Huge update in chilling cold case of woman raped and buried alive in shallow grave by ‘US soldier’ 37 years ago

DETECTIVES have confirmed they have extradited a former US soldier in connection with the rape and attempted murder of a woman 37 years ago.

A 29-year-old was battered, bruised and moments from death after she was allegedly assaulted in the town of Goeppingen, Germany in October 1985.

Investigators at the time believe the woman was threatened with a knife, raped and severely beaten as she was walking home one night from a sewing course.

It is thought the attacker had deliberately attempted to bury her alive in a shallow grave of twigs and leaves in a nearby forest.

According to news coverage at the time, the young woman had almost died from serious head injuries having also suffered broken ribs, a ruptured eardrum, strangulation marks and abrasions all over her body.

Prosecutors accused a suspected assailant of trying to cover up his crime by dragging the unconscious woman away from the town centre.

They refused to disclose her name and whether she was still alive today.

The victim described the rapist as a black US soldier but failed to clearly identify him when officers showed her portrait photographs of several suspects as the case was later abandoned.

But this week, state prosecutors in Ulm announced that a retired US American soldier, 64, was in custody in connection with the decades old cold case.

The suspect was arrested in February this year in the US State of Mississippi and recently extradited after his DNA allegedly matched with samples from evidence first found at the scene.

Investigators believed the man had been posted in the nearby Cooke Baracks at the time of the incident.

Prosecutors said that the suspect - who refused to make any statement in the first round of interrogations - could have decided not to appeal his extradition to evade being convicted in the United States over other felonies.

They confirmed reports by German news website SWR that he has been sentenced for several violent offences in his home country.

The update comes as German investigators are reportedly reopening another cold case sex attack to determine whether the same suspect could have committed a second offence.

The naked and shackled body of a 31-year-old female kitchen hand was found in an wood outside the nearby remote town of Deggingen just a few months prior to the Goeppingen attack.

Historical data suggests that US Army units were stationed at the town’s Cooke Barracks from the late 1950s until 1991.

The barracks was named after Charles H. Cooke, a US Army soldier from Worcester County, Massachusetts, who died during World War Two on the 11th of July 1943.

After being returned to the federal German defence ministry in 1992, local authorities used the estate to set up homes for refugees for some time before developing it into an industrial area.