20 OTT 2026 · Silja Trindler murder: 18-year-old Swiss tourist found dead on a French beach in 2000. Suffocated in the dunes of Carcans-Plage, her head held to the sand, a partial male DNA under her fingernails. Twenty-six years later, the case is still unsolved.
On August 5, 2000, the body of Silja Trindler, 18, was discovered in the dunes of Carcans-Plage on the Atlantic coast of southwestern France. She had been asphyxiated, her head pressed to the ground, sand in her airways. Her bikini bottom had been placed on her face; her ring was arranged inside one of her red sneakers. The autopsy showed she had fought back: skin fragments under her nails yielded a partial male DNA, and she had had consensual intercourse shortly before death.
This episode reconstructs her last days: the family holiday at the Carcans campsite, the paranoid crisis in which she felt watched and said people looked at her as if she were mad, the painful past that surfaced years later, the words Bob Marley traced in the sand, the crying girl seen at the Chez Heidi brasserie with a stranger in a striped T-shirt, the composite sketch that led nowhere, the cleared suspects, the eerie parallel of the Audrey Texier murder, and the twenty-three-year hunt through twenty thousand interviews and five thousand seven hundred DNA tests. In 2023, the file moved to the PCSNE cold case unit in Nanterre. No one has ever been convicted.
DeepCold investigates unresolved mysteries with careful, sourced storytelling. The murder of Silja Trindler remains unsolved.
In this episode:
0:00 - The Body in the Dunes
1:03 - Silja Trindler
1:41 - Plot One Hundred Eighteen
2:20 - The Unraveling
3:01 - The Wounds Beneath
3:46 - Friday, August Fourth
4:28 - Writing in the Sand
5:15 - The Disappearance
5:48 - The Discovery
6:32 - The Autopsy
7:18 - Two Thousand Five Hundred Letters
8:04 - Homicide Ohm Thirty-Three
8:38 - The Man from Chez Heidi
9:34 - The Sketch Leads Nowhere
10:11 - The Ruled-Out Suspects
10:54 - The Audrey Texier Parallel
11:52 - The Past Resurfaces
12:55 - The DNA Hunt
13:47 - Nanterre
14:33 - Who Killed Silja Trindler
15:18 - Epilogue
Sources: Wikipedia (Affaire Silja Trindler); Le Parisien / Code source podcast (Apr 2023); Paris Match (Apr 7, 2023); RTL L'Heure du Crime (Apr 5, 2023); Le Temps (May 3, 2001); France Info (Apr 12, 2014); 20 Minutes (Apr 8, 2005); Marianne (Apr 9, 2023); r/UnresolvedMysteries discussion thread.