The cold case solved after 46 years
Hope dies last. This applies to a criminal case that was finally solved after almost half a century. In early June 1978, 35-year-old Bärbel Gansau was found dead, naked, and covered in blood in the bed of her ground-floor apartment in Ludwigsburg by her neighbor Hugo Rehberg and US soldier Robert Burright, the husband of a friend. Bärbel had been stabbed a total of 37 times. Her slashed underwear lay beneath her body. The police found traces of semen in the bed and fingerprints on the frame of the open bathroom window, through which the perpetrator had entered the apartment. Bärbel always left it open because of her cats. The entire apartment had been ransacked in order to cover up any traces. Who had murdered Bärbel so brutally? To answer this question, investigators looked into Bärbel’s social circle. She often visited American soldiers’ officers’ clubs at the US Army base in Ludwigsburg to dance with GIs. Bärbel was friends with several American soldiers, with whom she occasionally shared her bed. Was one of them Bärbel’s murderer? Investigators took fingerprints from all the soldiers with whom Bärbel had had contact. However, not only did they all have solid alibis, but their fingerprints also did not match those found at the crime scene. Despite meticulous investigative work, the case remained unsolved until 2020, when German authorities revisited the cold case of Bärbel Gansau due to advances in forensic technology. The investigators handed over the fingerprints found at the time to an FBI liaison officer in Berlin. He sent them to the United States to be compared with the FBI database. On January 29, the FBI contacted the German investigators and informed them that the fingerprints from the window frame matched those of a man from New York who had been charged with drunk driving. This man was 66-year-old James Patrick Dempsey from Oneida, New York, who had recently left the US Army and was stationed as a soldier in the 34th Signal Battalion in Ludwigsburg from late 1977 to late 1978. James suffered from alcohol problems and was prone to violent outbursts, which is why he had to undergo a six-day detoxification program in Bad Cannstatt on June 1, 1978. Bärbel Gansau was murdered between June 8 and 11, 1978. After the murder, James was discharged from the army and returned to the US. He continued to struggle with alcohol problems. Following this result, the FBI searched James’s trash on April 14 to perform a DNA trace analysis, comparing James’s DNA with the samples found at the crime scene. The probability of a match was 1 in 270 quadrillion. The 66-year-old James was subsequently arrested by the U.S. Marshals on February 13, 2022. On June 24, 2022, the Stuttgart Regional Court issued an arrest warrant for James for the murder of Bärbel Gansau. James is to be transferred to Germany under an extradition agreement to stand trial for the murder. Because murder never expires.
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