Catching a murderer can mean chasing the shakiest of leads, the smallest of details – and doing it again and again.
Such is the case in The Black Forest Murders, a four-part German miniseries directed by Stefan Krohmer that follows the police hunt after a young women is killed while out jogging. The evidence is scarce as Chief Inspector Barbara Kramer (Nina Kunzendorf, whose CV includes , also streaming at SBS On Demand) and her colleague Thomas Riedle (Tilman Strauß) begin an investigation; soon, a second murder rocks the region, sparking fears of a serial killer. Is it connected? New leads, a much bigger area to overview: it all adds to the enormous task facing Kramer and her team, and public pressure to find answers grows.
Thomas Riedle (Tilman Strauß). Credit: Lailaps Film / Luis Zeno Kuhn
Riedle, in particular, feels the desperation of the locals: he grew up in the area and knows almost everyone in the village where the victim lived. Kramer, on the other hand, heads the criminal investigation unit of a neighouring city. Well regarded by her colleagues, she brings an outsider's eye to the investigation.
While some crime dramas balance the 'whodunnit' with the investigator's personal struggles, The Black Forest Murders takes us into the heart of the investigation. There are no traumas chasing Kramer and Kunzendorf found this appealing.
"She's not a typical TV crime detective. Barbara doesn't have an extensive backstory or have to deal with personal trauma; her investigation is the focus. Not everything is recounted in great detail. I like that a lot, because it gave me and the audience room for interpretation," she has .
Inspector Brabara Kramer (Nina Kunzendorf) and her team. Credit: Lailaps Film / Luis Zeno Kuhn
While the investigators are fictional characters, the storyline is inspired, in part, by real-life events, and a about them by a former police press spokesman, Walter (Walther) Roth. Writers Robert Hammel and Martina Mouchot say they were fascinated by how the book portrayed the exacting and meticulous nature of the work involved in trying to solve the murders of three young women.
"Four years ago, I read about these crimes and the investigations in Walther Roth's non-fiction book Soko Erle and found the events so moving and the work of the police and forensic scientists so admirable that I thought: This has to be made into a film," Hummel has of the origins of the project.
We were fascinated by how persistently and how much time and effort the police put into their investigation: every lead was followed, national borders were crossed
Martina Mouchot came on board as co-writer for the project, which developed into a four-part series. "In this remarkable book, Roth describes in detail the meticulous and ultimately successful search for the murderers of three young women from his perspective as a police press spokesman. We were fascinated by how persistently and how much time and effort the police put into their investigation: every lead was followed, national borders were crossed, and numerous overtime hours were put in to solve the crimes," the pair say in a joint statement about the series.
"We were very quickly able to impress the experienced producer Nils Dünker, who worked with us to formulate the narrative in a committed and competent manner: We wanted to fictionalise the crimes in a classic way, but portray the police work in a detailed and realistic way. This means that we traced the investigations, but invented our investigators and their backgrounds. We also invented the locations. We also changed the order of the murder cases and alienated the victims and families.
"We did not want to exploit the suffering of the victims and their families in the media, nor did we want to give the perpetrators too much attention, out of respect for the environment and to protect the dignity of the people involved. In the points where we were concerned with adapting and changing the material, we turned to a case analyst, a professor of forensic medicine and research contacts with a criminalistic background with our questions in order to do justice to the claim of realism beyond the literary original."
On the job in 'Black Forest Murders'.
In the series, the murders cross international lines: a clue in one of the German murders leads the team to the similar case involving the death, four years earlier, of another young woman in Austria. As the days tick on, the team continue trying to tie it all together.
"In contrast to conventional crime novels, we were concerned with meticulous, real and at the same time laborious, slow and irritating detail work: DNA cannot be analysed in a few hours, crime scenes are subject to a variety of influences, many witness statements are of no use, numerous clues turn out to be dead ends," the writers say.
Telling the story as a mini-series, rather than a film, was the answer to showing the dedicated chase. "...We were able to give the effort of the investigations ... the tenacious perseverance, but also the astonishing and liberating twists in these cases, the necessary narrative space."
The team investigating the real-life 2016 murder had to sift through. The Black Forest Murders gives us a glimpse of how determined police work can find an answer among all the dead ends and details.
The Black Forest Murders season 1 premieres Thursday 8 May on SBS On Demand.
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The Black Forest Murders
