After four days of searching, police found Ursula Herrmann's dead body in a box buried in the woods.

[2][3][4][5] The perpetrators made coded telephone calls to Ursula's family on 17 September, playing the distinctive Bayern 3 radio jingle in an attempt to elicit a response concerning a ransom payment.

On 21 September, another letter arrived with detailed instructions to hand over the money, but without stating a location for the delivery.

Two weeks after Ursula's disappearance, the forest was searched by officers with metal rods, probing for disturbances, and after four days the box was found.

After a day without recalling his whereabouts, Mazurek eventually offered as his alibi that he had been playing Risk with his wife and two friends.

By then, the thirty year statute of limitations for kidnapping with fatal consequences was approaching, and the prime suspects were re-examined.

Police developed a theory that the tape recorder had been used to play the Bayern 3 jingle in the calls to the Herrmanns.

Police presented evidence of Mazurek's prior legal difficulties, including a 2004 fraud conviction, and of animal cruelty.

It was established that Mazurek had the means to construct the box, that he had listened to police communications during the search, and that he was in debt.

Mazurek maintained that he had bought it at a flea market the week before the raid, but no corroboration from sellers could be found.

Ursula's brother Michael took the extraordinary measure of making a written statement to the court, stating that the tape recorder analysis was "incomplete or one-sided.

[5][6] Michael had become increasingly convinced that Mazurek had been wrongfully convicted on faulty evidence, and that a court action would be a means of re-examining the case.

Herrmann alleged that traces of pressure from mathematical sketches corresponding to class work at the upper secondary level could be discerned in the note.