"The Gentleman" Cold Case in Germany Breaks After 28 Years
Twenty-eight years ago, on July 11, 1994, a body floated to the surface off the coast of the Heligoland archipelago, a collection of islands off the coast of Germany. For the past two decades, the secret of the identity belonging to this body which would become known as “The Gentleman” has been lost, but recent research may have just found a clue to help figure out the truth.
After the body was collected from the North Sea and brought ashore by a border guard, general characteristics and information were taken. German forensic scientists saw that the body was six feet and five inches tall and predicted the man to have been between 45 and 50 years of age. According to the Independent, on the Gentleman’s body, they also found signs indicating a higher likelihood of foul play has been at hand in his demise. The body showed faint injuries on the head and upper body, along with finding cast iron cobbler’s feet on the body, presumably being the cause of death or immobilization and used to weigh the body down in the water to hide it. Interestingly enough, the cobbler's feet found were not a pair, but they were of the same size and were deduced to be for women's shoes.
Additionally, the investigators took notice of what the man was wearing. Describing it as “middle class” clothing, he wore a collared shirt, nice pair of trousers, imported shoes, and a tie. The tie brought significant attention, being brightly colored green, yellow, and blue striped, which according to The Sun investigators, pointed to the victim being a part of an organization that goes by such colors. Because of the outfit, the body was given the name “The Gentleman,” and that is what he went by amongst cold case files for almost 30 years.
The Gentleman’s body was taken to Wilhelmshaven, a town in Lower Saxony, Germany, to be examined by a postmortem crew and eventually be buried until being exhumed earlier this year. A Cold Case team partnered with criminology and forensic science students at the Murdoch University of Perth, Australia to do an isotope ratio analysis on a sample of the man’s bone. This test shows the composition of food, water, and test particles in your tissue, and by looking at these microscopic pieces, researchers can determine where someone lived by the unique combination of them and the climate, soil, and other factors that would create them. Through this test, they determined that the Gentleman lived most of his life in Australia, an ironic discovery due to the research team’s own location.
The test was also able to isolate a complete string of the man’s DNA profile, which was sent out to national and international databases to attempt to find a match. The announcement and discovery of these clues also came on the last day of Australia’s National Missing Person’s Week. According to the Guardian, this week in Australia is when numerous citizens volunteer to donate samples of their own DNA to databases and researchers to try and be used as a match to DNA samples of missing persons and cold cases. Hopefully, with this timing and modern technology, a real name will soon be discovered for the Gentleman, leading the way to further investigating what happened to this man.
