Transcript: 211. The Amager Man (Marcel Hansen) | Denmark

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Our cases deal with true crimes and real people. Some parts are graphic in nature and listener discretion is advised. Each episode is produced with the utmost respect to the victims, their families and loved ones.

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On February 17th, 1987, the thick smell of gas had a group of men knocking on the door of an apartment in Copenhagen. The smell had only been getting worse, throwing the safety of the whole building in danger, but the men weren’t even sure that the woman inside could hear them knocking over the sound of the television blaring inside.

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With no other options, one of the men, the caretaker, opened the front door, letting two policemen and a gas technician in, the fear that the elderly lady who lived there had already succumbed to the toxic gas making them all hurry… But it didn’t take any of them long to figure out that something else entirely had been going on inside.

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Edith Louise Andrup was a seventy-three-year-old widow who’d recently moved into the building. In only about the month that she’d been living there, she hadn’t been out much and she’d rarely had visitors, choosing instead to spend her days at home, by herself.

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When the men entered her apartment on the fateful day, the place was a mess. The drawers and cupboards had been left open, their contents clearly gone through and some of them undoubtedly missing. Papers and other household items had been strewn across the floors like someone had thrown them around while looking for something. The air in there was even thicker with the heavy smell of gas, a lit candle on a nearby table showing them all how dangerously close they had come to catastrophe.

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The men opened the windows and the technician cut off the gas from the stove so that it would be safe for them to be inside as they tried to find the owner of the flat. One look in the living room and they saw her lifeless body. They knew that none of this had been an accident or an attempted suicide.

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Someone had been in that apartment with her recently, by the looks of it not that long before, and they’d strangled her with a piece of cloth around her neck before wrapping her up in a carpet and leaving her body on the living room floor. Only the lower half of her shins and her feet were visible outside the carpet.

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She was still wearing her socks, but she was stone cold, and when the caretaker unrolled the carpet enough to get a look at her face, he was able to confirm her identity. Edith had been murdered, her home ransacked and some of her jewellery taken before whoever had done this to her had fled the scene. The authorities were able to determine a few key points of the case from the crime scene alone and they greatly helped narrow down the pool of potential suspects.

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It was well known that Edith hardly had any visitors and interviews with any remaining relatives and friends quickly ruled out any of them as potential suspects, but that didn’t match with one crucial piece of evidence.

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There had been no signs of forced entry into the home, suggesting that Edith had either known her attacker or that they somehow had a copy of the key to her apartment. One-by-one, everyone who was known to have a copy of the key was ruled out.

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At the scene, police found shoe prints in several locations around the house.  After her attacker had killed her, it appeared that he’d combed through her apartment, looking for valuables and leaving his shoe prints behind him as he went, but who did Edith know that wore that particular make of Adidas shoes and why would they have targeted her to begin with?

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The answer seemed pretty simple at first. Edith had just moved in, meaning that three men had already gone through her stuff, helping her pack and move and getting a good idea of what valuables she had as they did so.

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This immediately narrowed down the list of potential suspects, especially when it was discovered that only one of the removalists wore a particular pair of shoes. The make, size and print matched perfectly with the prints found at the crime scene and the shoes belonged to Marcel Lychau Hansen (Mar-sel Lu-cow Han-sen).

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At first glance, it looked like the police had their man and they’d found him incredibly quickly, but Marcel had an alibi and it was the police themselves who had given it to him.

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Using a complicated formula, the investigators put the time of death and when the gas stoves had been turned on at two separate times. The leading theory was that Edith’s attacker had killed her and then stolen her property, leaving the apartment and the body exactly how they were found until the next day.

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Then, using the amount of gas left in the air as the reasoning behind this next conclusion, the investigators determined that the killer had returned to the property about 10:30 the following morning, opening four valves on the stove and leaving a burning candle on the table in the hopes of causing a fire to cover his tracks.

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Only the fire never caught and the smell of the gas was what had alerted the neighbours to the fact that something was potentially wrong in Edith’s flat.

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Despite that miscalculation and the leaving of his shoe print, the killer had left no other prints or DNA evidence behind and with that time frame of events in front of them, Marcel Hansen was able to raise his hands and tell the investigators that he’d been working all day with his colleagues when the murderer had supposedly been opening valves and lighting candles. Marcel’s two colleagues confirmed his alibi, a quick check of the jobs they’d all been working on that day confirmed it too, but the police were still suspicious, and they had a right to be.

