The two cases are strikingly similar. Not only did they both play in the Achterhoek, both times the bodies were found by children playing. And twice it was also about a boy who shortly after his birth had been killed by violence. In Doetinchem the child was frozen in a reed collar, in Laag-Keppel children dug it up in the forest.
Dig hut
Actually, he never said that to anyone again, Gloudemans realizes. On that particular day in 1973, he and friends were ‘revitalizing’ an old, underground hut. When he put a shovel in the ground, he came across a shopping bag. At first sight an innocent find, until the then 9-year-old Koos carefully hit it with a shovel.
“I can still remember when we rang the bell in the area, out of a kind of panic,” he says. Two days after his parents called the police, the 17-year-old mother of the child confessed that she had killed her newborn son out of desperation.
Unintentionally pregnant
Over this tragedy wrote The Telegraph in 1973 that Corry, as the distraught nursery mother was called, came from a strict Catholic family from Wehl. After she accidentally got pregnant with her boyfriend, she applied for a job at an institution in Laag-Keppel, where she was given her own room.
Shortly after a sneak delivery, Corry killed the baby and put the body in a plastic shopping bag. After hiding it in her room for a while, she put the bag with the dead baby in a secluded spot in the woods. There, Koos and his friends soon made the lurid find.
That smell is still somewhere in my brain
For the 17-year-old girl, her full confession felt like a huge relief. Gloudemans hopes that his story about this ‘old case’ can contribute to a solution in the ‘cold case’ surrounding Sem Vijverberg. Because that is the big difference between his find and the one in Doetinchem: after 15 years, the police there are still in the dark about what happened.
Also see: The search for information about dead baby Sem continues
“Of course I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is someone like Corry in the Achterhoek who is carrying the same suffering. Perhaps this can ensure that that person or someone from the area still reports”, says Gloudemans.
According to the now 56-year-old resident of Hoevelaken, this is the reason for the first time in his life to really reflect on March 30, 1973. Although he is reminded of it again with every news about a baby corpse, such as early this month after find a the remains of a baby in ‘s-Heerenberg.
“But it’s not that I get completely upset every time something like this happens. It does happen when I cycle past somewhere where cadavers are. That smell is still somewhere in my brain.”
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