Family of British nurse who vanished in Germany 20 years ago urge police to reopen her case

Louise Kerton - Phil Kerton/PA
Louise Kerton - Phil Kerton/PA

The family of a British woman who disappeared in Germany 20 years ago have called for her case to be reopened.

Louise Kerton, a 24-year-old student nurse from Broadstairs in Kent, went missing after travelling to a small village in Germany with the family of her German fiancé.

On the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, her father Phil Kerton called for British and German police to reexamine the case.

“With the new technology they have now, DNA technology and artificial intelligence, it’s worth looking at the evidence again,” Mr Kerton said.

“There were human hairs that were found, but they couldn’t get any DNA off them at the time. Maybe with today’s advances you could.”

Louise travelled to Strassfeld, a small German village west of Bonn, with her German fiancé Peter Simon in 2001. Mr Simon and his family were UK residents and Louise was living with him at a property owned by his mother, Ramana Simon, in Broadstairs.

UK ALL-GERMANY-AFP...BRU35 - 20010813 - OOSTENDE, BELGIUM: Brits Phil Kerton and his wife Kath show a poster of their missing daughter, 24-year-old Louise Kerton, at their arrival by train in Oostende, Monday 13 August 2001. Louise's parents are undertaking a trip from Aachen (Germany) to Oostende (Belgium), trying to find traces of their daughter who disappeared on the same travel last Monday 30 July 2001. EPA PHOTO BELGA /PHOTO UNPIX - UNPIX/EPA

They travelled for five weeks to a holiday home Ms Simon owned in Strassfeld. Mr Simon returned to the UK ahead of Louise.

On the day Louise was due to return, Ms Simon says she dropped her off at Aachen station to catch a train to Ostend for the hovercraft to the UK. But when Mr Simon went to pick her up, she was not on the hovercraft.

“The British police took it extremely seriously from the start,” says Mr Kerton. “They conducted a fingertip search of the flat where Louise had been living.”

But he is critical of the German police response. “I’m not saying they didn’t take it seriously. But if a young German woman had gone missing in the UK you’d have seen a lot more action.”

There were alleged sightings of Louise living with homeless people in Aachen, and the German police assumed she had chosen not to return home.

But when the family travelled to Aachen they were able to prove the sightings were of another woman.

It was not until Mr Kerton contacted the British government through his MP and it sought help through diplomatic channels that the German police began to take the case more seriously.

Gravel pits near the holiday home where Louise had been staying with the Simon family were searched, but nothing was found.

“I used to work in the industry and I know the thing about gravel pits is you have to search them quickly if you’re going to find anything, because they are always being dug and the geometry is shifting. And this was about a year on from her disappearance,” says Mr Kerton.

LWK7.jpg Louise Kerton. Young Louise contains photos of her from her childhood.
LWK7.jpg Louise Kerton. Young Louise contains photos of her from her childhood.

The family's concern grew when they learned a schizophrenic brother of Mr Simon’s who travelled to Germany with the couple had been tried for the murder of a woman in the UK. Michael Simon was acquitted of battering a 79-year-old woman to death with a champagne bottle near Broadstairs.

"Louise was the one who could calm him when he was stressed," Mr Kerton says.

Mr Simon denies his family had anything to do with her disappearance.

There has been speculation Louise may have committed suicide. She was depressed at the time: she had been a school friend of Lucie Blackman, a British air stewardess who was raped and murdered in Japan a year earlier, and she had just learnt that she was about to fail her nursing exams.

There have also been suggestions she may have joined a cult, and at one point Kent police even flew to Mali after a prisoner claimed he had seen a white woman being kept captive there, but the claim proved false.

Mr Kerton says he and his family have long reconciled themselves to the thought Louise is dead. “We believe she died by misadventure, and some one is covering up what happened, either because they were involved in some way or they want to avoid any contact with the authorities,” he says.

But he says knowing what happened would help the family grieve. “Before Louise disappeared I’d never even heard the word ‘closure’,” he says. “But when I heard it, I knew what it meant.”