Isabella Mueller (crime writer) 
This question remains unanswered to this day, making it one of Germany’s most mysterious cold cases. The New Year of 1994 was barely six hours old when a horrific crime took place in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. Twenty-year-old Claudia Hucke, who worked as a nursery teacher, had celebrated the New Year with her friends at a party in Wilstorf on 31 December 1993. In the early hours of the morning, she set off for home. She first took the tram, which she left at the Neugraben stop at around 5.16 am. From there, she intended to continue her journey by bus. However, the buses were not running on 1 January, so she set off home on foot, where, 150 metres from her front door, she was overpowered by a man who presumably intended to rape her. When she fought back, the man stabbed Claudia in cold blood. A few hours after the crime, Claudia’s body was found on a grass verge at the corner of Cuxhavener Straße and Fischbeker Weg. The police compiled over 500 files of evidence and interviewed more than 500 suspects, but to no avail. Even the coverage on the RTL II programme “Unsolved Murders – On the Trail of the Perpetrator” failed to yield any clues as to who Claudia Hucke’s murderer was. To this day, this mysterious cold case is repeatedly reopened, as there is no statute of limitations for murder.
