A hiker is found dead in a remote forest that is popularly known as the "Murder Hole". Opposite the victim is a melting snowman with one eye missing. The start of a series of murders in the forest area near Freudenstadt. The handwriting is always the same: all victims show frostbite, while the left eye is covered with a black gem. The investigative team Maris Bächle and Konrad Diener has Florentin Sneelin in its sights, a reproductive doctor who lives in a romantic moated castle whose ice cellar not only stores champagne. The suspect knew the victims from a stay in a children's home many years ago. The teachers there enforced discipline and order using sometimes sadistic methods. Their wards did the same. There was a strict caste system among the children. Sneelin belonged to the lowest caste. He was a so called "Snow Child", one that his mother wanted "to foist" on his father.

Policeman Koops witnesses a car accident. The dying driver gives him an envelope with the part of a code. Shortly thereafter, Koops gets in the sights of a contract killer.

SOKO Leipzig is a German police procedural television programme, a spin-off of the earlier German police programme SOKO 5113. It was first broadcast on 31 January 2001, on German television channel ZDF. On 12 November 2008, the first part of a two-part crossover between SOKO Leipzig and British police procedural The Bill was aired, with the same version being shown on both ZDF and British television channel ITV1.