On 27 February 2012, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Stade district court for three murders and 20 cases of sexual assaults.

Between April and June 1992, a masked man was seen twice by students before one night in August, when he woke several children up by touching them inappropriately.

In March 1992, a series of similar incidents took place in Schullandheim Badenstadt in Zeven, when a stranger tried to sexually abuse a 13-year-old at night.

A mushroom picker found the boy's corpse 14 days later in dense shrubbery on a forest road between Kirchtimke and Hepstedt.

[6] This crime spree began in August 1992, when a masked offender sexually abused a nine-year-old and another child in a camp near Selker Noor.

[7] In April 1994, a masked offender broke into several single-family houses in the Bremen area, especially in the Horn-Lehe district, and abused three boys.

The special commission aimed to fit the offenses into a narrower context before assigning them to an alleged perpetrator based on witness testimonies and similarities between the crimes, which might also lead to the discovery of new cases of abuse.

[10] According to a case analysis by Alexander Horn, the offender was characterized as a German-speaking man between the ages of 30 and 50, who was noticeably tall, sturdy of build and had a deep voice.

[11] During his crimes, the man wore dark clothes, a mask and a pair of gloves, and managed to intimidate young children.

He likely lived alone and was socially integrated, but had pedophilic tendencies towards young boys, a fact that had been possibly noticed by his family and close friends.

For example, he had transported the three German murder victims over long distances by car, and in the case of Dennis Rostel, more than 250 kilometres (160 mi) over the guarded border between Denmark and Germany.

Investigators theorized that the offender was of above-average intelligence, planned his actions carefully in advance and carried them out in a familiar environment.

"[12] Despite a thorough investigation of the victims' relatives and acquaintances, as well as a mass DNA testing of hundreds of men from northern Germany, Ney initially went undetected.

He claimed to have seen the culprit along with the victim Dennis Klein sitting in a car on a forest path in the early morning while he was running track near the abduction site.

[17] During his interrogation, Ney stated that he had committed the three murders in order to cover up the sexual abuse and not be identified as a culprit.

After his criminal record was wiped from the educational register at the age of 24, Ney applied for a foster son in 1995 at the Social Services Office in Bremen.

With the help of falsified documents, Ney got a job as a social education teacher in a daycare position at a Hamburg foundation, which he held until early 2008.

In the years before, Ney had held a job as a youth worker alongside his studies and had thus become familiar with some of his future victims and their daily lives.

In 2006, Ney attempted to blackmail a social worker from Berlin by threatening to report him for possession of child pornography, demanding 20,000 euros for his silence.

As part of the investigation, the police searched Ney's apartment and secured his computer, which was found to contain about 30,000 photographs featuring child pornography.

As the police could not verify when the images had been stored and last accessed, the prosecutor stopped the proceedings due to the statute of limitations ending in 2007.

Investigators failed to detect that some of the photographs in the exhibit complied by the Hamburg police showed victims of Ney's previous crime sprees.

Ney had been first interviewed by SoKo "Dennis" back in 2007, as he was found to match the offender's profile, but he denied having anything to do with the crimes.

The request for Ney's saliva sample, which he refused to provide, could not be enforced legally due to a lack of reasonable doubt.

On 27 February 2012, Ney was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of the three boys and 20 cases of sexual abuse, with subsequent preventative detention condemned.

This was justified by the statement that according to the current legal situation, preventative detention can only be ordered for the indispensable protection of the general public.