Series Review: "Dig Deeper: The Disappearance of Birgit Meier" ("Dig Deeper - Das Verschwinden von Birgit Meier") (2021).

From the writer/director of Above and Below comes Dig Deeper: The Disappearance of Birgit Meier (Dig Deeper - Das Verschwinden von Birgit Meier). This German true crime documentary miniseries written and directed by Nicolas Steiner. After Birgit Meier vanishes in 1989, police missteps plague the case for years, but her brother never wavers in his tireless quest to find the truth.

In 1989, Birgit Meier disappeared. Initially, investigators suspected that she had died by suicide or had been killed by her husband, but they later focused the investigation on Kurt-Werner Wichmann, who was working as a gardener at the Lüneberg cemetery. Wichmann was interrogated, and despite the flimsy alibi of being with his wife and walking the dog, he was not checked closely. He also concealed the fact that he was on sick leave at the time of Meier's disappearance, but the police did not inquire further. Only with the establishment of a new prosecutor in Lüneberg did further investigations begin. In 1993, charges of suspected murder in Birgit Meier's case were brought against Wichmann, and the police searched his house. Investigators found two small-caliber rifles, a converted sharp gas pistol, stun guns, mufflers, handcuffs, sedatives and sleeping pills, as well as a secret torture room with a soundproof door, which only he and his brother were allowed to enter. There was a buried, red Ford sports coupe in the backyard, with blood on its back seat. Body-tracking dogs were used several times to search the property, but no bodies were found. Wichmann fled and was arrested in Heilbronn when he was involved in a traffic accident; weapons were found in his vehicle. Ten days after his arrest, Wichmann hung himself in the Heimsheim Prison. He had attempted suicide previously. He left strange farewell letters in which he asked, among other things, his brother to clean the gutter. After his death, the murders in the woods around Lüneberg ceased, and further investigation was discontinued. His vehicle and the items found in it were disposed of by police. In 2017, Birgit Meier's remains were ultimately recovered under the concrete floor of a garage of a house on the outskirts of Lüneburg that Wichmann had previously occupied. On 19 January 2018, it became known via an autopsy report from the Hannover Medical School that Birgit Meier had been shot. Lüneberg Police President Robert Kruse stated that the perpetrator was a serial killer who may have killed beyond Germany. He announced a thorough review of old cases, with Wichmann being considered as a possible suspect. As a result, analysts from the State Criminal Police Office of Lower Saxony filtered out twenty-four unsolved cases, in particular homicides and missing persons.

Steiner certainly sought out a sickening true crime story on a decades long disappearance and while the filmmaking has an extended Unsolved Mysteries quality to it the storytelling is engrossing and heartbreaking. The series starts off like so many other true-crime stories of its ilk, but soon finds its moral footing and lands in a more moving, profound place.

Simon says Dig Deeper: The Disappearance of Birgit Meier (Dig Deeper - Das Verschwinden von Birgit Meier) receives: