Asked Where She Was, Frauke Liebs Said Mama

In the summer of 2006 Germany hosted the World Cup and the whole country seemed to be at one long party, so that even in Paderborn, a small city in North Rhine-Westphalia, young people gathered in groups to watch the matches. Paderborn sits in a stretch of countryside where three German states meet. It is green, thinly settled and usually very quiet, and the two larger cities nearby both have crime rates below the national average.

Tuesday 20 June was a hot day. Frauke Liebs, a 21-year-old student nurse, had arranged to meet friends that evening at an Irish pub in town to watch England play Sweden. Before she went, her mother and her flatmate took her out to dinner, and at around nine they dropped her at the pub door.

Two hours later the match was over. Frauke was a little tired, and she decided to walk home. From the pub to the small flat she shared with her flatmate was a fifteen-minute walk. Her flatmate, who was also her best friend, had to wait up for her that night. He had borrowed Frauke’s house key, and without it she could not get in. He could only let her in once she got home.

But that night, he waited for her in vain.

For the week that followed, Frauke called home from her own phone almost every night. Again and again she said she would be back that day, and not once could she say where she was. In October, a hunter found her in a forest.

A Text from Forty Kilometres Away

About two hours after she walked out of the pub, Frauke’s phone sent a text message.

Later the police traced where it had been sent from. It was not Paderborn. It was the area around Nieheim, a small town forty kilometres away. In other words, two hours after leaving the pub, Frauke was already somewhere she could never have reached on foot.

Her parents reported her missing, and the police launched a large public search. It may have been Frauke who typed that message, or it may have been someone else using her phone. Perhaps from that night on, the phone was no longer in her hands alone.

“I’m in Paderborn”

On the evening of 22 June the flatmate got a call. It was Frauke. She called him by a name she only ever used when things were wrong, and said: “I just wanted to say that I’m fine and that I’ll be home soon. Tell Mum and Dad and the others.”

The next day a text arrived: “Coming home today. In Paderborn. Love you lots.” The same day her brother called her and asked when she was coming home. Today, she said, not too late. She was in Paderborn, she told him, and he shouldn’t ask. He pressed her on where exactly she was. All she would say was: “Can’t say.”

On 24 June Frauke called her flatmate again and said she would be home that evening. He asked whether she was hurt. She said no, and then, for no reason anyone could see, she said the same thing three times in a row: “I’m in Paderborn. I’m in Paderborn. I’m in Paderborn.”

He had not asked her where she was. Yet she kept repeating that she was in Paderborn, as if someone had told her she must say it.

On 25 June it was the same promise: “Coming home today.” Was she in danger? No. Where was she? She would explain when she got home.

Apart from one, these calls all came late, after ten at night. Each lasted only a few sentences. Frauke’s voice grew weaker every time, and sometimes she sounded as if she were in a trance. When the police checked where the calls had been made, they found they came from several different industrial estates around Paderborn. So when Frauke said she was in Paderborn, she was not lying. It was as though someone was taking her to a different place each night to make that call.

On Monday 26 June, no call came at all.

The Last Five Minutes

On the evening of Tuesday 27 June, Frauke’s sister and her parents came to the flatmate’s flat to wait for news. Later her parents went home, leaving the flatmate and her sister alone in the flat.

Late that night the phone finally rang. It was Frauke. This call lasted a full five minutes, and her sister listened in beside the flatmate. Afterwards they wrote down every line they could remember.

“I’m fine,” Frauke said.

“Where are you?” the flatmate asked.

“Can’t say.”

“Then come home.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Then the flatmate asked the question: “Are you being held?”

“Yes… No! No!”

The “yes” slipped out first. Then she took it back, twice, at once. He asked whether she was afraid. No, she said. He asked who was with her. She couldn’t say.

“Are you tired?”

“Yes, very tired.”

“Do you know the police are looking for you?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been gone almost a week.”

“Why did you go?”

“You know why.”

He said he didn’t, and asked whether she had met another man. “You know I wouldn’t disappear for a week because of a man,” Frauke said. “You know me.” She asked whether Mum and Dad were there. When she heard they had just left, she said: “Tell them I love them very much.” He offered to come and fetch her. She said no. Could they meet somewhere? No again.

