Dutch detectives turn to power of podcast to solve 1991 murder case
Dutch detectives are chasing 15 new leads on a 30-year-old murder case after being inspired by the current popularity of true crime documentaries to broadcast their own three-part podcast on the original ill-fated police investigation.
Neither the identity of a murdered man found wrapped in an electric blanket by a busy motorway in August 1991 nor that of his killer have emerged in the decades since the discovery of the body despite a nationwide probe.
But a 70-minute series of podcasts made by the police detailing past efforts at the time to crack the case and recent developments, including a facial reconstruction of the victim made with the help of Dundee University, has opened up new avenues for detectives to explore.
Thousands of listeners have been drawn to the story, which is the first attempt by officers in the Netherlands to make their own true-crime podcast to crack a cold case, revealing the hurdles faced by detectives.
“It is like a documentary,” said Martin de Wit, a former journalist who works as a spokesman on cold cases in the communications department of the Politie Nederland. “I went back with the police officer who was first on the scene. I went back with him to that place and spoke to others who worked on it. I interviewed the forensics experts and the team working on it now.
“At this moment we have had 15 leads from the podcast – very useful information – and my colleagues are working on it now. The victim was 60 or 70 years old at the time. We want to find out who he was and who did this to him.”
The success of recent true crime programmes such as Making a Murderer, the US documentary that follows the conviction of Steven Avery for the murder of Teresa Halbach, offered a clear indication that the subject matter would be of interest but the challenge lay in the force itself telling the story engagingly.
Johan Baas, the detective called off from his holiday to join uniformed officers at the scene back in 1991, said he had no doubts about taking part. “The makers asked me if I wanted to be interviewed for the podcast and I would do anything to help find out the identity of the dead man,” he said.
“I talked them through everything we did. In the 1990s we had nothing like this, and all the information we had we couldn’t tell to everyone. Now we can share information that only the perpetrator and the police can know.”
It was a hot summer in 1991, when the man’s decomposed body was found by local workers in the city of Naarden, 9 miles (15km) east of Amsterdam. The dead man’s chest bore evidence of several stab wounds.
The podcast walks the listener through the discovery of the body and the subsequent trawl for clues by forensic experts and others.
Baas, who was 33 at the time of the murder, recalled that it was a struggle to identity the corpse, as DNA testing technology was in its infancy and there was not at that stage a national database for checking samples.
The man’s fingerprints did not match any on record. Such was the state of decomposition, it was a difficult task to judge as to when he had died, let alone for police artists to create a likeness of him.
The man’s clothes and the blanket, which was made in Germany, also offered no clues as they had been sold in the many thousands.
A ring on the man’s finger was all the detectives had to go on during the initial six-month investigation.
Baas said: “We went to a jeweller and he told us it was a gold ring and it had an inscription that said where it was made. It was made for a mail order company called Otto. We looked at all the rings sold by Otto and went to speak to anyone who bought one. It was the only lead we had.”
Baas said that they spoke to one man in particular who no longer had his ring because he had gone on to sell it to someone in a bar in Amsterdam. But the mystery buyer did not emerge again and no one at the establishment had known his name.
He said: “The facts weren’t there to say ‘yes or no’ as to whether that was the victim. I had to search for the family of the person who was dead. He was an older man, maybe a father, and that was what weighed on me. We worked for six months and it was very frustrating. We were very hard-working, across the Netherlands, north to south and east to west, but we never identified him.”
Two years ago, new technology was used to build an image of the man’s face. He is believed to have have been around 65 years old and to have come from from eastern Europe rather than Turkey, as had been suspected at the time of his discovery.
De Wit said: “The cold case team wanted to go public with it. We thought we could be traditional and do a press release, go to our investigation TV programme. But this was a case with so much information that we can share. Maybe the smallest detail can open the case up. Maybe if we get it out there somebody can help us take the next step.
“It has been a big success and we have got a lot of exposure for the case so it is only logical to do it again. There are departments in other regions thinking about it now. With cold cases there is more you can share. But it doesn’t mean it cant be used for new cases too.”