On 30 September 2001, 5-year-old Pascal Zimmer disappeared in the Burbach quarter of Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany. The investigation was plagued by dead-end leads, as well as allegations of misconduct, evidence tampering, and incompetence against police. The subsequent trial, dubbed the Pascal Trial (), and later acquittal of twelve defendants accused of Pascal's rape and murder between 2004 and 2007 is regarded as the longest and most complex criminal case in the state's judicial history. The case remains unsolved.
Background Pascal Zimmer was the only child of Sonja Zimmer, a homekeeper who was unemployed due to obesity and chronic illness. His stepfather was Karl-Heinz Coen, a manual labourer with a criminal record and alcohol problems. Through Coen, Pascal had two stepsisters. He grew up in Burbach, an industrial area of Saarbrücken, considered a deprived area with high rates of unemployment, prostitution, drug abuse, and violent crime. Pascal had health issues, and was underweight due to a metabolic disorder.
Disappearance Pascal left his home on Hochstraße shortly before 16:00, riding his yellow-blue bicycle to the annual Oktoberkirmes, a local Oktoberfest celebration held at the Festplatz, with a curfew to return by 18:30. Police described Pascal as 120 cm in height and weighing 18 kilograms, with short blond hair, brown eyes, and a noticeable gap between his incisors. He was last seen wearing a light blue long-sleeved sweater, blue sweatpants, and black-blue trainers.
Pascal spent a few minutes at the Oktoberkirmes, where an employee gifted him a balloon. He then exited the festival grounds through a less lively side-exit at around 17:00. His bicycle helmet was found in the courtyard of an apartment building an hour later. Pascal's aunt was alerted by the boy's mother shortly after 20:00, taking a photo from the home and spending a few hours searching the Oktoberkirmes for her nephew without success. The aunt and Pascal's stepfather reported the boy missing shortly before 21:00.
A special commission was formed, but despite receiving hundreds of tips from the public over the course of nearly a year, the boy remained missing. Both Saarland Police and the French gendarmerie of neighbouring Moselle participated in a search of both residential and wooded areas surrounding Saarbrücken. Over the following weeks, Pascal's mother was treated at a hospital for shock while Pascal's stepfather made several pleas on television tearfully asking for his son to be found, with relatives offering a €20,000 reward for information that would lead to his return. Unknown to Pascal's parents, there were a few Internet donation sites within days of their son's disappearance, claiming to be affiliated with the family.
Investigation Within two weeks, Pascal's stepsisters were implicated. 18-year-old Melanie became a suspect, after her 14-year-old sister Sarah claimed that the older girl had confessed to following Pascal to the Oktoberkirmes and beating him to death with a shovel or iron bar. Sarah recanted the accusation after eight days and gave two differing explanations, the first being that police officers had beaten her so that she would instead push a different narrative, according to which a stranger had taken Pascal into his car. After an investigation into assault and testimony manipulation was dropped against the officers, Sarah instead claimed that Melanie had asked her sister to not implicate her. By the time she testified in court in 2004, she stated that officers had pressured her into the confession via coercion, but not physical violence, and invented the entire story by herself on the spot.
Around the same time as Pascal Zimmer disappeared, pediatric nurse Esther Fehrer took in a 6-year-old boy (born 7 January 1995) from Saarbrücken-Burbach. The boy, most often referred to by the pseudonyms "Kevin", "Tobias", and "Bernie", had been removed from the custody of his mentally disabled mother, Andrea Müller, who herself was under legal guardianship of Christa Weyand, the sister of Müller's latest boyfriend. Weyand was a former lay judge for the (juvenile court for adolescent offenders) and ran a local dive bar, the "Tosa-Klause", out of a small hut building near Burbach's railway station, located only a few blocks from Pascal Zimmer's home. It was through Weyand's brother that Jugendamt were convinced to remove "Kevin" from his mother in January 2001, as Christa Weyand forced the boy to eat expired food, sleep in an unheated room, and act as a drug courier for her. The accusation came after Weyand had refused to pay her brother 100,000 DM after she received the entire inheritance from their father.
While "Kevin" had been adjusting well to his newest foster family, his foster mother noted that he displayed sexual behaviours, also being prone to experiencing flashbacks and periods of extreme fear, during which "Kevin" would hyperventilate and sometimes choke himself. "Kevin" reluctantly opened up to his past over time and in autumn 2002, "Kevin" told his foster mother of abuse he experienced through his biological mother. Between 1999 and 2001, "Kevin" had been raped in at least four instances by associates of Christa Weyand, with his mother aiding in one of the rapes in Forbach, France.
After the foster mother called police, they confirmed that "Tosa-Klause" had been under long observation due to suspected child sexual abuse. On 19 November 2003, the bar's owner, and around two dozen patrons, codenamed "Tosa-Gemeinschaft" ("Tosa-Community"), were arrested in a raid. While in custody, a few of the accused made mention of the name "Pascal". Pascal Zimmer had previously been taken to the bar by his stepfather until the latter stopped going due to unpaid tabs. The first to make a confession was Peter Sch., a regular patron of the "Tosa-Klause", who admitted in January 2003 to the rape of both Kevin and Pascal, claiming that the bar owner had prostituted the boys to customers for a 20 DM fee. On 14 February 2003, Gabriele G., at the time not under suspicion, was questioned to confirm a suspect's alibi. During her statement, she told officers that the missing Pascal Zimmer had been murdered in the Tosa-Klause. However, she later claimed to have "just imagined the whole thing".
