BELGIAN WOBBLE
Did King Albert I fall to his death while rock-climbing, or was he murdered? DNA evidence may solve 80-year-old mystery,
On the afternoon of Feb. 17, 1934, King Albert I of Belgium asked his valet to wait in the car while he went for a climb in Marche-les-Dames, where the rock peaks reach 180 metres above the River Meuse. The king glanced at his watch before he left — he had to appear that evening at the Palais des Sports in Brussels. His valet watched him start up the rocks, and after a few minutes he was out of view.
The king would never be seen alive again.
As the sun went down, a sense of unease descended upon the valet. King Albert was an accomplished climber, but also 58 years old and very far-sighted. Hours went by. The valet enlisted the help of local villagers and gamekeepers to search among the cliffs called “Crow’s Nest,” named for their staggering heights and inaccessibility.
At 2 a.m., in the dark, one of the volunteers caught his foot on some rope. Then, he saw that it was attached to the king’s body. The New York Times reported the next day that “the body was bent in double and there was a huge gash in the left side of the head.”
His eyeglasses were found 36 feet above his corpse.
Almost immediately, there were whispers around the circumstances of the king’s death. The New York Times reported that those close to the king were convinced he had given up dangerous climbing.
In May 1934 in Nottingham, the British officer Graham Seton Hutchison, who formed his own Fascist party in Britain, gave a speech claiming that the king had been killed because of his efforts to keep peace in Belgium during the First World War, a position that made him beloved among his subjects. The king had refused to let German troops pass through Belgium to attack France. Ultimately, the Germans marched into Belgium and occupied the country. The king personally fought along the Western Front.
Conspiracy theories erupted. Rumours flew that the accident had been staged, the king had been killed elsewhere and his body dumped at the site. But now researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium say they have found DNA evidence to provide some closure to this 82-yearold cold case.
In 2014, a journalist for a Flemish television network, Reinout Goddyn, bought bloodstained tree leaves that had been collected at the site in the days after the king’s death. Beyond obtaining a historical relic, Goddyn wanted to see if the conspiracy theories could be proven, one way or another. In 2014, the blood was confirmed to be human.
Last month, forensic geneticist Maarten Larmuseau announced in a statement that thanks to DNA tests, he could definitely say the blood belonged to King Albert. Finding his blood at the site strongly contradicted any plot that would have involved moving the king’s body.
But even decades later, Belgians will be relieved to hear that their popular king most likely wasn’t killed as a result of foul play. As mourners heard the news of his death back in 1934, people remembered publicly how King Albert had stood up for Belgium again and again during the war.