The now 59-year-old German Frank Vick has been acquitted, almost 28 years after his father-in-law was found murdered at a campsite in Petten. Vick was sentenced to five years in prison on appeal in 1995. He has served three of these.
After several interrogations, Vick stated that he had stabbed the victim to death. He later retracted that statement. According to his lawyer, there would have been ‘psycho-terror’ during the interrogations. He was found guilty on the basis of the confessions alone.
The Court of Appeal in The Hague found that the confessions do not contain any knowledge of the perpetrator and that they are therefore ‘probably false and therefore not reliable’. “There are no useful indications at all in the file, let alone evidence, which indicate that the suspect killed the victim,” the judge said.
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Initially Vick’s uncle was suspected, but after Vick told about a dream in which he killed the victim – 41-year-old Peter Teschke, the stepfather of Vick’s wife – the attention of the investigators shifted. However, according to the judge, they should have done more research into that possible other suspect. In this they ‘failed’, the judge finds. “This is despite the fact that another suspect was in the picture, of whom incriminating facts and circumstances were already known at the time.”
His lawyer insisted on an apology and compensation from the government for the ‘miscarriage of justice’. According to him, the case can be compared with, among others, the Puttense murder case and Schiedammer Parkmoord, in which innocents were sentenced to years of imprisonment.