Research into the role of Marc Dutroux in the disappearance of Dutch student Tanja Groen in 1993 | Investigation into Dutroux’s role in Tanja Groen case

Sources in investigative circles in both the Netherlands and Belgium confirm the news to the Dutch regional newspaper ‘De Limburger’. A request for legal assistance has been submitted in Belgium. Justice asks to compare the unknown female DNA found in houses and delivery vans of Dutroux with that of eighteen-year-old Tanja Groen from Schagen. The results will be sent ‘as soon as possible’ to the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Limburg, Advocate General Jean-Baptiste Andries of the public prosecutor’s office in Liège said.

Investigations have already been carried out. The cold case team of the Dutch Limburg police spoke to various witnesses. In addition, it is being examined whether facts and circumstances surrounding Groen’s disappearance can be linked to Dutroux. His method, in which he pulled girls with bicycles into a van, could fit in with Groen’s disappearance. She was last seen cycling in Maastricht in the summer of 1993.

Tanja Groen is sometimes called ‘The Dutch Annick Van Uytsel’. If you put the search messages of the two girls side by side, you will indeed see striking similarities. Both have dark hair, a light blush and a shy smile. And just like Annick, Tanja was an 18-year-old freshman who got on her bike after a party and was never seen again. The only difference: Annick’s body was found six days after her disappearance in the Albert Canal, and her killer was also arrested three years later with Ronald Janssen.

There is still no trace of Tanja Groen after 29 years. Her parents do not know where their daughter is, if she is still alive and what happened to her. “And you won’t let that go for a day”, says her mom Corrie. “I never go to sleep without asking myself, ‘Girl, where are you?’ In my head I constantly hear yelling: ‘Tanja? Tan-yeah?’ That’s me, calling her to mind—for 28 years now. I wish I could stop that so I know where my girl is. It’s all so heavy to carry that you just hope that there will finally be news, even if it is the news that Tanja is dead. Then at least we’ll know. Anything is better than that terrible insecurity.”

Every Friday afternoon around a quarter past two Corrie Groen flees from her house on the Spoorlaan in Schagen, a city in the north of the Netherlands. At that moment the train from Maastricht thunders past the house of the Groen family, and that sound hurts Corrie too much. Because it was the train that her daughter Tanja should have taken home on September 3, 1993. Tanja is the youngest daughter of Corrie (77) and Adrie Groen (79), a couple who together have two daughters and a son. Tanja grew up as a sweet and shy girl, who did not easily come to the fore.

“It was actually always a very easy girl,” says her mom. “She also had a nice group of friends, with whom she often lay sprawled on the couch and chatted.” At the age of 18 Tanja went to university to study health sciences. In Maastricht, near the Belgian border, she rented a student room – 300 kilometers from Mom and Dad. “Far away, but we gave it to her,” says mom Corrie. “Student life, learning to stand on your own two feet. But in the end she only slept in her room for five nights…”

On Tuesday 31 August 1993, a week after Tanja arrived in Maastricht, she went to the christening party of student club Circonflex in the evening. She left that party at a little after midnight. A fellow student waved goodbye to Tanja as she got on her bike and rode away. Since then, no one has ever seen her again.

Still, it took three days before the girl was reported missing. Because the boy who lived in a room with Tanja was ill that week, so he didn’t see that she never arrived. And the landlord assumed that Tanja had gone home too, because she had told him the day before that she had a cold. It was 1993: the year King Baudouin died and Bill Clinton became president of the United States, we went to the cinema for ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘The Bodyguard’ and the Colombian police shot drug lord Pablo Escobar.

It would be years before all young people had a mobile phone with which they could text or call their parents from their dormitory. And so Adrie and Corrie Groen had no idea that their daughter had been missing for three days, when they were waiting for her in Schagen station on Friday afternoon at the agreed time. Only when Tanja didn’t get off the train there and it turned out she wasn’t on the next train either, they sounded the alarm.