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Marcel was born in October, 1965, on an island called Amager (A-ma) in the south of Denmark’s capital city of Copenhagen. Friends and family described his childhood as “safe”, one where the family would gather every evening to share dinner together and talk about their days, but the family weren’t just alone. The children would often even bring a friend or two to join them for dinner, so it looked like all were welcome at the Hansen household and Marcel’s parents were definitely proud of their son.

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He wasn’t strong academically, but he was charming and social and he both loved and was good at football, but most of all Marcel was fearless. He was the one you wanted on your side of things when a fight went down on the school yard. To Marcel, it wouldn't matter how much bigger or stronger the other guys were there. He was ready.

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But Marcel’s fearless nature and love for a good ol’ fist fight wasn’t what had the police so interested in him after Edith Andrup had been murdered. It was his criminal past.

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When he was only a teenager, Marcel had begun making a name and reputation for himself as a career criminal. He thought nothing of sneaking into other people’s houses and stealing their jewellery, sometimes even as they slept in the very same room.

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A childhood friend later told the police about one occasion, when they’d been doing a job together. The friend was the look out and Marcel crept into the homeowners’ bedroom, not even batting an eye as he snuck up beside the side of the bed. As the homeowners slept, Marcel quietly opened their bedside tables, taking whatever was worth taking without waking them up and before anyone knew it, Marcel became known as the guy who kept his cool and got the job done no matter what the circumstances were.

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But his work and his growing reputation weren’t just a matter of pride for Marcel. His friend later explained that Marcel seemed to enjoy the thrill of it and if a teenager could be as fearless and as cunning as that, it was no surprise that the police were so interested in him when that teenager became an adult.

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Edith’s apartment had shown no signs of forced entry, but Edith had known Marcel, as he was one of the removalists. Would it have been too much of a stretch to believe that she could have let him in? Maybe he’d put his notorious charm to good use or maybe he’d given her a reason that involved her recent move as an excuse for why he should be let in.

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And then there was the matter of the shoe print that matched the ones he wore and had been found in several places in the crime scene. They’d also been found on top of those papers that had been strewn across the floor, strongly suggesting that the papers had been on the floor at the time that someone wearing those shoes had walked over them.

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But Marcel had an airtight alibi.

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It was one thing that his colleagues might cover for him, but with the schedule he had for that day, there was no way he would have been able to sneak off and find the time to go to Edith’s apartment again without being noticed or missed by their customer.

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The police put the pressure on, but they couldn’t get Marcel or his alibi to crack. They interviewed him seven times over the course of the investigation, each one as fruitless as the last, until Edith’s case eventually went cold and her killer walked free only to strike again later.

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In the summer of 1990, only three years after Edith’s murder, forty-year-old Lene Buchardt Rasmussen was enjoying the sun. She had the evening off from Kvikmarkens Private School, where she taught both Danish and English, and with the weather being like it was, Lene was determined to make the most of it. She’d already done the shopping for dinner, been home and dropped it off, but she had a few hours before her husband was due home and she had a favourite spot she liked to visit.

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Lene loved birds and whenever she got the chance, she would go to the nearby nature reserve, Amager Fællend (A-ma Fellen), and try to spot some wildlife. She’d just bought a new pair of binoculars, so once she’d finished putting the groceries away, she picked them up, grabbed her bike from the communal bike cellar and headed off towards the park. It was close to her home and she’d been there many times before, but this time wouldn’t be like any other.

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Her husband, Carsten Jensen, came home around 6pm, expecting to find his wife already inside, but the house was empty and quiet. He didn’t think much of it at first, Lene had a busy schedule and it was possible that she’d forgotten to mention that she’d had a teachers’ meeting that evening or she had and he had simply forgotten, so he let it be.

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But by 10 o’clock, Carsten grew anxious. It wasn’t like his wife to be gone this long without letting him know and he couldn’t get rid of that pit in his stomach, so he decided to have a look around. The first place he went to was down to the communal bike cellar and one quick look around told him that Lene’s bike was missing.

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The bicycle was pretty distinctive. It was 25 years old and had been painted a dark blue and Carsten would have recognised it anywhere, so when he saw that it was missing, he knew that something was wrong. If the bike wasn’t there, that meant that Lene had gone somewhere far enough from home to need to use it and he knew she would have sent word if she’d planned on being away for that long.

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He immediately called it into the police and they started looking for her the next morning, focusing on the local parks and nature reserves in the area. Carsten had noticed that her binoculars were also missing and he’d figured that she’d gone bird watching when something had happened to her.

