Fitted-In » Ate Kloosterman

Vindicated

Satish Sekar — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 12:05:45 +0000

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (April 23rd 2011)
Proved Innocent
It took four years to prove Kees Borsboom innocent, but it happened in bizarre circumstances. Wik Haalmeijer raped and killed 10 year-old Nienke Kleiss and left 11 year-old Maikel Willebrand for dead after strangling him and stabbing him repeatedly. Willebrand survived to tell his remarkable story. Shamefully, the evidence to prove Borsboom innocent had been there all along and was ignored.
Haalmeijer was eventually arrested for the rapes of two women, but he had a very big surprise for investigators. He also confessed to the Schiedammer Park crimes, which had shocked the Netherlands to the core in 2000. Despite requests to do so, Haalmeijer refused to retract and DNA testing not only proved that Borsboom was innocent, but that Haalmeijer was the real perpetrator. This was the Netherlands’ first vindication case. It should also be a cause of shame for the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI).
Shameful
It was a complicated case scientifically as there were two victims and a perpetrator. This meant that the DNA would be mixed despite the number of samples. Nevertheless, there was enough material to prove that Kees Borsboom was innocent. “They come to me and say, ‘This is our guy; now look, compare the DNA’”, Richard Eikelenboom said. “And I’m saying, ‘This is tricky, look at his profile’. We looked at the database and got eighty partial matches, but when we compared the full profiles on the database to the partial matches, none fully matched. Therefore, there was no support for the hypothesis that the perpetrator was on the database. This proved to be true later on when Haalmeijer confessed. He had not been on the database when we originally checked it, or at the time of the murder”.
Eikelenboom noted that there were alleles from several locations that did not match Borsboom. That included the boot-lace. “Based on the combined DNA evidence alone you could exclude him”, Eikelenboom explained, “but because it’s Low Copy Number DNA, you have to be careful”.
Obscene
There was DNA markers (alleles) that did not originate from either of the two victims or Borsboom. It offered compelling support for the belief that Borsboom was not the murderer. These alleles were detected at a number of locations – the lace that had been used to strangle Nienke Kleiss: her bare shoulder, her bare abdomen, her boot and most importantly her fingernails. The likelihood that all of this was coincidence was minimal. It provided strong support for the belief that this was the DNA of the killer and that it did not match Borsboom. This meant some unknown person (now proven to be Haalmeijer) had deposited those alleles at the crime-scene.
“This is not going to support it”, Eikelenboom said. “The DNA is not matching up. This is not our guy and we knew it, but this is not reported”.
This was crucial. The science had proved innocence with just a few alleles, but it was ignored. “In this case you could see that something went terribly wrong with what happened”, Eikelenboom said. “Now the police know we’ve got all these results, but the Reporting DNA expert, Dr Ate Kloosterman decided, without telling me, that he would take out all the results obtained from the shoe-laces, her bare shoulder and bare abdomen”.
Crucial Omission
The prosecutor and police didn’t mention the evidence in court and failed to inform the defence about it. The judges and defence lawyers knew nothing about the DNA that had been shed by the killer on the lace, shoulder and abdomen.
“I talked to judges about it years later, asking them if they would have thought that it would have been important to know about this DNA”, Eikelenboom said. “They all said, ‘Yes’”.
But even now the NFI does not include the DNA profiles in their reports. If that had been provided in the Schiedammer Park murder, a wrongful conviction could have been prevented.
The behaviour of the NFI was scandalous as those results proved that a miscarriage of justice was happening, which they knew about, but without the actual profiles the report could be manipulated. There was more. Low Copy Number would prove controversial later, but before it was used in the Schiedam case several validation tests were conducted. The science was sound and here was an important example of it proving innocence with just a few alleles. There were lessons for Britain too. One of its most notorious murders of recent times had gone wrong in a similar manner.

