Forty years ago, two girls disappeared in the canton of St. Gallen, nine weeks later their bodies were found in the Kobelwald crystal cave. The case was never solved – and still moves the residents.
A bike tour was their undoing: The photo is the last one on which Brigitte Meier (left) and Karin Gattiker can be seen alive. It was recorded by a man they met on their trip.
There is nothing to indicate that one of Switzerland’s most mysterious crimes began at the crossroads between Oberriet and Kobelwies in the canton of St. Gallen. If you come from Oberriet, you come across a hilly forest area at this crossroads. The path splits in three directions: on the right it goes between meadows to Eichberg, on the left through the curve to Kobelwies and Kobelwald. An asphalt path leads straight ahead through the forest up to the Kobelwald crystal cave, one of the most beautiful accessible caves in Switzerland with mineral deposits that are unique in the country. Here posters advertise a village festival, a prize-winning game and an alpine church service.
Forty years ago, on July 31, 1982, 17-year-old Brigitte Meier and 15-year-old Karin Gattiker were last seen alive at this crossing. Their bodies were found near the Crystal Cave in early October. The police assumed at the time that the two were killed immediately after their disappearance. To this day it is not clear who the perpetrator was.
The case is extremely complex and hasn’t left people in the region in peace to this day. Almost everyone in Switzerland knows about the crystal cave murder. It was one of the biggest true crime cases in the country before people even knew what true crime was. The crime has shaped entire generations and offers insights that can be unbearable: having to acknowledge that there are cruel coincidences and questions that remain unanswered forever. And that justice is not always possible.
It’s the end of July, late in the morning. Thomas Benz is standing at the crossroads that lead up to the cave. Benz is 47 years old and describes himself as a “criminal archaeologist”. He knows every detail of the case. For years he has been investigating a gray car that was seen at the intersection around noon on the day of the disappearance. Benz spoke to suspects, local residents and a detective. His theory: “It was killing in the affect.”
Private investigate on their own
Thomas Benz grew up in St. Gallen and often spent holidays in the region as a child. He was seven years old when the girls disappeared. He’s been on the case ever since. In 2018 he founded the “Crystal Cave Murder Interest Group” with a former police officer. The group, which has around ten members, continues to investigate on its own: follows up on clues, tries to reconstruct the crime, and organizes lectures. Benz has since withdrawn from the group, and there were different positions among the members. He’s still on the case. He says: “Once you know more than others, you can’t let go.”
Benz knows that as a private investigator he moves in a gray area and has to be careful with suspicions. There is only one thing that can be said with certainty about the exact course of events: “Something must have happened quickly at this intersection.”
One thing is certain: on the morning of July 29, 1982, a Thursday, Brigitte Meier and Karin Gattiker set off on a bike tour in Goldach. The friends wanted to cycle through the Appenzellerland for three days.
On the first day they drove to Herisau to visit Karin’s grandmother. On the way they met a man who took a picture of the girls with Brigitte’s camera, as Karin later told her grandmother. The photo was to be the last to see the young women alive. They are standing in a meadow, Brigitte supports herself with her arm on her friend’s shoulder. Both laugh at the camera.
In the afternoon the two drove to Schwende, where they slept in a youth hostel for the next two nights. They wanted to go back to Goldach on Saturday, but they never got there.
The young women are believed to have lost their way. In any case, they were spotted by a motorist at the intersection leading to the Crystal Cave shortly before 12 noon on Saturday. The girls gave the impression that they were lost, the driver later testified. In the evening he rode back the same way, but only the bikes were left by the side of the road. There was no trace of the girls.
A search operation soon began, which was to become the largest manhunt in the history of the St. Gallen canton police. Many firefighters and volunteers were involved. All without success.
The bodies were discovered in early October. A hiker noticed a smell of decay in the forest and then found Brigitte Meier’s body. She lay in a root hole near the Crystal Cave, hidden among leaves, branches, and a heavy slab of rock. A little further away, the police found Karin Gattiker’s body in a small cave, hidden under many stones.
