depths of Ballypatrick Forest, it was quite possibly a particularly sturdy vehicle. It would have been driven along dirt-tracks
within the forest in darkness, and a killer who gave enough thought into travelling that far into the forest may well have felt secure in that his vehicle was reliable in difficult terrain; perhaps
it was a jeep, or a truck or a van. As detectives strive to keep an open mind on what may have occurred, they have also considered that the vehicle which brought Inga-Maria to her death in the
forest may not have been the same vehicle that she was either abducted in or accepted a lift in at Larne. Is it possible that Inga-Maria was taken to some location before she was transferred into
another vehicle and then taken to her death in Ballypatrick Forest?
The
PSNI
has long pondered these types of questions, with detectives having brainstorming sessions, trying to think ‘outside the box’. The fact that the 1,000
men who were prioritised for giving
DNA
samples failed to unlock the mystery has led officers to analyse and re-analyse the case. And they are learning new information all
the time, in doing recent house-to-house enquiries and carrying out the recent voluntary sampling of men in the locality. Every piece of information is put into the mix. “The screening
process has been good not only in terms of the forensic investigation, but also in terms of building up information,” says Raymond Murray. “It’s like an onion, layer upon layer of
information. Who was in the docks, who was in the forest, who was in a particular place in Co. Antrim, what people were driving lorries, what people were driving cars. The account has grown
substantially since 2005.”
Back in Munich, Almut shows me more artwork that her daughter did in school. Inga-Maria was just two months short of her nineteenth birthday when she left for her trip to Britain and Ireland.
She hadn’t decided what she wanted to do when she left school and she had one full year left in high school before she had to make up her mind. One of her favourite subjects was English and
she spoke it very well, and had been very much looking forward to practising it when she headed off from Munich on her InterRailing adventure. Almut tells me that the original family home is just
up the street. Inga-Maria was the younger of two daughters.
In August 2006 Almut’s husband Josef died at the age of 67. In 1988 he and his wife had travelled to Northern Ireland to take their daughter’s body home and to meet police and make a
public appeal for help in catching Inga-Maria’s killer. “My husband was a very good man, very good father and very good husband,” says Almut, as she looks at his Memorial Card.
“Josef and I were both from Vorchdorf, a town in northern Austria. We met in school, I was the one who later pursued him. We moved to Germany for financial reasons and settled in Munich.
Josef is now laid to rest here in Munich with Inga-Maria, I visit them every day.”
Northern Ireland has thousands of unsolved murders, most of them linked to the Troubles. The Historical Inquiries Team was specifically set up to review more than 3,200 deaths attributed to the
conflict from the late 1960s to 1998. There is an understanding in Northern Ireland of the need to get answers for families who have been bereaved. That feeling is also reflected in the many other
cold-case murder investigations which the
PSNI
has undertaken in recent years. One of those cases is the murder of nine-year-old Jennifer Cardy, who was abducted while
cycling near her home at Ballinderry in south Co. Antrim in August 1981. Six days after her disappearance Jennifer’s body was found ten miles away at McKee’s Dam near Hillsborough. A
massive investigation was put in place at the time by the
RUC
, and in recent years detectives from the
PSNI
’s Serious Crime Branch carried out
a full re-investigation. In October 2011 a Scottish serial-killer was convicted of Jennifer’s murder. After murdering Jennifer in 1981, this man had murdered three other girls in Britain
during the 1980s.
Another cold case which has seen renewed investigations is the disappearance of 15-year-old Arlene Arkinson, who vanished on a night out in August 1994. It is feared that Arlene was murdered and
her body secretly hidden either in Co. Tyrone or in Co. Donegal. In August 2011 it was confirmed that the
PSNI
planned to begin new searches for the missing teenager, using
specialist search equipment.