In August 1989, 41-year-old Birgit Meyer vanished without a trace from her respectable home. The police were convinced she had simply run away due to a difficult divorce. They completely overlooked the quiet cemetery gardener who lived nearby. This became one of the most egregious mistakes in the history of German criminal investigation. While the police were questioning her husband, a soundproof torture chamber was hidden in the gardener’s basement, and a blood-stained car was buried in the garden. How did the system let a serial killer slip through the cracks—a man who may be linked to more than 230 unsolved crimes across the country—and why did the victim’s brother have to assemble his own team of investigators to break open the concrete sarcophagus 28 years later? Today we’ll uncover the chilling story of Kurt-Werner Wichmann and the infamous Göerde Forest Murders.