The Crystal Cave Murders

The victims

Brigitte Meier, 17, and Karin Gattiker, 15, were friends from Goldach, a town on Lake Constance in the canton of St. Gallen. On 29 July 1982 they set off by bicycle on a planned three-day tour to Appenzell. They stopped for lunch at the home of Karin's grandmother in Herisau, where a passer-by took a photograph of them. As far as is known, it is the last picture of the two girls.

The disappearance

The friends spent two nights at the youth hostel in Schwende, in Appenzell Innerrhoden. Shortly before noon on 31 July a family from Oberriet, in the St. Gallen Rhine Valley, drove past them at a road junction in Kobelwies and saw them looking at a map. That is the last confirmed sighting. At around 9:30 that evening the same family came past again and noticed the girls' bicycles standing by the road, with their luggage, including a camera, still on the racks. The girls were reported missing that night. About 150 police officers, firefighters and volunteers searched the woods around the Kristallhöhle, a show cave above Kobelwies. They were helped by an army helicopter and sniffer dogs, and police divers checked a nearby pond. They found nothing.

The discovery

On 2 October 1982, more than nine weeks later, a hiker from Herisau found Brigitte Meier's body hidden under a slab of rock in the forest. Karin Gattiker's remains were found the following day in a shallow rock shelter close by. After so much time investigators could not answer every question, but they concluded that both girls had been killed, probably with a blunt object. The case became known throughout Switzerland as the Kristallhöhlenmord, the Crystal Cave murder.

The investigation

Investigators looked closely at three men who worked as guides at the cave. A local architect, whose car and horse trailer had been seen near the place where the bicycles were found, spent time in pre-trial detention but was released for lack of evidence. A driver with a previous conviction for a sexual offence was also briefly under suspicion. None of these men was ever charged, and all of them are legally innocent. During the inquiry a police investigator was suspended for passing confidential details to outsiders. A year after the crime the German television programme Aktenzeichen XY … ungelöst broadcast an appeal for witnesses, but no breakthrough followed. The investigation was halted in the early 1990s. Later outside reviews produced their own theories. In 2016 the German profiler Axel Petermann told Blick that the killer must have known the steep terrain intimately and was probably a climber familiar with caves, possibly with a helper. These remain theories, not court findings.

Time-barred

Swiss law sets a 30-year limitation period for murder, and the case became time-barred in 2012. In 2022 Blick reported that the evidence had been destroyed. A 2026 SRF report was more cautious: it said nobody was sure what had happened to the exhibits, which might still be held by the police or a forensic institute unless they had been destroyed after the deadline, as the law generally allows. The St. Gallen cantonal police say they have no legal basis to reopen the case. The files have recently been transferred to the St. Gallen state archives. SRF asked to see them in order to check for possible investigative mistakes, but the request was refused, partly to protect the legal peace that comes with closing a case. The broadcaster's appeal against that decision was pending in March 2026. Private investigators, authors and amateur sleuths have kept working on the case. In the same SRF report, a former suspect who was never charged said amateur investigators had damaged his reputation over decades. He said he supported abolishing the limitation period because DNA testing could clear him. Lukas Gschwend, a legal historian at the University of St. Gallen, argued that in the internet age the idea of healing through forgetting no longer works, and that police should be able to follow up well-founded new leads, even ones that come from private sources.

A change in the law

The case is often cited in the Swiss debate over whether murder should ever become time-barred. In Germany, Austria and Italy it does not. In 2019 the canton of St. Gallen submitted a cantonal initiative arguing that DNA analysis now makes it possible to secure evidence long after a crime. In March 2025 the Council of States voted 34 to 5 for a bill to end the limitation period for murder, and the National Council followed in March 2026. On 16 September 2026 the two chambers settled their last differences, and the bill now needs only a final vote. However, the version the Council of States approved would cover murders committed after 1 January 1995. Even if it is adopted, it would not bring back the Crystal Cave case. For now, the deaths of Brigitte Meier and Karin Gattiker remain one of Switzerland's best-known unsolved crimes.