When 35-year-old Bärbel Gansau was murdered in her sleep in June 1978, police were stumped.
The killer entered Gansau’s ground-floor apartment in Ludwigsburg, Germany, about 10 miles north of Stuttgart, through the bathroom window, which witnesses told police she often left open to allow her cats to come and go as they pleased.
Gansau, taken by surprise and unable to fight back, was stabbed 37 times, sustaining injuries to her neck, arm, and legs. She died, however, from a stab wound to the center of her chest, which pierced her pericardium, investigators determined. The gruesome scene was discovered by Gansau’s neighbor, Hugo Rehberg, and a friend’s husband, a U.S. Army soldier named Robert Burright.
Gansau’s naked body was lying diagonally across the bed, legs slightly spread, with the tips of her toes touching the floor. It was partially covered with a bedspread, arms raised above her head and bent slightly, hands together. Large swaths of the bed sheets were soaked through with blood, and there was a pool of blood on Gansau’s pillow. Her underwear had been sliced off, and was found beneath her corpse.
The apartment itself was in complete disarray, authorities said. Her handbag had been emptied, its contents scattered all over. The hallway and living room closets were ransacked, with clothes and other items strewn about. The main door to the apartment was locked from the inside, and the key was in the lock. Detectives were able to lift a fingerprint from the window frame, plus two others from inside.
Ludwigsburg castle, in the town where Bärbel Gansau was murdered in 1978.
Friends and acquaintances of Gansau told cops she liked to hang out at the non-commissioned officers’ club on the nearby Army base. A friend, Rosemarie Baumann, said she had gone there with Gansau, and that Gansau had a thing for American guys. She had dated several enlisted men, and had been intimate with a handful, according to Baumann. Investigators interviewed each of them, hoping to nab the killer. However, they all had alibis and none of their fingerprints matched the ones in Gansau’s apartment.
Detectives soon hit a dead-end. But they continued to believe Gansau’s killer was an American soldier. The trail subsequently went cold, and no suspect was ever identified.
More than four decades would pass, without a break in the case. Then, in 2020, German authorities reopened it, taking a chance on new advances in forensic technology and hoping for the best.
Investigators gave their fingerprint evidence to an FBI liaison in Berlin, who sent it to the United States for comparison against the bureau’s database.
Before the FBI’s fingerprint system first began to be digitized in the 1990s, the prints maintained by the bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) Biometric Identification and Analysis Unit were kept on physical cards in rows upon rows of massive filing cabinets housed in an unused wing of a defunct West Virginia shopping center. Finding a match had to be done by hand, and it was tedious work. By the mid-2010s, the algorithms were improving to the point where the FBI could automate the entire process and turn around a criminal fingerprint check in less than five minutes. And by 2020, the system had ingested enough legacy prints to help crack even the coldest cases.
On January 29, 2021, some 43 years after Bärbel Gansau’s murder, the FBI contacted their German counterparts with a piece of extraordinary news.
The fingerprints taken from Gansau’s windowframe in Ludwigsburg in 1978 were a match for a set of prints taken by cops in the U.S. the following year, when a 22-year-old Central New York man was arrested and booked on a DUI charge, according to extradition papers reviewed by The Daily Beast.
The driver, James Patrick Dempsey, had just recently gotten out of the U.S. Army, the documents say. He served from November 1976 to December 1978, they go on, and was stationed in Ludwigsburg, as part of the 34th Signal Battalion, from late 1977 to late 1978. But in the aftermath of Gansau’s brutal death in the summer of ’78, German police “found no evidence that the victim had prior consensual sexual contact with Dempsey, and he was not fingerprinted as part of the investigation,” the extradition papers state.
“Army records reflect that during his time in the Army, Dempsey developed a drinking problem and became aggressive under the influence of alcohol, resulting in alcohol rehabilitation for six days, beginning June 1, 1978, in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt,” according to the extradition papers, which were filed in response to a request by the German government, which now seeks to prosecute Dempsey for Gansau’s murder.
Gansau was killed sometime between June 8, 1978, and June 11, 1978, the papers say. Dempsey was discharged later that year and returned to the United States, where he “continued to have problems with alcohol.”
Dempsey’s precise location is redacted in the extradition package, but The Daily Beast tracked him down in Vernon Center, New York, a hamlet of 1,532 people in Oneida County. He lived a quiet life in a mobile home, with no discernable work history, and a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in 2005.
On April 14, 2021, the FBI surreptitiously gathered trash from Dempsey’s residence in the United States to assist the German investigation, according to the extradition package. Agents provided items from Dempsey’s garbage to German detectives, who the following year used DNA trace analysis on several skin and sperm samples obtained at the crime scene in 1978, the papers say.
“In particular, semen from the bedsheet recovered from between the victim’s legs was analyzed and found to be a pure trace with a male one-person pattern,” they state. “Forensic testing indicated that the semen, as well as some skin samples from the crime scene, matched Dempsey’s DNA found in the trash pull. Investigators determined that the likelihood of a match was 1 in 270 quadrillion.”
On June 24, 2022, the Stuttgart Lower Court issued a warrant for Dempsey’s arrest on aggravated murder charges, according to the extradition papers. The German government then submitted a formal request to U.S. authorities, through diplomatic channels, for Dempsey to be arrested and sent to Germany to stand trial. The U.S., in accordance with its obligations under its extradition treaty with Germany, filed the necessary paperwork to make this happen, and on Feb. 9, a federal magistrate judge issued an arrest warrant in the case.
Dempsey, now 66, was arrested Feb. 13 by the U.S. Marshals Service. He remains detained pending his return to Stuttgart.
Last week, Dempsey’s wife told The Daily Beast that she had been unaware of her husband’s dark past, and that the whole situation took her by surprise.
“I don’t have any idea what is going on with Jim at this point,” a shaken-sounding Sharon Scott Dempsey said. “That was back in the 70s, and I didn’t even know him then… I have no idea [about what happened] other than, he was in a situation, and then I found out about what was coming down later. I don’t even know the specifics to tell you any more than that.”
She said she was in the dark about what was to come next, declining to comment further “until I hear where this is going, myself. I don’t know where it’s going.”
Dempsey’s brother John also said he had not been privy to the alleged murder, telling The Daily Beast, “I’m not going to talk about this. I don’t know anything about it.”
Reached by phone at his home in Rockford, Illinois, Robert Burright’s son, also named Robert, said his dad died in 2011. He told The Daily Beast he never talked much about his Army service, and never mentioned anything about having found Gansau’s body during his time stationed in Germany.
According to the extradition papers, Dempsey poses a flight risk and is too dangerous to release on bail.
“The extradition request from Germany describes a brutal killing of a defenseless woman, following a break-in,” U.S. prosecutors said in their motion to keep Dempsey locked up. “The evidence provided also points to a sexually depraved component of the crime. The materials from Germany indicate that Dempsey poses a great danger to the community and should not be released from custody.”
In an email, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Southwick told The Daily Beast, “The U.S. Department of Justice function in this matter is to fulfill our treaty obligations pursuant to agreements on international extraditions. We have no comment.”
Although he is now close to 70, German authorities say they will try Dempsey as a “young adult,” which, under their system, means age 18 but not yet 21, “due to his age at the time of the alleged murder offense.”
If convicted by the German court, Dempsey faces up to 10 years in prison.
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