Dark Woods (Das Geheimnis des Totenwaldes)

In the summer of 1989, Barbara Neder (Silke Bodenbender), the sister of high-ranking Hamburg police officer Thomas Bethge (Matthias Brand), disappears without a trace from her house. Shortly before two couples had been cruelly murdered in nearby woodlands.  Artist Hans Lingner is quickly under suspicion – he lives on the edge of the forest and is a gun enthusiast. The links between the earlier murder cases and the “Killer Forest” and Barbara’s disappearance are not initially picked up by the investigators.  Instead the police begin to suspect Barbara’s husband Robert (Nicholas Ofczarek) who was in the process of divorcing his wife. Their daughter Theresa suffers greatly from her mother’s disappearance and the suspicions surrounding her father, making her too believe her father may be her mother’s murderer.

Meanwhile, the brother of the missing woman – Head of the Hamburg State Office of Criminal Investigation – Bethge – faces the most difficult task of this life because as a Hamburg police officer he is not permitted to investigate a crime in Lower Saxony. He then seeks support from his colleagues Anne Back (Karoline Schuch) and Frank Behringer (Andreas Lust). Bethge’s quest for justice continues long after his retirement as he and his team eventually, through painstaking and meticulous research, finally get on the track of a suspected serial killer.