- Dec 17, 2006
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Tamam shud and of course, Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon
This case drives me crazy. At face value it looks like a cautionary tale about the dangers that can face European tourists who venture to out of the way places in the Americas, Africa, Asia or Australia and in many ways it is, but what happened is just flat out weird and totally inexplicable eight years later. For example:
- The girls were booked to hike the same trail the next day with a professional guide as part of a tourist group.
- In some ways the girls were well prepared for their hike but in some ways woefully underprepared. For example they took toilet paper, but despite the warm and humid weather prone to change neither girl had a hat and they had just one small bottle of water between them and no food.
- The girls took the dog of the host family with them, but the dog returned home on his own later that evening unharmed.
- The timeframe of the days events are wildly inconsistent from witness statements.
- Photographs taken by the girls in the early part of the hike are close up, some selfies and they look happy and relaxed. However this abruptly changes later in the day and the shots are taken much further away, the girls looking unhappy and apprehensive. Even weirder are night time shots taken later of the sky, the jungle, the back of one girl's head and toilet paper laid out in patterns on a rock. One photograph - and one photograph alone - was found to have been deleted and despite both girls' cameras and phones having video functions, they took no videos at all.
- Both girls attempted to call emergency services many times on their phones for days afterwards, some to the Dutch number 112 and others to the Panama 911 number, but none were successful.
- The girls were reported missing pretty quickly and a search of the area mounted, but despite the trail being close to town and having people walk it regularly, not a trace of them could be found either on the ground or from the air.
- Two months later, a backpack the girls were carrying was found by a river in perfect condition. It contained cash, one girl's passport, the water bottle, both girl's bras, sunglasses and phones and one girl's camera. The shorts one girl was wearing was also found, but not their shirts, their panties nor their footwear.
- Skeletal remains of both girls were found in July, but both were incomplete and in completely different condition. One girl's bones were bleached, the other girl's were not. There was no trace of animals gnawing at the bones.
- The taxi driver who had driven the girls to the trail that day died prematurely and mysteriously less than a year after Kris and Lisanne died.
So what happened here? Did the girls - either deliberately or accidentally - go off the trail and get lost and possibly injured and die of exposure? Did they fall to their deaths in the jungle or fall in a river and drown? Were they abducted and murdered by a serial killer? Were they in the wrong place at the wrong time - for example accidentally stumbling across organized crime activities - and murdered to keep them quiet? Did they fall prey to predatory animals?
Any are possible, but the bizarre circumstances cast strong doubt on all of them. For example, if lost and/or injured, how were they not found despite the extensive search not that far out of town, and clearly both were alive for some time afterwards trying to call for help on their phones? This also seems to rule out instant deaths like falling or drowning. Why did the mood in the photographs change throughout the afternoon and why was one deleted? Serial killers or organized criminals would have immediately taken the phones from the girls, and neither would have allowed their possessions to be found. And why were only some of the girls' possessions and clothes found and not others? The cash in the bag suggests robbery wasn't the motive. True, serial killers are known to take souvenirs of their crimes from the victims, but anything they didn't want would probably have been destroyed, not put back in the backpack and tossed near the trail where they vanished from months earlier. And how were the bones of both girls in such different states when they were found? Neither set of bones showed any clue as to how they died, and the lack of animals chewing at the bones suggest that a predatory animal attack wasn't the cause of their deaths.
This tragic case is a very mysterious one and sadly, I don't know if it will ever be solved.