German police investigating the deaths of three people killed by crossbow have found two more bodies in a flat occupied by one of the deceased.
A cleaner found two women and a man dead in a hotel room in Passau, Bavaria on Saturday, with multiple crossbow bolt wounds, according to a spokesman for Bavaria’s public prosecutor.
The bizarre case then took another turn on Monday as investigators made the gruesome discovery of two more female bodies at an apartment some 400 miles away in Wittingen, Lower Saxony, northern Germany.
A police spokesperson told the AFP press agency that the two corpses in Wittingen were not killed by crossbow and “the modus operandi cannot be compared.”
Autopsy results for the three victims in Passau have now been released, revealing that a 53-year-old man and 33-year-old woman were found lying on a bed holding hands, with a 30-year-old woman lying on the floor.
The man had been shot with five crossbow bolts and the woman on the bed was shot twice, both through the head and chest, according to Passau prosecutor spokesman Walter Pfeiler, while the second woman was shot once in the throat.
The three had arrived at the hotel near the Austrian border in southern Germany on Friday and were discovered dead on Saturday. There was no sign of a struggle and formal wills were found in the room.
In northern Germany, police searched the Wittingen property after a neighbor reported an unusual smell and an overflowing letterbox, said the spokesman.
A coroner in Hanover carried out an autopsy on the victims, whose bodies showed no sign of external violence, police said after preliminary results were released Tuesday afternoon local time.
Police identified the two women as a 35-year-old teacher from Wittingen and a 19-year-old.