A brutal and shocking murder that horrified Germany and has remained unsolved, it still confuses people as to how the killer disappeared after such savagery.
Tristan Brübach was born on October 3 1984 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in the suburb of Höchst to Iris and Bernd, their only child. Iris died of cancer in 1995, leaving Bernd to raise their son alone. Tristan was described as shy but that he was very streetwise. He spent a large amount of his time walking around his neighbourhood with no real purpose and he was very fond of animals, although usually shy, he would gladly approach strangers who were walking their dogs and strike up a conversation with them about their pet, he also had a pet rabbit named Hoppelfried and would spend many hours playing video games. Bernd and Tristan soon had his grandmother move in to help with looking after Tristan when his father was working.
By the time he was a teenager, Tristan had developed a reputation for being very independent, he had begun to smoke cigarettes in an effort to fit in with older children but was known to be bullied and beaten up by kids in the neighbourhood. People would later say Tristan was very impressionable, some say the loss of his mother at such a young age had made him so.
It was March 26 1998, the last day of school before the Easter holidays, Tristan awoke at 8am and dragged his feet with getting ready and called his father, who had left for work at around 4.30am. He asked his father if he could not go to school and go to the doctor instead as he claimed he had hurt his back a few days prior but his father thought he was just trying to skip school and told Tristan to go in and they could revisit it later if it was still bothering him.
Tristan holding a rabbit
When Tristan got to school he ended up smoking with his friend until around 9am. It was after lunch when Tristan informed a teacher that his back was hurting and he asked if he could leave early to go to the doctor. When the teacher asked how he had hurt his back Tristan said he had fallen out of a tree the night before but a friend would later state that Tristan said the injury had happened during a rock fight. He would leave school at around 1.15pm and got on a bus, sitting at the back, as was usual for him, he left the bus and walked to the nearby railway station.
Tristan was spotted on CCTV at a shop in the train station at around 1.46pm, roughly 16 minutes after leaving school, standing by him is an older man but the footage was too blurry to make out any details of the man and if they spoke to each other. Tristan would later be spotted by two classmates on their way home between 2.15pm and 2.45pm, they said he appeared to be alone. One did say he looked as if he may have been waiting for someone but she couldn't be certain.
Tristan caught on CCTV at the train station
Another encounter with Tristan happened at around 3.20pm at Bruno-Asch-Anlage, which is a park in front of the Frankfurt-Höchst railway station, a woman out with her dog walked past the bench that Tristan was sitting and smoking on. Tristan started a conversation with her, telling her how he loved animals and petted her dog a few times before she carried on. She looked back and saw two older looking men sit down on either side of Tristan, she described them as "probably foreign". After she left he was murdered 10 to 25 minutes later in the Liederbach Tunnel only 500 metres away. This woman is thought to be the last person to see Tristan. He was only 13 years old.
The crime scene
His body would be discovered by school children walking home who would run back to school to tell their teachers of their grim discovery and the police were informed at 5.08pm. Tristan's body was discovered in a pedestrian tunnel that runs alongside an underground section of the Liederbach River, the tunnel is known locally as Liederbach Tunnel, it is dimly lit and in the daylight even looks eerie.
Police would later describe the scene as one of the worst in Frankfurt. Investigators had to use the labels in his clothes to identify him due to the nature of his injuries.
Inside the tunnel
Tristan had suffered a brutal death, he had been beaten and strangled unconscious and dragged into the tunnel. He was dragged to the walkway that overlooked a small egress from the nearby river and it was there the killing blow of cutting Tristan's throat occurred, the cut has been described as ear to ear with the wound being deep enough to reach the spine. He was then stabbed multiple times with his killer letting his blood flow into the river. It was then the killer removed Tristan's testicles and a section of his buttocks and thigh had been sliced off. The killer then posed Tristan's body to look as if the teenager was asleep, even placing his shoe that had come off in the initial struggle on top of his body after taking the time to go and retrieve it. The murder weapon laid nearby on top of a concrete block. As Tristan's backpack was not found at the scene, police assumed the killer had used it to transport the missing body parts away from the scene. Whoever this killer was he was bold to take such time in the murder.
Police theorised that the murder had taken place in only 15 minutes.
Police announced a bloody fingerprint found at the scene was most likely the killers and remained their key piece of evidence. It does not seem to have yielded any leads.
The murder had apparently been witnessed by three teenagers who had not realised what they had saw at the time, they gave police a description of the killer and a sketch was done. The teenagers had been walking to a nearby football field and had decided to cut through Liederbach Tunnel at around 3.30pm but as they approached the tunnel they saw an odd looking man in the dark tunnel and decided to wait from a distance for around two minutes. The man was bent over something, most likely Tristan's body, luckily the teenagers went the long way around to the field and weren't spotted by the man.