Thus three days were lost. Precious days, which made it more difficult for the police to search for clues. At the time, they also had no cell phone signal to locate her, no CCTV footage showing Tanja or her kidnapper. And so they searched everywhere: on all possible routes between the party hall and her room, in caves, in maize fields, in the Meuse, up to the sewers. But they found nothing – not even the valve cap on her bicycle. Tanja seems to have gone up in smoke. And that is very difficult for the parents. “It can’t be that you leave on your bike and never come back?”, says mom Corrie. “That is not possible, is it not allowed?”

Not that there have been no ‘breakthroughs’ in the most famous disappearance file in the Netherlands in recent years. Ten years ago, for example, a psychic’s dowsing rod led to a spot in the Maas, south of Maastricht. There, divers retrieved a brown bicycle, painted over with black paint, with a double bar and a green bicycle lock – exactly like Tanja’s. Next to it were also two barrels, which had been dumped in the water. Corrie and Adrie Groen held their breath: ‘Would it…?’ No, it turned out three weeks later. An investigation showed that the bicycle was not Tanja’s, and that no DNA of hers could be found in the barrels. Two years later, another breakthrough seemed in the making, after a hiker found human bones in a field in Gronsveld, not far from where Tanja was staying and where a horrifying scream was heard on the night of her disappearance. This time it only took a week to crush hope: the femur found was not Tanja Groen’s.

The denouement also seemed near at the beginning of 2020, after a very precise tip ended up at the police station. He reported that Tanja was murdered on the night she disappeared, and was then dumped in the open grave in which a certain Jean Van Hooren was buried the next day. His next of kin gave permission to examine the grave in the Maastricht cemetery. “It was a strange idea that Tanja would have been with my father for 27 years”, his daughter Virginie told the newspaper ‘Algemeen Dagblad’. “But I was so hoping they would finally find her.” It didn’t, and the investigation went back to square one – again.

The line that has returned most often in recent years was that of the convicted serial killer Wim Smulders, alias ‘Geile Wim’ or ‘The Killer van Lappegat’. In the 1990s, he told his cellmate that he had murdered and dumped eleven women in the Strabrechtse Heide nature reserve in Geldrop, including “that girl from Maastricht”. According to his statements, he killed Tanja and buried it on the moor – and doused her body with quicklime, because he had read somewhere that such a thing makes a corpse ‘dissolve’. Incredibly detailed, and besides, Smulders was a gravedigger who knew how to make a body disappear. But when police confronted him with his confession, he denied it. Meanwhile, ‘Geile Wim’ has passed away. In recent years there has been regular searches on Strabrechtse Heide, the last time at the beginning of this year. But the places where the ground had been churned up and where the investigators thought a body had been buried, turned out to be rabbit pipes after examination.

Adrie and Corrie Groen were left with yet another disappointment. They try to live their lives as normal as possible, but it’s difficult until they know what happened to their youngest daughter. “In the beginning there was still the hope that she would come back,” says Adrie. “That it was Tanja when the telephone rang, or when we heard the garden gate open. But that hope fades as the days turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into years. You cannot live without hope, they say, but it is almost impossible after 29 years.”

In Tanja’s bedroom they keep things belonging to their daughter: her badminton racket, some bears, the white dress she wore for her first communion. The cupboard and her bed are also still there, “because it remains her room”. The parents drove to Maastricht a number of times in recent years, even if it was always very difficult for them. “Especially the departure,” says Corrie. “When we drove away again, we felt bad. As if we left Tanja there. Five years ago we decided to stay away from Maastricht because it hurts us too much.”

Tanja would be 46 years old today. Would. “You sometimes wonder what she would look like. Whether she had saved her studies, and whether she would be married and have children. It’s all running through your head. Today we have grandchildren who are older than Tanja when she disappeared. That’s weird. People often ask me: how do you process something like that? Well, not. Because there is absolutely nothing to process, because we have no idea what happened. And our greatest fear is that we will never know. That we die without knowing where Tanja is, without being able to close it. I am not at peace with that.”