00:00For 16 years, German investigators hunted a ghost.
00:03Between 1993 and 2009, a single female DNA profile turned up at over 40 crime scenes
00:10across Germany, Austria, and France.
00:13Murders, armed robberies, the shooting of a police officer, the press called her the
00:18woman without a face, task forces were built around her, psychologists drew up behavioral
00:23profiles, experts estimated her age, her ethnicity, her background, millions of
00:29euros were spent, hundreds of suspects were cleared, and she was nowhere.
00:34Then in 2009, investigators finally traced the DNA to its source, a factory worker in
00:40Bavaria.
00:41A woman who packaged the cotton swabs used to collect crime scene evidence.
00:45She had never committed a crime.
00:47She had never been near any of those scenes.
00:49Her skin cells had contaminated the swabs at the manufacturing plant.
00:53For 16 years, forensic science had been chasing itself.
00:57The most sophisticated criminal investigators in Europe had built an entire human being,
01:02a monster with a face and a psychology, out of a factory defect.
01:07She never existed.
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