The book The mysterious disappearance of Willeke Dost by Marja West will not be released on October 3 after all. The appearance date has been postponed due to new information about the case.
Writer Marja West says she received “a very solid tip” about the disappearance. “This requires further research and that takes quite some time. We are now heading with the publisher for next year, hopefully before the summer,” she says.
The publication date was previously postponed, because West initially had a co-author in Jürgen Snoeren. The duo also wrote a book together in 2021 about a controversial disappearance case. That was Lost in the jungle, a reconstruction of the mysterious 2014 disappearance of two Dutch girls in Panama. But Snoeren left the Willeke Dost project earlier this year, because the extensive research work took up too much time for him, in combination with a new job and his young family.
Marja West does not want to say anything more about the ‘solid tip’ she recently received. “But it is a very serious clue. It can hopefully lead to the finding of Willeke, or at least show that she was certainly there after she disappeared without a trace from her foster parents’ house in Koekange in January 1992. More I can’t say about it. But hopefully that is the one piece of the puzzle that is needed to solve this case.”
This summer there was a lawsuit over the book. Old acquaintances of the disappeared girl, who had also been approached by West, insisted that their name and place of residence not be mentioned in the book. They demanded changes to the content of the book through the courts. But that was rejected by the judge.
Marja West has been working on the book since last year. The disappearance case has intrigued her since 1997, when she lived in Drenthe for several years and also ended up in Koekange. She noticed how much the village had become torn apart by the girl’s disappearance.
“Initially it was my idea to write a book about the village of Koekange, and what this case did to the residents. Because over the past thirty years, there have been repeated searches in and around Koekange for the girl, and that had quite an impact TV crews would then turn out en masse, just walk into gardens, and residents thought something of that.”
But according to West, new information has gradually turned the story towards further investigation into the disappearance itself. “At some point I found myself on a path that no one has ever looked at. And from there my whole investigation spiraled out of control, and I’ve been working on it for over twelve months. I come to very different conclusions than have been drawn up to now. I cannot say more about it.”
To write the book, West has recently reviewed testimonies from as many people as possible involved in this disappearance case. She also received many new tips, including one that has now prompted in-depth research.