A young Dutch medical student went missing while on safari in Uganda. The authorities at the time assumed it was an accident—but exclusive new evidence may point to foul play.
Eight years later, however, a potential new lead has surfaced. And the new director of the Criminal Investigations Directorate in Uganda has reopened the investigation into Sophia’s mysterious disappearance. Instead of a croc or a big cat, it now appears that Sophia may have fallen prey to the most dangerous species of all: man.
In conversation Marije comes across as articulate and precise. Her gaze is steely and intense, and one senses that she does not suffer fools lightly. It seems clear that this woman would be a very formidable enemy. You can’t envy any Ugandan bureaucrat or official who crosses her, let alone someone who may have harmed her daughter.
However, the next morning at around 11 a.m. rescue workers discovered more of Sophia’s clothing and personal effects. The items found included a small souvenir purse she’d bought in Kampala, which was completely empty. One boot but only the sole from the other boot. A pair of sunglasses and a half-torn thousand shilling banknote.
By all accounts Sophia adjusted easily to life in Uganda, and quickly became a favorite with the hospital staff—in no small part due to her charismatic and engaging personality. “The house where we are staying is fairly big but there is hardly any furniture. In the living room only a couch and a small desk. In essence we sit on the floor,” Sophia wrote in one of her first letters home after arriving in Uganda.
“This evening I asked [the] guys in the house if they could teach me some Luganda. One of them taught me ‘olinga toya’ which means ‘I am funny,’ according to him. I liked having learned this. Then he wrote it on my arm and a bit later I found out that it meant: ‘I am a toilet.”’ “She is always happy and very social, interested in everybody around her,” said Rondagh, who like Sophia studied medicine and is now a third-year student in psychiatry in the Netherlands. Rondagh also said that Sophia was committed to her future in medicine.Her strong work ethic also shines through in her letters home, as Sophia repeatedly shows genuine interest in her patients and true passion for science.
The good times seem to have lasted all the way to the end of the internship, and her last letter home indicates she was in high spirits and thinking about the future. There was no blood on any of the recovered items, leading park rangers involved in the search to deny the hypothesis that an animal was responsible.
That’s because the bottle was recovered just a few yards from where the other articles were found just 26 hours later—leading Marije to consider the possibility that the other articles may have been planted after the fact.When she asked one of the cops why the water bottle and the other items were not found on the same day, despite the respective recovery points being so close together, she got what seemed like a dubious response.
“Most missing persons cases do not have a ‘crime scene.’ How did Sophia's knickers end up some 5 meters high up in a tree? How was the water bottle found, but not her other belongings that were nearby, only to be found a day later? How could the shoe that was found be so clean? How did the strips of fabric from Sophia's pants end up there? Where are the rest of those pants? Where are Sophia's other clothes? This crime scene raises so many questions,” the former detective said.
The report was prepared by Independent Forensic Services , a private laboratory based in the U.S. The chief author and lead scientist was a man named Richard Eikelenboom, a former researcher with the Dutch government’s Netherlands Forensic Institute . “There is no logical explanation for the fact that an unknown male contributes DNA to torn pieces of fabric, knickers, the right shoe and the insoles all belonging to Sophia Koetsier,” the IFS team wrote.To better understand how or why the evidence in Sophia’s case might have been planted, and who might have done so, we reached out to Dr. Claire Ferguson of Australia’s Queensland University of Technology.
So what kind of suspect could have had the wherewithal to successfully navigate the area and place evidence in such a way as to fool the Ugandan authorities? Not content to rely on the cops, Marije began seeking information from Sophia’s two traveling companions, as well as their driver. To protect their identities we’ll refer to the companions as Sandra van Dalen and Nina Smeets, and the driver as David Atubo.
Authorities soon ruled out the other two med students and the driver as suspects. While there had been some tension within the party in the days leading up to Sophia vanishing, there is no evidence her safari companions were involved in what befell her, and their alibis for the night in question and ensuing days were verified by multiple witnesses.Meanwhile, back at the student center, Marije claims the local cops continued to bungle the investigation.
Unfortunately, authorities in the Netherlands also failed to provide much-needed assistance in the search for Sophia. The Dutch homicide detective told The Daily Beast that, unlike the FBI in the U.S., his national police prefer to allow their local counterparts to investigate cases involving Dutch citizens in other countries.
“We have discovered you can only believe this as long as nothing terrible does happen to you. This was a huge deception to us. We did not feel taken seriously by the Dutch police and public prosecutor.”The search for Sophia went on for almost two full weeks. One aerial drone, a helicopter, and boats were all deployed, but no other evidence as to her whereabouts came to light.
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