Tanja Groen | |
|---|---|
| Born | Tanja Afra Maria Groen June 23, 1975 |
| Disappeared | August 31, 1993 (aged 18) probably between Maastricht and Gronsveld, Netherlands |
| Status | Missing for 31 years, 5 months and 13 days |
| Nationality | Dutch |
| Known for | mysterious disappearance |
| Mother | Corrie Groen |
Tanja Afra Maria Groen (born, June 23, 1975) is a missing Dutch person case [1] about a teenage woman who disappeared near Maastricht in the summer of 1993. [2] Groen came from Schagen and was just about to start studying health sciences. Groen has been missing ever since.
Tanja Afra Maria Groen disappeared in the night of Tuesday 31 August to Wednesday 1 September 1993, [3] [4] after she had left a hazing party at the Circumflex student society in the centre of Maastricht by bicycle to her room in Gronsveld. She never arrived there. The weekend after her disappearance she was supposed to go to her parents in Schagen.
Despite a thorough and lengthy search for Groen's disappearance, nothing was found for years and therefore nothing was known about her fate. From the beginning, however, the police assumed a crime. [5] There were no concrete suspects, although they did investigate whether links could be made with previously convicted murderers such as Willem S. and Marc Dutroux.[ citation needed ]
In the summer of 2012, a bicycle was recovered from the Maas river, based on information from a dowser. This bicycle turned out not to belong to Groen and the investigation stalled again. At the end of June 2014, human bones were found by a hiker in a field near Gronsveld. However, an investigation by the Netherlands Forensic Institute showed that these bones did not belong to Groen. In August 2018, the parents made a video appeal via Amber Alert in the hope of finding out more about their daughter's fate. [6]
After a serious tip, a man's grave was opened in Maastricht on January 22, 2020, because the NFI wanted to search for the remains of a woman who was buried in the same grave as the man. However, this investigation also did not lead to the discovery of Groen's body.[ citation needed ]
In January 2022, forensic psychologist Peter van Koppen and his fellow scientists found three 'promising' places where Tanja Groen could possibly be buried during a search on the Strabrechtse Heide in Geldrop, Brabant. A new search was therefore conducted at that location, but her body was not found. [7]
At the end of 2022, the police and judiciary in Belgium and the Netherlands investigated a possible role that serial killer Marc Dutroux could have played in the disappearance of Tanja Groen. Dutroux had been in the picture as a possible perpetrator in the Tanja Groen case for much longer, but this investigation had never yielded anything.[ citation needed ]
On April 29, 2024, it was announced that DNA traces from the Dutroux case will be compared by the Netherlands Forensic Institute with DNA from the Groen case. [8]
In June 2021, crime reporter Peter R. de Vries launched the De Gouden Tip Foundation. The aim of this foundation is to raise a million euros in rewards through crowdfunding to solve stalled police investigations, so-called cold cases. The first case the foundation attempted to solve concerned the disappearance of Tanja Groen. A week after the attack on De Vries, the foundation had raised the million euros, partly thanks to the widespread attention that the TV program Tijd voor MAX had paid to the case.
On December 22, 2022, the Peter R. de Vries Foundation and the Limburg police announced that the promised reward had not led to a new breakthrough in the investigation into Tanja Groen's disappearance. Six months earlier, the deadline for claiming the amount had already passed. The million euros that had been earmarked for the Tanja Groen case would now be spent on other cold cases and on supporting victims of crime.