Film titles, stories of Simenon: the woman in the well, the girl in men’s clothes, the body wrapped in a carpet, the unknown woman from Teteringen, a woman on the border, the corpse with a flower tattoo. These are the almost fictitious identification tags that Interpol has given, alongside the more anonymous acronyms for each country (Bel01, Nl03, D02), to twenty-two unsolved cases: lifeless women found over the course of at least thirty years between Holland and Belgium and Germany .
shoes and jewelry
What remains, what little is known about a patchwork of nameless people, as those who killed them remain nameless, are being released by police. Documents locked in a drawer or file for years are now being unearthed along with a scattered catalog of personal belongings: the size 36 tennis shoes that “the woman on the Autobahn” in March 1986 near Heilbronn barefooted wearing, the small diamond on the incisor of the charred body found in the forest of Altena, the woman of the dam with red Vos jeans, a torso and two legs, found in a rubbish bin found in a quiet Amsterdam canal swims. For the first time, investigators have decided to break the news of these “cold cases” online, hoping to give credit to the victims, if not the perpetrators.
The girl with the fake nails
They called it “Operation Identify Me”. Find out who I am, who I was. Interpol’s website has women’s faces computer reconstructed to look like sketches of beings that lived thousands of years ago. Forgotten Stories. Almost all were between 20 and 40 years old. The latest case: the “girl with false nails”, believed to be 14-24 years old, fair complexion, one scar on the wrist and one on the abdomen: her naked body was recovered on May 31, 2009 at the foot of the Alberto Canal, in Belgium.
Woman wrapped in a rug
“Who saw it?”: For each case, there is a link on the Interpol website that leads to the reference police. The hope is that someone reading them might be able to recognize them by one small detail: The woman, who was found in the Weser River in Germany in 2002, must have been between 22 and 35 years old and was wrapped tightly in a carpet. Police believe the jewel with the red stone she wore in her right ear was made in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1956. Maybe a souvenir, a gift: someone who loved her might turn up. German police say the girl with the ruby earring also had two fresh fillings on her teeth, a temporary restoration made a few weeks before her death. From the old examinations of the anatomopathologist it appears that she gave birth between 1985 and 1999. A possible son (or daughter) may have been 3 years old at the time of the disappearance and could be between 24 and 38 years old today. Maybe there’s someone who grew up not knowing: Mom didn’t leave without a trace, but was killed.
At the Amsterdam Cemetery
In the fragments of these vanished lives we lose ourselves in the imagination. Each is a story of justice awaiting. Dutch detective Carina van Leeuwen tells the BBC about the pain she feels for people who have fallen into a double darkness: violent death and anonymity. Therefore, the detective hopes that the Give Me A Name operation can also restore the lost identity of the woman, parts of which were found in the floating dumpster. Now and then he visits her: two legs buried in the Amsterdam cemetery, between the tombstones of strangers.