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Helicopters roamed the air and on the ground teams of officers combed the forests with cadaver dogs. Witnesses reported seeing a woman matching Lene’s description at Amager Fællend between 5 and 6:45pm, further narrowing down the area that they had to search when only a few days later, a helicopter made the first big break in Lene’s case.

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On September third, 1990, they found her bicycle standing upright by a tree about twenty-five metres off the path in a local forest. At first glance, it looked like Lene had just walked into the forest and vanished without a trace, but a little over an hour later the police had uncovered the truth. A cadaver dog had caught her scent, leading officers further into the forest and to a pile of branches and leaves. Lene was hidden underneath.

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She had been strangled by a piece of her own clothing; her clothes covered in semen stains though she’d shown no signs of being raped herself. Her jewellery and her watch had been stolen, but no one had seen or heard anything, and everything hinged on the DNA evidence found at the scene. The stains came back with an ample supply of DNA, but the cold reality was that it didn’t match any of the other samples the police had on record, and no one could put a face or a name to Lene’s killer.

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And five years later, he struck again, in a case that not only shocked the local community, but the nation as well. As a country with a small crime rate, Edith and Lene’s murders were enough to cause quite a stir, but the country held its breath after the events of October 1995 with everyone desperately hoping that the man behind this terrible crime spree would be caught before he could do anything remotely similar to this incident again.

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On the night of October 19th, a man broke into a home on the island of Amager, seeking his thrill. Upstairs was a 23-year-old-old woman, tired from a day of work. Unbeknownst to her, downstairs in the basement, a man snuck in through the window, not making a sound or waking anyone up as he crept upstairs to the kitchen, stealing a kitchen knife.

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He found the woman asleep and decided to wake her up by placing the knife to her throat.

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The woman shared the house with her mother and a 15-year-old daughter, but as luck would have it, the mother was away in Yedlin for the night and as such, the 15-year-old invited two friends over so she wouldn't have to spend the night alone.

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Her friends were twin sisters, who were only fourteen years old. Then, the night took a dark turn.

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The intruder led the woman down into the room where the three teenagers were sleeping.

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He ordered them not to look at him, saying you mustn't look at me. You must not see my face.

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He gave them pillowcases to wear over their heads. He tied their hands with rope. He shouted and screamed at them, slamming his knife into a table to make his point.

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Then he had the girls give him their social security cards and he stole the woman’s ATM card, demanding that she give him the code as well.

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He proceeded to take one of the twins, dragging her to the bathroom, keeping the door open. He warned the others that if they tried to run away, he would kill the girl he had with him.

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Then he closed the door and began his assault.

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When he was done, he took another girl. Again, he warned that he would kill his victim if the others caused any trouble. They obeyed, not wanting to risk each other’s lives by fleeing or raising the alarm, and had no other choice but to listen to the crime in progress, waiting for their turn.

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Once he had assaulted all of them, he went through the house, collecting all the jewellery and silverware that he could find, taking about 65,000 kroners’ worth of valuables before he left. He used the 23-year-old’s bank card at several ATMs in Amager, withdrawing 2000kr.

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It was an horrendous crime and local residents were appalled. Sadly, police failed to catch the perpetrator. It seemed like he had vanished into thin air, and he managed to remain under the radar for 10 years.

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Shortly before 6am on May third, 2005, a 24-year-old student was asleep in her dormitory near Amager College in Ørested. She was woken up by the sound of someone going through her belongings in the next room. When she carefully opened her bedroom door, she saw a man in her living room.

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The man forced her back into her bedroom, pressing her face onto her bed as he assaulted her. The young woman suffered almost two hours of continuous abuse. She thought about escaping when he went to the kitchen at one point, but was paralysed with fear. At 8am, he finally left, and she managed to call the police.

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Investigators were able to collect DNA from a milk carton in the fridge. When the rapist had gone into the kitchen, he had a drink of milk and left fingerprints as well as saliva on the spout. It is chilling to think that he was mid-way through a brutal assault when he took a break and had a drink. Either way, this was the break in a decades-long case the investigators so desperately needed.

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The DNA matched to cold cases: that of the quadruple rape over ten years before and the other from the Lene Buchardt Rasmussen case from 1990. Finally, law enforcement knew that they had a serial rapist and a murderer on their hands, but there was still one problem: they had no idea who he was.

