There is a particular kind of knowledge that cannot be acquired from textbooks or laboratory manuals, and it cannot be simulated in a training environment. It comes from years of being inside the actual situation, the one with consequences, where the margin for error is not a statistical concept but a human life on one side of a verdict or the other. I have been accumulating that kind of knowledge since the late 1990s, and it has shaped the way I think about evidence, about certainty, and about what it actually means to call yourself an expert.
I am a forensic anthropologist, a digital forensics specialist, an audio and video forensics examiner, and a certified and accredited expert operating under EU accreditation number DE/6765 through the German Association of Professional Experts. My work over twenty-five years has taken me across four continents, into cases involving child abuse, homicide, missing persons, political scandal, mass graves, identity fraud, and digital crime. I have testified for prosecutors, investigative agencies, and intelligence services. I have worked cases no one else would take, and I have written reports that courts found uncomfortable precisely because they were correct.
In 2019, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegel asked me to authenticate the Ibiza video before publication, the recording that ended the Austrian government and became the largest political scandal in that country’s postwar history. I spent three days and three nights in my office in Munich going through seven hours of material, frame by frame, second by second. My conclusion was unambiguous: the video was authentic. The consequences of that conclusion became public record.
That case was not unusual in its intensity. What it illustrated, which every serious case illustrates, is that forensic work at the level where it matters most is not a methodical exercise conducted at a comfortable pace. It is pressure, responsibility, and the constant awareness that the conclusion you write will reach a courtroom and affect a life. The only way to operate in that environment without becoming something other than an independent scientist is to never let the institutional machinery decide what your findings should be before you have made them.
I read bones. When I hold a skull, I know within seconds the approximate age at death, the biological sex, the ethnic origin, and the contours of the face as it was in life. Fifteen years of forensic facial reconstruction, without a single error in the biological profile. The skull is not an abstract specimen. It is a person who lived, and the bone remembers things the rest of the body long since stopped holding. I work through osteological morphology, metric analysis, population-specific regression data, and the accumulated pattern recognition that comes only from handling enough actual specimens over enough actual years. No algorithm replaces that combination. Software assists it.
The same logic applies to everything else I do. In audio forensics, I do not trust the output of a commercial spectrogram tool until I have understood what it is telling me and why. I have written my own analysis code. I need to see the data directly, not through an interface designed for convenience. In video forensics, I have watched experts testify to identifications that the underlying evidence could not support, and I have written the method-critical reports that explained exactly why, at considerable professional cost and without apology. In digital forensics, I know how attackers think because thinking the way an attacker thinks is a discipline I have practiced since I was sixteen years old and built my first operating system on a Commodore 64. At twenty, I penetrated a Deutsche Telekom satellite. That background is not a curiosity. It is the reason I understand digital evidence from both directions.
The International Institute of Forensic Expertise operates under intelligent piXel GmbH, based in Starnberg, Bavaria. We are members of the British Archaeological Association, the American Anthropological Association, the International Association for Identification and its European division, the German Society for Criminalistics, LEVA, and the Content Authenticity Initiative. Every piece of forensic work conducted through this institute follows ENFSI standards and uses only certified methods and software recognized by international courts. We do not use outdated hardware or decade-old procedures. We invest continuously in the current state of the discipline, because anything less is not a cost savings. It is a deficiency that will eventually show up in the findings.
In autumn 2025, I stopped taking active expert witness assignments from the German justice system and its investigative authorities. The reasons are my own, clearly understood, and not subject to revision. International advisory work continues. I consult for European courts outside Germany, for US investigators, for international law enforcement, and for attorneys working in jurisdictions where genuine forensic independence is not only possible but expected. If the case is serious and the standard is real, that is where I work.
What I am building now runs alongside that consulting work and beyond it. Antrometric, the precision stature estimation tool for forensic anthropologists and pathologists, is in active use across multiple countries. A forensic facial reconstruction system is in final testing, designed to produce scientifically grounded reconstructions from skeletal remains in cases where identification has otherwise reached a wall. A biometric voice identification platform is in development. Two books are in progress. The research does not stop because the testimony calendar has closed.
I communicate by email and Telegram. There is no phone. If you have a case, a question, or a need for forensic expertise that meets the standard this work requires, the contact page is the right place to begin.