Tristan's body being removed from the tunnel
The teenagers also helped to establish the timeline of Tristan's movements that day and police could say that his murder happened around 3.30pm only minutes after his encounter with the dog walker. A woman in the area provided a near identical match to the teenagers description of the man who she saw leaving the area of the tunnel around the same time, meaning they had a good description of the killer. But it troubled police as to why someone would viscously murder a teenage boy and then mutilate him, was the murder a ritual? Was the killer a cannibal? Or more worrisome, was this a random case of brutality?
The description of the man released was:
Long unkempt looking hair blonde hair, worn in a braid style. He was wearing a baseball cap. The man had light coloured eyes, possibly blue, and was of a pale complexion, he stood at around 5 foot 7 inches and had a lean / slender figure. He had a gaudy and grimy appearance, seemingly an unwashed for days look. A distinctive feature was a cleft lip or a severe scar under the left nostril.
Additionally, police released a profile of the killer:
Between the ages of 25 and 35.
Has no real friends or family, a bit of a loner, hinting at anti-social behaviour.
Have pedophilic tendencies or have a resentment to children.
Known to Tristan, it is theorised that the teenager knew of his killer beforehand.
On April 7 1998, the day of Tristan's funeral, a man called police confessing to the murder. He said he would wait at Höchst Railway Station for police to come and arrest him. When police arrived they could find no trace of the man, the call is available to listen to in German on YouTube (click here to listen), the man has never been identified. He gives a description of himself as 5 feet 11 inches tall and long black hair. Some think this was a deliberate move on the killers part to give a different description of himself to confuse police while others think the caller sounds as if they are drunk or high and put the call down to a cruel prank.
Sketch of the suspect
The murder investigation was the largest at the time, more than 10,000 men in the area were fingerprinted with 99% of men willingly giving them. There were 24,000 witness statements and the sketch was sent to over 80 prisons in the vain hope perhaps their killer was a known criminal.
In March 1999, a year after Tristan's murder, his backpack was found in a forest in Niederhausen, 15 miles from the crime scene. The bag contained a Czech language atlas of Germany, which was not thought to belong to Tristan as he did not speak Czech or had any reason to possess the atlas. The investigation expanded to the Czech Republic and Slovakia but no leads turned up.
Tristan's backpack, the atlas and the backpack when it was found
As the development was released to the media a woman came forward saying she had been in the forest at around the time of Tristan's murder and had come across a strange man not far from where the backpack was found. The man had been mentally unstable and had ranted about many things including the French Foreign Legion and a herd of sheep he had lost track of, the man also mentioned he had recently come to Germany from the Czech Republic.
The police felt hopeful that they were closing in on their killer and reached out to the French police but found they had already identified the man. He was apparently a legionnaire (highly trained infantry soldiers that are unique as the soldiers can be from another country), so he had an alibi for the murder due to his military service and medical information.
Tristan's grave disturbed
In October 1999, an unknown person went into Höchst Cemetery at night and dung down into Tristan's grave exposing his coffin but not opening it. Police believe this act was done by a mentally disturbed person and had no connection to Tristan or his murder although locals speculated that the killer had come back to collect more body parts but was interrupted. In Germany, graves in public cemeteries are maintained by the state for up to 20 years after the deceased's death, their family must then pay to lease the grave if they wish to keep their loved one there. If they don't pay then the headstone is removed and the grave is reused for a new person. Tristan's father died in 2015 aged 59 and no other relatives could afford the lease, the public launched a campaign to fund a memorial stone. In March 2018, after Tristan's grave was reused, a memorial stone was erected under a nearby tree, within sight of the grave.
Tristan's grave today
Due to no solid leads or the case being solved soon led to speculation, some believed Tristan had become involved in the drug and gang world and had been killed due to that while others believed the teenager had perhaps come across some crime and had been killed to silence him, while others believe Tristan was being abused by a predator citing his back injury as proof. Police have dismissed these theories as there is no evidence to even suggest it.
The prime suspect remains a man aged 20 to 30 with either a cleft lip or scar on his upper lip with a general unkept appearance. This man was seen by several people on the day of the murder and is the man in the composite sketch, it was shared worldwide but no one has come forward to identify him.The first person to see the man was a 12-year-old girl who was walking through the Liederbach Tunnel, the man apparently came from behind a bush, he was wearing a hat and had a ponytail. About a week after the murder a man matching this description turned up at lawyers office stating "I've only just been released from prison and I've already screwed up.", the lawyer told him to go to another law firm that dealt with criminal law but the man never went there.
