Suspicions

Before police investigating the rape and murder of Nienke Kleiss and attempted murder of Maikel Willebrand ‘discovered’ Kees Borsboom as a suspect, they believed that Willebrand was lying. The children had been playing in Beatrix Park in Schiedam. They were viciously attacked by a man. Kleiss tried to fight back, but the ten-year-old girl was no match for a homicidal Wik Haalmeijer.

Nor was the eleven-year-old Willebrand. He played dead and waited for Haalmeijer to go. Eventually he did and Willebrand sought help, which he received from passing cyclist Kees Borsboom – the man who called the police. The police did not believe Willebrand. The survivor – the crucial witness – was treated as their prime suspect. They thought that he had been too smart by playing dead.

His account did not fit the case-scenario that they had developed – a ridiculous one – so they thought that he was the perpetrator. It was absurd on every level. Willebrand was a child. There was no evidence that he had attacked his friend and there was clear scientific evidence that proved that someone else had been involved.

It was even thought by police that his injuries were self-inflicted. But then a coincidence occurred. Police discovered that their star witness Borsboom had exposed himself to a child – the child of a police officer. They decided that could not be coincidence. He becomes their prime suspect, but it was exactly that – a coincidence – a wretched one at that.

Miracle

The survivor was to all intents and purposes a defence witness, but Willebrand was marginalised. The surviving victim and therefore a key witness did not support the case hypothesis. Rather than admit that the hypothesis was the nonsense that it was subsequently proved to be, the victim/witness was marginalised and Borsboom was convicted in nearby Rotterdam.

Borsboom subsequently lost his appeal, but this was not the end of the story. Despite the indisputable evidence of innocence, he could have maintained his innocence to his dying day without being believed. It required a miracle and unusually it got one.

Both he and Willebrand would be vindicated by it. Wik Haalmeijer was arrested for two unconnected rapes. He not only admitted to those offences, but confessed to the Schiedammer Park crimes and insisted on DNA tests to prove his guilt. Nothing would induce him to withdraw his request. The DNA testing proved his guilt and also Borsboom’s innocence.

Outrage

Before police investigating the June 22^nd 2000 rape and murder of ten-year-old Nienke Kleiss and attempted murder of her eleven-year-old friend Maikel Willebrand ‘discovered’ Kees Borsboom as a suspect, they believed that Willebrand was not only lying about the terrible events, but was also responsible for them. They thought that he his account of playing dead to survive did not and could not ring true.

The investigators could not understand how a brutal killer could fail to kill him after brutally murdering Kleiss and also how an eleven-year-old child could be that cool under such pressure to outsmart the killer, but that is exactly what Willebrand did. He knew that he could not fight off a fully grown and vicious Wik Haalmeijer. He did as he was told while being attacked and then played dead.

It saved his life as Haalmeijer, believing Willebrand was dead, attacked Kleiss. After satisfying his bestial urges he left the Beatrix Park in the town of Schiedam – near Rotterdam – and allowed an innocent man to be wrongly convicted. Dutch society was shocked to the core by these crimes, but insult would soon be added to terrible injury.

Shocking

Willebrand’s account did not fit the case-scenario that the police had developed – a ridiculous one. They could not believe that the perpetrator that Willebrand described could have been so careless as to leave a witness to tell the tale. They also thought that no child could think that quickly and rationally in such horrific conditions, so Willebrand had to be lying and if he was lying, then he had to be the perpetrator.

But that was absurd on every level. Willebrand was just eleven-years-old. There was no evidence that he was capable of such depravity and brutality or was anything other than a normal child, whose childhood was ruined by the Schiedammer Park attacks and wretched investigation of those crimes.

There was no evidence that he had attacked his friend and there was clear scientific evidence that proved that someone else had been involved, but that was not enough to persuade police that their ridiculous belief that Willebrand’s injuries were self-inflicted was wrong. That required another unfortunate coincidence. Police discovered that their star witness Borsboom had exposed himself to a child – the child of a police officer.

They decided that could not be coincidence, so he became their prime suspect – another tunnel had opened, which led investigators away from the real perpetrator, Wik Haalmeijer.

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.

Damage Limitation

The Police Corruption Trial of the Century ended in farce on December 1^st 2011 – a nine year investigative process had resulted in convictions of three vulnerable witnesses and no others. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), prosecutor Nicholas Dean QC and defence lawyers – police even – all accepted that they had been forced to lie (see Duress and The Lawʼs An Ass). Nevertheless, the law did not recognise the duress that they had suffered.

Mark Grommek, Angela Psaila and Learnne Vilday therefore had no choice but to plead guilty to perjuring themselves.¹ Having done so, they were treated leniently due to the bullying they had endured by police officers who had in the words of the judge used methods that were “unacceptable in a civilised society”.

The New Cardiff Three were sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. By March 2009 the CPS announced that 13 police officers (some of whom had retired) had been charged with a variety of offences including conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury. Two witnesses also faced those charges. They had no intention of going down meekly. However, this would prove to be a poorly prepared prosecution marred by penny-pinching foolishness that would ultimately cost the public millions more and deprive us all of the accountability and answers we have waited years to discover.

The Judge

Despite the seriousness of the case it was destined to be heard in Swansea before Mr Justice (Sir Nigel) Sweeney. The judge had been involved in prosecuting a notorious crime – the Chillenden attack on the Russell family which left Lin Russell and her daughter Megan and dog Lucy dead and Josie Russell fighting for her life.

