Louise Bell murder case: Dieter Pfennig convicted of killing schoolgirl | Adelaide

Louise Bell murder case: Dieter Pfennig convicted of killing schoolgirl

Court finds former physics teacher guilty beyond reasonable doubt, of the crime in Adelaide more than 30 years ago

Dieter Pfennig has been found guilty of murdering the Adelaide schoolgirl Louise Bell more than 30 years ago.

The supreme court justice Michael David delivered his verdict on Friday, finding the 68-year-old former physics teacher guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

Louise was abducted through her bedroom window in Hackham West in January 1983. The 10-year-old’s body has never been found.

Her disappearance sparked a police search of unprecedented scale in suburban Adelaide and it remained one of South Australia’s most enduring cold cases.

Pfennig was charged in 2013 after DNA scientists in the Netherlands linked him to Louise’s pyjama top, which was found after her death.

The former maths and science teacher denied the charge and he did not give evidence at his trial, which ran for several months over 2015 and 2016.

During the trial, the prosecutor Sandi McDonald said the chances of a random male providing such a DNA match were greater than one in a billion.

But the defence lawyer Paul Charman argued that the evidence fell short of proving Pfennig committed the crime.

He said the DNA could have ended up on the top through contact with Pfennig’s daughter, who played basketball with Louise.

The pyjama top was found neatly folded on a neighbour’s front lawn, the trial heard.

The woman who discovered it also received a phone call from a man who said Louise was with him. The voice told her to look under a broken brick at a nearby corner, where police found the girl’s earrings.

The court heard Pfennig suffered from insomnia and liked to walk the streets at night. He lived in the same neighbourhood as Louise when she went missing.

Prosecutors said Pfennig admitted killing the girl to fellow prison inmates on two separate occasions while in jail for another child murder.

He was convicted of killing 10-year-old Michael Black in 1989 and he was in jail when he was arrested over Louise’s murder.

The trial paused when Pfennig suffered a heart attack in Yatala prison in March. He was resuscitated and required surgery before returning to trial three weeks later.

Another man, Raymond Geesing, was originally sentenced to life in prison for Louise’s murder but that decision was quashed on appeal in 1985.

In 1991, police searched a home that used to belong to Pfennig, pulling up floorboards and excavating part of the back yard.

They returned to the home in 2012 and excavated other areas with the aid of ground-penetrating radar.

Witnesses at the trial included Pfennig’s daughter, a librarian, a student, police officers and forensic specialists.

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