A suspect was announced on May 19 2016, when the Hessen State Office of Criminal Investigations in Wiesbaden revealed they were looking into Manfred Seel. Seel had died in 2014 at the age of 67, he had lived an ordinary life, worked the same job for decades, raised a family, had no criminal record and was a respected member of the community but was really a serial killer. After his death, his daughter had been going through his belongings in a rented storage facility when she came across human remains and diaries that contained graphic descriptions and sketches of murders. Police are certain that Seel is behind at least five murders of women and is suspected of nine in total. His victims are primarily sex workers, drug addicts and those suffering from mental health problems and he was active during 1971 to 2004.
Manfred Seel
Seel was a suspect due to living in the same neighbourhood as Tristan rather than any hard evidence to link him and Tristan did not fit his victim profile nor did the murder itself match as Seel stalked his victims and attacked during the night but Seel did exhibit sexual sadism, searches into his internet history and chat forums would reveal an interest in cannibalism and necrophilia and he kept the genitals of some of his victims. In October 2017, police announced Seel had been excluded as a suspect.
The most popular theory emerged from witness statements of children in the area. The children described a strange older man who hung around the train station at the time of Tristan's murder, this man was homeless. Tristan's teachers had recalled seeing the teenager in the company of older men, one of these a blond haired man with a cleft lip whose appearance would suggest he was homeless. A classmate of Tristan would later state as an adult that the homeless man was the man in the sketch and he would often intimidate and terrify children often following them. The daycare that reported Tristan's body had reported the homeless man in the woods nearby, this may allude him to living nearby. He also had asked children to buy him something in town and would give them a gift in return, this was around the time of Tristan's murder. It wasn't until after the murder that adults took this individual seriously and police could never find the man suggesting he fled the area, although, children said the man did not have an accent so the theory that this was a local person and not someone from another country fits.
The Frankfurt am Main Prosecutors Office offered a 15,000 euro reward for any information leading to the conviction of Tristan's murderer. A private donation of 5,000 euros made the total to 20,000. The reward remains in place. The Liederbach Tunnel has been sealed off since the murder and Tristan's murder has gone down as an urban legend with details exaggerated to scare other children in the local community.
Liederbach Tunnel today
New hope came to the case in the last couple of years after a break in the infamous case of the missing Madeline McCann, who was abducted at the age of four in 2007 after her parents left her and her younger siblings asleep in their Praia da Luz (Portugal) holiday apartment while they had dinner nearby. Christian Bruecker (43) had been announced as a suspect in her abduction and murder (according to German police, after vaguely saying they know she is dead but won't say why they know that) after his long list of crimes against children in Germany and Portugal came to light, he is currently in prison in Germany for drug offences and the 2005 rape of a woman near the resort where the McCann family were staying.
Bruecker was identified as a suspect by the Frankfurter Neuer Presse after the announcement in Madeline's case. Bruecker does indeed fit the sketch of the man very closely and the teenage witnesses say he bares a striking resemblance to the man they saw, his crimes against children and his moving around a lot does make Bruecker a very promising suspect. Nothing else has been announced in Tristan's case in regard to Bruecker, any updates seem to be only for Madeline as investigators rush for evidence before he is released from prison.
Madeline McCann, Christian Bruecker and the sketch of Tristan's killer
At Apollo's Raven we think that perhaps Tristan had been meeting up with these older men for some reason, others say that he was impressionable so we can say that he was perhaps a little more susceptible to be persuaded to go with them than other children, although what these older men wanted is a worrying mystery. His insistence on not going to school that day and waiting until lunchtime to ask to go see the doctor makes us think that perhaps he had other plans that day. His classmates said he was by the train station, an area that in most countries we can safely say attracts odd people and that Tristan did seem to be waiting for someone, why would a 13 year old boy just wait by a train station alone for no reason. The dog walker says that two men sat down by him and only minutes later he was dead. The crime has a sexual nature to it, did these two men or just the one of them lure Tristan to this more secluded spot to assault him or was murder always on their mind. It is a vicious case and is shocking not only for the murder itself but also that the victim was only 13. It seems someone who would butcher a teenager wouldn't just do it once, are there more victims out there? There is also the worrying thought of what did the killer do with the missing body parts, most think that the killer was in fact a cannibal.
Sadly, Tristan's wait for justice will have to continue. There are many strange and terrible parts in this tale, Tristan had his life stolen away from him, he seemed to be a nice and normal boy who had everything going for him and we cannot imagine his fathers pain, to not only lose your wife but to then have your only child murdered and to never know who or why must have been devastating.
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