Tristan Brübach

Case background and investigation

Tristan Brübach, 13, was killed on Thursday, March 26, 1998, in Frankfurt am Main. According to the Hessen police cold-case page and the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the attack took place at around 4 p.m. in a tunnel beside the Liederbach stream near Frankfurt-Höchst railway station, a passage local people used as a shortcut. Children found his body there.

The BKA states that he suffered severe stab and cut wounds, and that a deep cut to the neck was the cause of death; the body was further mutilated inside the tunnel after death. Police say they have no firm indication of the motive and do not know whether the killer waited at the scene, lured the boy there or followed him. German Wikipedia records that he was last seen alive at about 3:20 p.m. in a small park near the station.

Witnesses described a man seen near the scene, and police released a composite sketch. According to the BKA, he was about 175 cm tall, aged 20 to 30 at the time, thin and pale, with long, greasy dark-blond hair worn in a ponytail and a scar on the upper lip, possibly from a cleft lip. His backpack was found about a year later in woodland near Niedernhausen, some distance from Frankfurt, t-online reported; the BKA has published photos of it and of items including a road map of Germany printed in Czech.

Beginning on May 10, 2002, police asked men aged 18 to 49 who had lived in the Frankfurt districts of Höchst, Unterliederbach, Sossenheim, Nied, Sindlingen and Zeilsheim at the time to give fingerprints for comparison with a print recovered in the case. The BKA describes the scale as unprecedented and reports very high participation, but no match was found. Investigators have said the killer may since have moved away.

In 2016 the Hessian State Criminal Police said the late Manfred Seel, suspected of killing several women, might be linked to the case; according to t-online and German Wikipedia, no concrete suspicion resulted and police later said he had been ruled out. As of late 2025, t-online reported that the Frankfurt police cold-case unit was still checking incoming tips, of which there have been more than 23,000, but that no promising leads had emerged recently. A reward of up to 20,000 euros remains on offer, and the case is unsolved.