Werner Ferrari

Overview

Werner Ferrari is one of the most notorious offenders in modern Swiss criminal history. He killed a child in 1971, was released early from his sentence, and in 1995 was convicted of five more child murders committed in the 1980s. One of those convictions, for the 1980 murder of Ruth Steinmann, was overturned in a retrial in 2007, after new evidence pointed to another man. Ferrari died in prison in December 2025 at the age of 78.

According to SRF, Ferrari grew up from the age of three mostly in children's homes and institutions, where he himself experienced violence and abuse.

The first conviction and early release

In August 1971 Ferrari abducted a ten-year-old boy from a village festival in Reinach, in the canton of Basel-Landschaft, and killed him. He was sentenced to twelve years in a penitentiary. In August 1979 he was granted early release. Sources disagree on how long he had served by then: SRF's news reports and swissinfo.ch give six years, while a 2022 SRF documentary speaks of about eight.

A decade of missing children

Between 1980 and 1989, 21 children and teenagers disappeared in Switzerland, according to SRF, and seven of them have never been found. After his arrest Ferrari was held responsible for five of these cases. Several others remain unsolved, and he was never convicted of them. Among the killings later attributed to him were those of a six-year-old in Rümlang in the canton of Zurich in 1985 and a ten-year-old in Windisch in Aargau in 1987.

The last victim was nine-year-old Fabienne Imhof, who disappeared from a fair in Hägendorf in the canton of Solothurn in 1989 while there with a friend. Ferrari was arrested in Olten on 30 August 1989, a few days after the girl was killed. He confessed to four child murders but always denied killing Ruth Steinmann.

Trial in Baden

The case came before the Baden district court in canton Aargau. A first trial collapsed in December 1994 after Ferrari withdrew all of his confessions. In June 1995 the court convicted him of five child murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The verdict rested on circumstantial evidence. The fifth murder was that of twelve-year-old Ruth Steinmann, who had been killed in a forest near Würenlos in May 1980. From 1995 Ferrari was held at the Lenzburg prison in Aargau.

The Ruth Steinmann retrial

Doubts about the Steinmann conviction were raised mainly by the journalist Peter Holenstein, who wrote a book on Ferrari in 2002, and by Blick police reporter Viktor Dammann. In March 2003 Holenstein reported in the Beobachter on another possible suspect. The man had lived near the scene, closely resembled Ferrari, and had taken his own life in 1983. Police had looked at him shortly after the murder but did not pursue the lead. Forensic tests also showed that a hair found on the victim and attributed to the perpetrator did not come from Ferrari.

Ferrari applied for a retrial in August 2002. In 2003 the Aargau High Court (Obergericht) ordered the Baden court to try the Steinmann case again. Progress was slow. A bite mark had never been compared with Ferrari's teeth, because the technique was not available at the time of the original investigation. After the other man's body was exhumed, the Zurich city police forensic service found a very close match between his teeth and the mark. In April 2007 the Baden district court acquitted Ferrari of Ruth Steinmann's murder, 27 years after the crime. The dead man could never be tried, and Swiss criminal law experts noted that no court can convict a deceased person. Ferrari's life sentence for the four remaining murders stood.

The case shows how rarely, and how slowly, the Swiss revision procedure reopens a final verdict: it took almost five years from Ferrari's application to his acquittal. It also shaped the wider debate about dangerous offenders. In 2004 Swiss voters approved the Verwahrung initiative, which allows offenders judged untreatable and extremely dangerous to be detained for life, a proposal supported by the parents of Ferrari's last victim. Under the rules that followed, such an order requires two expert assessments.

Death in prison

Ferrari's case was reviewed every year for possible conditional release, but the authorities consistently judged his risk of reoffending to be too high, and he was never freed. He died at the Lenzburg correctional facility on the morning of Friday, 12 December 2025, aged 78, having been ill for some time. The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the cantonal hospital in Aarau confirmed his death. A search of the Swiss press found no further developments in the case after his death.