A week after G.'s confession, Kevin's mother Andrea Müller, who prostituted herself out of the "Tosa Klause", stated that Pascal had been abducted, repeatedly raped by three to five men and smothered to death with a pillow in one day. Müller stated that Pascal's death was accidental and that she had been the one to kill him as Pascal was being raped by in an attempt to silence his screams from attracting attention. Afterwards, she alleged that his body was put in a garbage bag and smuggled over the French–German border to be dumped in a sandpit in a border town, either Forbach or Schœneck. Müller also implicated Dieter S. in the rape of her son at his apartment in 1999. According to Siggi D., who denied taking part in the abuse himself, "Kevin" was raped at the Tosa-Klause twice a week. Christa Weyand reportedly listed each rape with a line or cross drawn on a beermat, the same system used to charge for drinks.
However, the various testimonies often contradicted each other and a search of both Schœneck and Forbach did not find a corpse. Similarly, a forensic analysis of the "Tosa-Klause" did not find any signs of a rape or murder taking place, nor was any of Pascal's DNA recovered. As the investigation progressed, it became clear that a number of the accused were severely mentally disabled and chronic alcoholics, calling the admissibility of their claims into question.
Between 2001 and 2004, several sighting of Pascal were still reported, including at the Saarbrücken Hauptbahnhof, in various French cities such as Sarreguemines, Nice, and Paris, or "in the clutches of a child sex ring" in Amsterdam.
Trial In October 2003, Peter Sch. (48) was tried and found guilty of child molestation after just two days trial. Sch. was judged to be severely mentally disabled and although he had a previous conviction for a sex offense involving children, he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment followed by a lifelong stay at a psychiatric facility. A court doctor had attested an IQ of 60, alcoholism, and pedophilia to Peter Sch. to show he held diminished responsibility. The trial was criticised for its overly quick process.
In September 2004, thirteen of the initial suspects, four women and nine men, were indicted and charged with the rape and murder of Pascal Zimmer. Christa Weyand (51) was the main defendant as she was considered the leading figure in the suspected child abuse ring. The prosecution had accused six of the defendants, Weyand, Günter Ludwig (50), Hans-Josef "Jupp" W. (49), Michael C. (47), Dieter S. (61) and Martin R. (42), of murder and rape of Pascal, and child molestation of Kevin and a 10-year-old girl (born 1991; "Sandra" or "Sabrina") while the other five, Sigmund "Siggi" D. (44), Erika K. (51), Gabriele G. (50), Horst K. (49), Kurt K. (45) and Detlef S. (37), were charged with being accessories to murder for luring the victim and helping dispose of his remains. By 2007, convictions would have resulted in the former receiving life imprisonment (with preventative detention for four of them) and the latter receiving sentences between 4½ and 9½ years. The defense and prosecution had agreed on 14 years and 9 months with subsequent involuntary confinement for Andrea Müller (40), who claimed to have been the one to kill Pascal and was serving as a main witness in the trial.
Main accused Christa Weyand invoked her right to remain silent throughout the trial, barring a single instance regarding her personal history in July 2005. Unlike the rest of defendants, Weyand was described as exceptionally intelligent with an IQ of 138, though also noted as having only graduated Hauptschule. After completing training as a stenotyper, Weyand was employed at a boutique, a Commerzbank, and the Diakonie Deutschland, as well as a night-shift taxi driver. In 1990, she started work as a pub manager, successively operating three bars, the Tosa-Klause being the third and final one. She lived in Riegelsberg with fellow defendants Andrea Müller and Michael C., as well as three other men, aged 36 to 50, serving as their almoner by providing abode and food in exchange for their welfare payments. Weyand also acted as an informant to some members of Saarbrücken Police, telling them about the sale of stolen goods she observed at her bar. She was simultaneously under secret observation by the Saarland LKA after Weyand's brother accused her of smuggling hashish, with the phone lines of both her home and the Tosa-Klause tapped by investigators.
Andrea Müller was the star witness of the trial, but regularly contradicted or changed the content of her testimony. Müller was determined to have an IQ bordering at feeble-mindedness (below 70) by former standards. Müller had spent her childhood with her grandmother, as her mother was a prostitute who relied on social benefits. At age 12, Müller's grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, she was given into the care of a foster family in North Rhine-Westphalia. She ran away shortly after, engaging in child prostitution in Hamburg and Bremen before being returned to the foster family. She again escaped custody, making it back to Saarland to move in with her mother. The two lived together until March 1984, when Müller's mother was murdered by Müller's then-boyfriend. Müller was put under social care in June 1984 and spent the next seven years in women's shelters, social psychiatric facilities and sheltered workshops, with intermittent periods of homelessness and prostitution. She had four children during this time, putting all of them up for adoption.