Yin Yang wrote:I based my information about murder expiring after 18 years (in The Netherlands) on a murder from the 1970's when a young girl was murdered early in a winter's evening walking from the underground station to her home.
The chief of police after 18 years said he hoped the killer would come forward, because he could not be punished for this murder after 18 years.
Since then this law has changed and the term for expiry extended.
The so-called 'Criminal Code Statue of Limitations' has evolved over the years but the the vast majority remains from the mid and late 19th Century. But there has never been inclusion (extension of the SoL) of all crimes irrespective of the nature of those crimes. The policeman you cite in the 70s was not applying the law correctly, but then as I said, this is not the role of the police in the Criminal Code. It is and has always been for the Courts to decide whether the SoL applies or not, and on what grounds, with the police having to investigate the crime, with the offender being arrested, charged and put throught the court system, otherwise the Courts could not decide. Effectively, a senior official of the PPS (whose job it is to investigate and prosecute criminal cases) decides as it is their decision whether or not to present evidence and the scope of evidence - and if there is no evidence, there can be no prosecution. However, as I said, Parker could not have surrendered to a police station stating he murdered Anna van den Enden in 1929. The system has never worked like that.
Whether Parker / Andreas van Kuijk killed Anna, well, who knows. For those who aren't familiar with it: they attended the same church; Parker matches the description of someone seen leaving Anna's house (behind a grocer) but so would many men, and apparently one of the greatest clues is the sprinkling of pepper around the body, to stop police dogs picking up a scent, and Nash claims Parker would have known such a ruse from training circus dogs, however, such a ruse has never actually worked, that has been known since the days of Barnaby and Burgho (bloodhounds used to track 'Jack The Ripper'). Another clue is that he supposedly immediately fled Breda. Anna had her head, quite literally, smashed-in, with a crowbar like implement, possibly during a burglary. Personally, to some degree, whether he did or did not murder Anna is less relevant than would he have been convicted. Based upon the evidence presented by Vellenga and Nash to date, all highly circumstantial (and some of, just pathetically thin e.g. van Kujik was always short of money, therefore, he was liable to commit a burglary!), I doubt it, although Dutch courts have routinely convicted on circumstantial evidence, including, in recent years, at least until her conviction was quashed, the infamous case of Lucia de Berk, a nurse convicted of killing children, and for the Brits here, very very similar to the Lucy Letby case. Van Kujik lived close-by to Anna, and there is nothing to suggest any witness recognised him, or that the police identified him as a 'person of interest'.
As yet another aside (sorry!) Interpol has since last year been involved in investigating unsolved murders of young women from the Netherlands and Belgium (plus Germany) - including the well know 'Heul Girl' case from 1976. The young, still unidentified, woman is likely to have been trafficked from West Germany, and was aged 12-15. Her body was found in a car park in Maarsbergen (on the A12 motorway). Her case is the oldest included in the Interpol investigation.
