German woman accused of killing a lookalike found on social media to fake her own death
Police in Bavaria say a 23-year-old beautician lured a woman who resembled her into a forest and stabbed her to death in a plan to disappear from her own family.
German police say a young woman scoured social media for someone who resembled her, found a target, and lured her into a forest in Upper Bavaria where the woman and her boyfriend stabbed the victim to death in a scheme to fake the suspect's own death and disappear from her family, according to Fox News and NBC News reporting on the case.
The victim's body was found in the suspect's car on August 16, 2022, bearing more than 50 stab wounds that left her face nearly unrecognizable, according to police accounts reported by Fox News. The suspect's own family had reported her missing, and investigators initially treated the body as hers before an autopsy raised what police described as "massive doubts" about the victim's identity. The suspect and her 23-year-old boyfriend were taken into custody on August 18, 2022, NBC News reported.
What remains unresolved in the earliest reporting is the exact mechanism by which the victim was lured — subsequent reporting on the case's later trial described the victim as having been offered free beauty treatment, but that detail is not present in the initial 2022-2023 wire coverage of the arrest, and this account treats it as a later addition rather than an original fact confirmed at the time of arrest.
A search built around resemblance
According to the police account carried by Fox News and NBC News, the suspect had been searching social media platforms specifically for someone who looked like her before settling on the victim, who NBC News reported was found via her Instagram presence. The two were, in the phrasing used by outlets at the time, "strikingly similar" in appearance — the resemblance that investigators say was the entire point of the search.
What the case signals
The case drew international attention less for its violence than for its premise: a murder allegedly staged specifically to be mistaken, at least initially, for the killer's own death, using a stranger selected for physical resemblance found through public social media profiles. That the ruse worked long enough to fool the victim's own family before autopsy findings intervened underscored, in the coverage that followed, how a public social-media presence could be mined by a stranger for exactly the kind of resemblance a scheme like this required.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Fox News and NBC News. It restores a story originally published on this site in early 2023; figures are as reported at the time and reflect the arrest and initial allegations rather than the eventual trial outcome.