Marcel Lychau Hansen, the “Amager Man”

Crimes spread over 23 years

For more than two decades, police in Copenhagen were investigating a series of violent crimes that no one had firmly linked together. Most of them took place on Amager, the island that forms the south-eastern part of the Danish capital, and the unknown offender became known in the Danish press as "Amagermanden," the Amager Man. In November 2010 police arrested Marcel Lychau Hansen, a man then in his mid-forties, and DNA evidence went on to connect him to attacks dating back to 1987.

The victims

The oldest case in the indictment was the 1987 robbery and murder of Edith Louise Andrup, a 73-year-old woman, in her flat in Valby. Hansen was also charged with setting fire to the flat afterwards to destroy evidence, endangering other residents. In 1990, Lene Buchardt Rasmussen, aged 42, was raped and murdered in the Fasanskoven woods on Amager. The other charges concerned sexual offences against living victims: three teenage girls and a 23-year-old woman attacked in a house on Amager in 1995, a 24-year-old university student assaulted in her dormitory in 2005, and a 17-year-old girl raped at knifepoint in an allotment garden on Amager in September 2010. It was that last attack that led to his arrest.

Evidence and the 2011 trial

Hansen's trial was held at Copenhagen City Court before a jury of six and three professional judges. The prosecutor, Anne Birgitte Stürup, relied above all on DNA. According to The Copenhagen Post, the probability that the DNA found at most of the scenes came from someone other than Hansen was put at about one in a million. The match in the 1990 murder of Lene Buchardt Rasmussen was made only after he had been identified through the 2010 case. A matching handprint and shoe print and the testimony of more than 50 witnesses supported the prosecution's case. Hansen, then 46, maintained his innocence throughout.

On 19 December 2011 the court found him guilty on six of the seven counts, covering the two murders and the series of rapes. He was acquitted of one count: a 2007 sexual assault in Vangede, north of Copenhagen, where the DNA evidence was much weaker, with odds of about 2,200 to one, and was not considered sufficient to convict.

A life sentence

On 22 December 2011 the court unanimously sentenced Hansen to life imprisonment, the most severe penalty available in Danish law. In arguing for it, the prosecutor pointed out that Danish courts had previously given terms of 14 and 16 years in cases involving a single robbery-murder or a single rape-murder, and that Hansen's case combined both together with numerous other serious offences.

After the verdict, police also alleged that Hansen had tried, while in custody at Vestre Fængsel prison in Copenhagen, to smuggle biological material out of the prison so that it could be planted at a new crime scene, making it appear that the Amager Man was still at large. His defence lawyer declined to comment on that allegation, which was not part of the verdict.

Why the case matters

The Amager case is one of the clearest examples in Danish criminal history of how forensic DNA analysis can link crimes separated by many years. Offences committed in 1987, 1990, 1995, 2005 and 2010 had been investigated separately; only when a suspect was identified and his profile compared with the evidence kept from older cases did the full pattern emerge. The case also showed the limits of such evidence: the court acquitted on the one count where the DNA was only partial, even while convicting on the others.

For the women who survived the attacks, and for the families of Edith Louise Andrup and Lene Buchardt Rasmussen, the verdict came many years after the crimes, in some cases more than two decades. Their testimony, together with the forensic evidence, was central to the outcome.

Continued attention

The case remains a fixture of Danish true-crime coverage. A six-part Danish drama series about the 23-year effort to catch Hansen, with the working title Amagermanden and following prosecutor Anne Birgitte Stürup's role in securing his conviction, has been announced for Amazon Prime, with a premiere estimated for 2026.