Crime destroys an idyll
There were all sorts of oddities in connection with the double murder. The day after the girls disappeared, a cave warden found out that the cave had been broken into during the night; at least the lock on the entrance had been removed. The police also found a pen with a company name on one of the bodies; what it was all about could not be clarified. A detective was suspended during the investigation for leaking confidential information. It also remained unclear who the man who photographed the girls on the meadow was. The police called for him to come forward, but nothing happened.
For a long time, the main suspect was an architect who lived with his family in a house below the cave. However, he could not be proven to have committed the crime, nor could three cave wardens and a sex offender, all of whom at some point came to the attention of the investigators.
The case has been considered closed since 2012, since murder in this country is statute-barred after 30 years. This deadline is now to be lifted: in 2021, the National Council and the Council of States approved a corresponding professional initiative from the canton of St. Gallen, which was triggered by the double murder. A new law would have no consequences for the case. What is statute-barred once remains so.
Four years later, around 2016, German case analyst Axel Petermann began researching the Crystal Cave murder. Petermann headed the first homicide squad in Bremen for a long time and has been dealing with the FBI methods of profiling since 1999. This approach assumes that the choice of victims, the traces left by a perpetrator at the crime scene, and the reconstruction of what happened allow conclusions to be drawn about the perpetrator’s personality, thereby narrowing down the number of suspects.
You can reach Petermann these days during the holidays. Two aspects in particular interested him in the case, he writes by e-mail. On the one hand, there were the circumstances of the crime: A harmless bicycle tour without adults turns into a fatality for two girls. On the other hand, it was also about the destruction of an illusion: a double murder takes place in the intact Swiss mountains with Heidi romance.
Petermann, who wrote about the murder in the crystal cave in his book “On behalf of the dead”, assumes that it was a lone perpetrator who probably met the girls by accident. He may have offered to help them or suggested a tour of the cave. “Perhaps one can say that the victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he writes.
The girls’ bodies were already too badly decomposed for coroners to determine their exact cause of death. However, Petermann assumes that the perpetrator killed her with blunt force: Brigitte Meier, presumably in order to then sexually abuse her, Karin Gattiker, in order to get rid of his witness. Because of the nature of the injuries, he assumes that the weapon could have been a stick, of the kind used by mineral collectors. In addition, there is much to suggest that the perpetrator was familiar with the steep rock massif and must have known about the cavern in which Karin Gattiker was hidden. Petermann is certain: “The perpetrator is no stranger to the people in the village.”
Perhaps that also explains why it’s hard to put an end to the crime: it has called certainties into question and destroyed trust. The Crystal Cave, originally a popular tourist destination, became a place of terror, and being good at climbing, collecting minerals and knowing the mountains could turn an outdoorsman into a suspect. Since the slab of rock under which Brigitte Meier lay was too heavy to move alone, it is possible that the perpetrator had an assistant. So there was possibly an accomplice in the community, but he was silent.
Many people repressed the act
Even today, the atmosphere in the villages was extremely different, writes Petermann. Some people, he found in his many conversations, felt cheated of their youth, others resigned because the case was never cleared up. To this day, some women who were then Brigitte Meier and Karin Gattiker’s age feared that the perpetrator could still be among them. Many villagers were very helpful in solving the case, the profiler recalls, but some refused to cooperate, and there was even deep hostility.
A thesis that also supports Niklaus Oberholzer, who took over the case as a cantonal investigating judge. If you talk to him about the crime today, he says it was shocking how much the villagers suffered from the crime, but at the same time repressed it: “Many thought: ‘Something bad like this can only come from outside'”, he says on the phone.
So how likely are you to testify against a neighbor in a village where everyone knows everyone?
Oberholzer says other aspects also made the investigation more difficult: At that time there was no DNA analysis, and the time between the disappearance and the finding of the girls was very long, which meant that valuable traces were destroyed by the weather. The high number of suspects was also a dilemma: “One always had the impression that another variant of the perpetrator was possible,” says Oberholzer.
Did the girls get into a car or were they taken away in it? Did they go towards the cave, met someone there, a girl fell, and everything escalated? Or was the culprit the great unknown who committed a double murder on the way through and then disappeared again?
In this case there is no evidence, says Oberholzer. Probabilities only.