Sweeney knew that the Crownʼs pathologist – albeit subsequently discredited – suggested that there had been significant contact between the killer and a bootlace used to strangle the unfortunate Megan. There was no disputing that the contact was substantial and that the killerʼs DNA would have been on the lace, but Sweeney knew that Michael Stoneʼs DNA was not on that boot-lace. This was strong evidence of innocence, but a fanciful explanation was advanced and Stoneʼs defence accepted the Crownʼs willingness to stipulate that Stoneʼs DNA and fingerprints had not been discovered at the crime-scene.

The Crown claimed that Stone – a habitual drugs-user – had obtained the lace from another user and had used it to restrain Megan. Somehow despite putting substantial pressure through the lace onto his fingers he had not deposited his own DNA while both Meganʼs and the unknown drug-user he had allegedly obtained the lace from remained on it, or at least alleles (bands in the DNA testing system used did).

It was obvious that the far more probable explanation of the unidentified male DNA at the relevant points on the lace was that it had been shed by the killer. It was yet another example of a convenient interpretation of the DNA results – one that stretched credibility and most probably contributed to an egregious miscarriage of justice. Sweeney was either aware of the fanciful nature of the explanation that he relied on, or he should have been.

Precedent Ignored

Stone was convicted again in September 2001 and subsequently lost an appeal. An application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) failed to present the compelling scientific evidence of innocence. He remains in prison for very serious crimes that he did not commit in circumstances where strong evidence supporting his claims of innocence has never been heard by any court or even the CCRC.

By this time a very significant miscarriage of justice – a Dutch vindication case had thoroughly unravelled. The Schiedammer Parkmoord has been covered in considerable detail by us (see the various articles on that case). Astonishingly the significance and potential of that case remains largely ignored by supporters of Stone, lawyers and media all professing to champion his innocence even though the methods used in that case to prove the innocence of Kees Borsboom are plainly apt in Stoneʼs case.

Shamefully, the scope to prove him innocent remains ignored while an almost certainly innocent man languishes in prison while an expert who has first hand experience of the issues involved is denied the opportunity to test his claims of innocence. Sweeneyʼs role in securing this miscarriage of justice has never been subjected to public scrutiny. Over a decade later no media apart from us even mentions it, let alone investigates it.

Damage Limitation

The Police Corruption Trial of the Century ended in farce on December 1^st 2011 – a nine year investigative process had resulted in convictions of three vulnerable witnesses and no others. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), prosecutor Nicholas Dean QC and defence lawyers – police even – all accepted that they had been forced to lie (see Duress and The Lawʼs An Ass). Nevertheless, the law did not recognise the duress that they had suffered.

Mark Grommek, Angela Psaila and Learnne Vilday therefore had no choice but to plead guilty to perjuring themselves.¹ Having done so, they were treated leniently due to the bullying they had endured by police officers who had in the words of the judge used methods that were “unacceptable in a civilised society”.

The New Cardiff Three were sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. By March 2009 the CPS announced that 13 police officers (some of whom had retired) had been charged with a variety of offences including conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and perjury. Two witnesses also faced those charges. They had no intention of going down meekly. However, this would prove to be a poorly prepared prosecution marred by penny-pinching foolishness that would ultimately cost the public millions more and deprive us all of the accountability and answers we have waited years to discover.

The Judge

Despite the seriousness of the case it was destined to be heard in Swansea before Mr Justice (Sir Nigel) Sweeney. The judge had been involved in prosecuting a notorious crime – the Chillenden attack on the Russell family which left Lin Russell and her daughter Megan and dog Lucy dead and Josie Russell fighting for her life.

Sweeney knew that the Crownʼs pathologist – albeit subsequently discredited – suggested that there had been significant contact between the killer and a bootlace used to strangle the unfortunate Megan. There was no disputing that the contact was substantial and that the killerʼs DNA would have been on the lace, but Sweeney knew that Michael Stoneʼs DNA was not on that boot-lace. This was strong evidence of innocence, but a fanciful explanation was advanced and Stoneʼs defence accepted the Crownʼs willingness to stipulate that Stoneʼs DNA and fingerprints had not been discovered at the crime-scene.

The Crown claimed that Stone – a habitual drugs-user – had obtained the lace from another user and had used it to restrain Megan. Somehow despite putting substantial pressure through the lace onto his fingers he had not deposited his own DNA while both Meganʼs and the unknown drug-user he had allegedly obtained the lace from remained on it, or at least alleles (bands in the DNA testing system used did).

It was obvious that the far more probable explanation of the unidentified male DNA at the relevant points on the lace was that it had been shed by the killer. It was yet another example of a convenient interpretation of the DNA results – one that stretched credibility and most probably contributed to an egregious miscarriage of justice. Sweeney was either aware of the fanciful nature of the explanation that he relied on, or he should have been.

Precedent Ignored

Stone was convicted again in September 2001 and subsequently lost an appeal. An application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) failed to present the compelling scientific evidence of innocence. He remains in prison for very serious crimes that he did not commit in circumstances where strong evidence supporting his claims of innocence has never been heard by any court or even the CCRC.

By this time a very significant miscarriage of justice – a Dutch vindication case had thoroughly unravelled. The Schiedammer Parkmoord has been covered in considerable detail by us (see the various articles on that case). Astonishingly the significance and potential of that case remains largely ignored by supporters of Stone, lawyers and media all professing to champion his innocence even though the methods used in that case to prove the innocence of Kees Borsboom are plainly apt in Stoneʼs case.

Shamefully, the scope to prove him innocent remains ignored while an almost certainly innocent man languishes in prison while an expert who has first hand experience of the issues involved is denied the opportunity to test his claims of innocence. Sweeneyʼs role in securing this miscarriage of justice has never been subjected to public scrutiny. Over a decade later no media apart from us even mentions it, let alone investigates it.