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They went through old case files and paid extra attention to any reports coming in, especially from Amager. With the locations of the rapes all being from that area, the unnamed suspect became known as the Amager Man. Police tried to tie this many to many unsolved cases, but the evidence was not strong enough.

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Then he struck again… Around 4am one morning in September, 2010, 17-year-old Mandy Johnson was walking home from a party. She had her headphones on, music pumping as she walked through the community gardens only three hundred metres from her house.

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She was singing along to the music when she noticed a man up ahead of her. Embarrassed about  singing, Mandy turned off the music, dipped her head, and hurried past him. She was just about through to the other side of the gardens, when she heard footsteps coming up closer and quicker behind her.

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Before she could run, the man grabbed a hold of her, covering her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. She fought back, kicking and hitting, but the man was undeterred. He pushed her to the ground and Mandy realised he intended to rape her. Thinking on her feet, she gasped for breath and told the man she was having an asthma attack. She pleaded with him to let her go so she could get to her asthma pump at home.

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The man simply answered: “Forget it.”

He dragged her across the gardens to a more secluded spot, threatening her with his knife. But Mandy was not about to give up. She had her phone in her pocket and managed to call her mother’s phone. Mandy’s father, Kurt Johnson, immediately concerned about the late-night call, answered his wife’s phone. He heard a scuffle on the other end of the line and then his daughter’s voice screaming: “I will not die. I don’t want to die…”

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… before the call ended. Kurt rushed outside to try to find her, but he had no idea where she could be. He walked through the community gardens, desperately hoping that he would find something that could point him towards her.  

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Meanwhile, Mandy was only 300 metres away from her dad, when her assailant took her phone from her and switched it off. He had her pinned down as he dug out a pack of condoms from his pocket. Then he proceeded to rape her at knifepoint – twice. When he was done, he told Mandy to count to 5000 before disappearing into the night, leaving his victim out in the grass, disorientated and terrified.

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Mandy started counting out loud, stopping only when she couldn’t hear the man’s footsteps anymore, and then she made a dash for it. She knew that her parents' garden lot was only a few metres away and if she could make it inside the small garden house, she’d be safe. The violated teen made it through the door on shaky knees, flicking on the light and trying to process what had happened to her when her father noticed the light go on.

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He called out for her and she was relieved to be safe after the ordeal. Kurt got Mandy home and together with her mother, they went to the police.

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Investigators found the packet of condoms at the scene, and were able to obtain a DNA profile. DNA that matched the Amager Man. But DNA wasn’t the only thing he’d left behind…. Mandy’s attacker had had his phone on him during the assault, and police were able to place a man known to them in the community garden at the same time Mandy was there – it was none other than the removalist, Marcel Hansen.

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Police tracked him down and asked him to provide a sample of his DNA. He complied. The tests conclusively linked Marcel Hansen to all of the unsolved crimes attributed to the ‘Amager Man’. Because he was a person of interest regarding Edith Louise Andrup’s murder, the case was reopened:

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Hansen pled not guilty to all charges, but he was found guilty of two murders, six rapes and attempted arson. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He didn’t appeal his charges, but he spoke after the hearing, saying:

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“The person who did these things must be sick in the head, be a psychopath and hate women. I don’t. I help my fellow man. I am 100% innocent. The police have got the wrong man. I have not committed these crimes.”

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Despite his strong words, Marcel seemed to keep a level head behind bars, keeping to himself and reportedly frightening the other prisoners.

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In prison, Hansen was hatching a plan… Using his eldest son’s girlfriend as a front, he corresponded with his son, sending parcels to and fro. In scanning these parcels, prison authorities discovered some unusual contents in one of the packages…

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Hansen had requested a sample of his son’s semen and sent his own by sealing it in the cut off finger of a rubber glove. The plan was simple: his son would attack someone, leaving Hansen SR’s DNA at the scene. Hansen hoped that if a rape occurred while he was in prison, matching the DNA police had on file, it would somehow exonerate him, and prove that he wasn’t the infamous Amager Man after all.

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“Do not kill anyone for me, at most knock someone out and plant the DNA,” he instructed, but needless to say, the plan failed.

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Exactly what he planned on using his son’s semen for behind bars still remains a mystery, but the prosecution decided not to press charges for the failed attack. They did however state that they would keep it in mind when and if Marcel Hansen ever goes up for parole.

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Hansen remains in prison, notorious for his reputation of being the infamous Amager Man and refusing any psychological therapy or counselling. And for the moment, the female residents of Amager can sleep at night, knowing they are safe.

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