Between 1993 and 2008, the police in Germany were searching for the mysterious “phantom of Heilbronn,” a woman who had been linked to forty crimes, including six murders; her DNA had been found at all the crime scenes. Tens of thousands of police hours were spent looking for Germany’s “most dangerous woman,” and there was a €300,000 bounty on her head. It turns out she was a woman who worked in the factory that made the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence.