A National Disgrace

Satish Sekar — Sun, 03 Jul 2016 11:27:41 +0000

by Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (April 23rd 2011)
The Mark of the Killer
Dutch forensic scientist Richard Eikelenboom likes information. He conducted several scientific investigations in the Nienke Kleiss Inquiry looking for the DNA of the perpetrator. He knew that it would be complicated as there were two victims, Kleiss and her friend Maikel Willebrand. The body and crime-scene had been handled badly. Nevertheless, Eikelenboom struck partial gold. He found DNA that did not belong to either victim, and its location indicated that it had been shed by the perpetrator. It should have made a miscarriage of justice impossible, but sadly, it didn’t
“The officers were not interested in his DNA”, Eikelenboom said. “We found DNA on her shoulder of an unknown person and on the left boot of the victim”.
It was also on her belly and on the lace used to strangle her. This was interesting.
Source level reporting means the scientist compares profiles obtained from items and reference samples. However, at source level, the expert is only concerned with whether there is a match to someone or not. Due to the small quantity of DNA that had possibly been deposited by the perpetrator, the evidence was not very strong at that level. Nevertheless, the question of how the DNA results that were obtained (the activity level) had got there in this case made it very interesting.
A Scandalous Inconvenience
The DNA results regarding her fingernails were perhaps the most important, indicating that she had scratched her killer. “Like with the fingernails, we got a match with two victims and unknown source”, Eikelenboom said. “The unknown source does not match with [Kees] Borsboom, but could be coming from the perpetrator. According to Maikel’s account, she was playing in the water just before she was killed and that means that if there was DNA on top of her fingernails for a while, that would probably have been washed away by playing in the water. Therefore, it’s more likely it would have been deposited by the perpetrator and Maikel also described to police that the perpetrator was scratched by Nienke, so it is more likely that it was the DNA of the perpetrator than somebody else. We had his profile, but couldn’t match it up with someone, but also we couldn’t match it with Borsboom”.
This also proves that reports on the activity levels must be written up and disclosed too. How did the DNA get there? If those reports had been written and disclosed, an implausible hypothesis could have been exposed then. The alleles that had not been deposited by Kleiss or Willebrand were very inconvenient to the prosecution case. They were mentioned in part, but in such a way that the real significance could not have been realised by anyone who did not already know of the missing results. That is outrageous.
Outrageous
In court Ate Klosterman gave a fanciful explanation of the inconvenient DNA evidence – one he must have known did not explain it in its entirety. Kloosterman came up with a weird hypothesis that the alleles on her shoe and fingernail had been deposited by a child at her school. The evidence about the same alleles having been deposited on the boot-lace that had been used to strangle her and on her bare shoulder and belly too was not included in the report disclosed to the court by Kloosterman.
The judges and defence had no idea about it. If they had known of all the locations that those alleles had been deposited in, they would have known that Kloosterman’s explanation did not explain all of the results and that it was far more likely that this must have been deposited by the killer. Kloosterman must have known that his explanation regarding the children as the source was at best highly unlikely and that he would have faced a torrid time giving evidence about it if the court had known about the location of the other DNA results that Kloosterman had not included his report.

Appalling

Satish Sekar — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 13:37:35 +0000

By Satish Sekar © Satish Sekar (April 23^rd 2011)

Unconscionable

The Dutch criminal justice has a good reputation abroad. Even activists, when told about the now notorious Lynette White Inquiry as the battle to free the Cardiff Three was nearing its conclusion in 1992, defended it. They said that it was impossible for justice to miscarry in the Netherlands as badly as it had in the Lynette White Inquiry for example.

Their outrage was limited to a peace activist who had been sentenced to two weeks imprisonment for daubing graffiti in an American base after breaking into it. They insisted that this was sentencing him twice for the same crime and they were outraged about it.

This, they insisted, was the worst miscarriage of justice in the Netherlands at that time. But they were wrong. The Dutch system was capable of miscarrying as badly as it had in Britain – worse even.

Vicious

On June 22^nd 2000 ten-year-old Nienke Kleiss was raped and murdered in Beatrix Park in the small town of Schiedam, which is within easy commuting distance of Rotterdam. She fought hard for her life and left vital clues to identify the perpetrator, but her efforts were wasted by police and the Dutch criminal justice system for four years as justice miscarried twice.

Her eleven-year-old friend, Maikel Willebrand, with whom she had been playing, was also viciously stabbed at the same time by Wik Haalmeijer. Willebrand survived by playing dead only to be absurdly accused of having inflicted the injuries on himself to cover up his crime – the attack on Kleiss. It was an utterly ludicrous allegation and an unconscionable way to treat a child who had been the victim of a vicious attack.

DNA testing would play a large part in this inquiry. It quickly proved that Willebrand had been telling the truth that he had been attacked himself and had played no part in the rape or murder of Kleiss, but police were still not prepared to listen to him at all.

They only moved on from Willebrand when they heard about a coincidence regarding the man who then became their new prime suspect Kees Borsboom – the man who had helped Willebrand after the crimes by reporting it to the police. And even then they would not accept Willebrand’s account because the boy would not turn on the man who had helped him.

Fanciful

DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom, then working for the Netherlands Forensic Institute (FSI) developed the DNA protocols that were used in the Schiedammer Park case. He knew that Low Template DNA had produced important results, quickly realising that both Willebrand and Borsboom had nothing to do with the crimes, but he was not the Reporting Officer and Ate Kloosterman’s report was very selective.

Kloosterman told the judge that the ‘foreign’ DNA results on Kleiss’ shoe and fingernails had been deposited by a child at her school. Unknown to the court there were compelling reasons to reject that explanation. Kleiss had been playing in water just before she was attacked and the surviving victim had told police that she had scratched her assailant – time would tell that she had.

The results on the shoe and elsewhere were also the same – it would have required an incredible coincidence for all of those alleles to have been deposited at various locations innocently, but Kloosterman knew the significance of the results well or should have done. It was obvious that they had been deposited by one person and not by Kleiss’ classmates. They had the DNA of the real perpetrator – enough to eliminate the entirely innocent Borsboom, but selective disclosure prevented that from happening.