Waking up one morning to find your child gone must be one of the most atrocious experiences a parent can live. So it’s not hard to imagine what Louise Bell’s parents felt when the morning of January 4th, 1983, they realized their 10 year old daughter had disappeared during the night. Her sister, who’d been sleeping in the same room, hadn’t woken up, but the open window and other signs pointed to an intruder.
A few days later, a man called a woman who lived in the same neighborhood than the Bells, in Hackam West, South Australia. He told her that he had Louise, that she was happy with him, but she needed medical help. He implied the girl had been raped. To prove what he was saying, the man told this woman where to find Louise’s earrings, hidden in a particular spot. The same woman later found the pajamas Louise had been wearing the night she went missing neatly folded on her lawn.
At the time, this evidence didn’t lead anywhere, and Louise’s case went cold. A known peadophile named Raymond John Geesing was at one point convicted of the crime, but later acquitted. Then, in 1990, a likely suspect appeared. Dieter Pfennig, a math and science teacher who lived in the same neighborhood than Louise, was convicted of the abduction and murder of Michael Black (10), who’d disappeared while fishing. Pfennig also confessed to abducting and raping a 13 year old. He was sentenced to life for those crimes.
It took more than 15 years to find concrete evidence to tie him to Louise’s case, though. New DNA techniques were able to find his in the girl’s pajamas. Pfennig is currently on trial for her murder, and has pled not guilty. Among the witnesses against him are his own daughter and a prison mate who said Pfennig had told him about the murder and that he’d hid her body in the same place as Michael Black’s, who’s never been found, but that he didn’t see a point in telling the location since he’s spending his life in jail anyway.