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...

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.

U.S. Soldier Arrested in German Woman’s Mysterious 1978 Murder (yahoo.com)