So the flatmate asked once more.

“Where are you?”

“Mama.”

“Where are you?”

“Mama.”

“Where are you?”

“Mama.”

Three times she was asked where she was. Three times, that one word was all Frauke gave.

Then she asked for her sister. The moment the phone changed hands, she said: “Please don’t keep asking me things.”

“We’ll tidy up the flat,” her sister said, “and nobody will ask you what happened. Come back.”

On the other end of the line, she gave an answer that seemed to come out of nowhere: “I can’t, I’m still alive!”

“Are you with one person, or more than one?”

“Please don’t ask me. I’d love to be with you. I’d love to come home.”

At the end the phone went back to the flatmate, who asked her to call at least once a day.

“Yes, I will. Bye. See you soon.”

It was the last time anyone heard Frauke’s voice.

At the time, Frauke’s mother worked in a small town on the other side of the hills, not far from Nieheim. So perhaps those three answers were not nonsense at all. Perhaps, when she could not say where she was, “Mama” was the only direction she could still give. Her family and the investigators have also wondered ever since whether that “yes”, the one that slipped out, was the reason there was never another call.

The Car That Went Out Every Night

A few hours after that call ended, Frauke’s phone connected to a mast one last time. It was near Nieheim again. After that, there was no signal at all.

The police passed everything they had to the North Rhine-Westphalia State Criminal Police Office. Its profilers ran technical and forensic-psychological assessments and made their own inquiries around Nieheim, and in January 2007 they gave their conclusion. For the week after she vanished, Frauke had been held against her will somewhere in the Nieheim area, perhaps in a flat, a house, a holiday home, a hunting lodge, or a caravan. The offender was probably a man acting alone, they thought, though several people, or a couple, could not be ruled out.

The police also worked out how those calls were being made. Almost every night that week, whoever held her drove Frauke out late in the evening to Paderborn, had her make the call, and later drove her back, perhaps so that everyone would think she was in Paderborn and no one would look for the place where she was really being kept. So if the police were right, every time Frauke said “I’m in Paderborn” on the phone, she was saying it on an industrial estate forty kilometres from where she was held. And as soon as the call was over, the car took her back to Nieheim.

To find that place, the police sent leaflets to every household around Nieheim and asked people to think back. The leaflet explained that the offender and Frauke had driven out late almost every night that week and come back some time later. If the offender lived in the area, coming and going like that in the middle of the night might have struck a neighbour as odd. So the leaflet asked: “Did a neighbour or someone you know change their habits or their daily routine during that time?” The police also asked anyone who had seen a young woman out with someone else around there in those days to think again, even if at the time the two of them had looked like nothing more than holidaymakers.

That week, perhaps someone saw that car pass their house late at night, never imagining that the young woman inside was being taken out to call home.

The Phone That Was Never Found

On 4 October a hunter found Frauke in a forest near Lichtenau, south-east of Paderborn, not far from a country road.

Her clothes were intact. The police believed she had worn the same clothes throughout the week she was missing. They soon established that the place where she was found was not the place where she had been killed. Every trace had been wiped away, and how she died could no longer be determined. After more than three months, the search for a missing woman became a murder inquiry.

Frauke’s phone and her watch were not with her. The phone that had called home almost every night that week last connected to a mast near Nieheim, and no one has found it since.

The Wooden Cross by the Road

Over the years the police checked nine hundred people and carried out forty searches. By 20 June 2026, twenty years had passed since the night Frauke disappeared, and the police had followed more than fourteen hundred leads. The prosecutor in charge of the case has still not given up hope of finding her killer.

At the spot where Frauke was found, someone put up a wooden cross in her memory. Twenty years on, it still stands by that country road near Lichtenau.

The One Sitting Beside Her

If the police were right, someone else was sitting beside Frauke during every one of those calls. Each time she called for help, the first person to hear it was not her family. It was whoever sat in that car, listened to her say “Mama” three times, and then drove her back.

That week, her family and her flatmate asked her again and again, “Where are you?”, and she could never tell them. For twenty years, the answer to that question has stayed with the person who sat beside her and heard every one of her calls for help.