Police seek IDs of 22 women killed in ‘cold case’ murders that have never been solved in three European countries
10 May 2023, 08:06
Police across three countries are trying to identify 22 murdered women in unsolved cases - whose names remain a mystery.
The women’s bodies were found in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany between 1976 and 2019.
Who the women are, where they came from and why they were killed is all still unknown.
They include ‘the woman in the well’ a woman whose body was discovered in a well in a town in the Netherlands in 1991. Her body may have been in the well for up to two years, police believe.
To this day, the identity of this woman remains unknown.
Another victim police want to identify dubbed ‘the woman in men’s clothing’ was found in 1988 in Germany. A group of seven forest workers found the body lying in a shallow grave in the middle of a fenced off area in a nature reserve. She was wearing mostly men’s clothing and police say she had been ‘violently killed’.
It is the first time Interpol, the international policing group, has gone public with a list seeking information about victims of this nature.
The three countries compiled a list of 22 cases they were struggling to solve and asked Interpol to release the details.
The victims are mostly aged between 15 and 30.
The full list of the individual cases contains details about possible identifying features of the women, and details about the circumstances of their deaths - as well as identifying marks such as clothing, jewellery or tattoos and facial reconstructions.
Interpol said: “If you remember a friend, family member or colleague who suddenly disappeared, please take a look and contact the relevant national police team via the form on each page if you have any information about any of them.”
Detective Carina van Leeuwen told the BBC: “No matter how long it took to identify them, they all had somebody who missed them," she says.
"Even if it's 25 years later, people are very happy to have something that they can bury and pay their respects to."
