By the Boot-laces 10 year-old Nienke Kleiss was raped and strangled with the lace of her 11 year-old friend, Maikel Willebrand's boot in the Beatrix Park in Schiedam in 2000. "In order to do that he had to untie the laces," Dutch DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom said. "It had very long strings. The shoe-strings were pulled around the neck and they were pulled very, very strongly, so now you have the information to work on – DNA on the fibres. We were doing contact DNA from them."
This was vitally important. It meant that there was a fair possibility that the killer's DNA would be on the lace. Eikelenboom tested the lace using Low Copy Number techniques and discovered alleles that did not belong to either victim, so what did this mean? Eikielenboom showed me profiles and evidence to illustrate his points.
"I'm sure the perpetrator put his hand here and pulled the cord here, but now we have DNA of her and of Maikel," he said. "Maikel of course has left a lot of DNA there. You are familiar with contact DNA? If you want my DNA, more force has to be applied. It's not very logical to get DNA if I touch the place, if you find anything at all." But as Eikelenboom had pointed out, this was different. The DNA evidence and the way that Kleiss was murdered required severe contact with the lace to apply the force required to strangle, which meant that the killer was likely to have deposited his DNA on the lace.
"I took samples at ten locations of the shoe-lace which was used to strangle Nienke," Eikelenboom said. "I got DNA not matching the two vicims and I would think well that could be coming from the perpetrator, because why would an unknown person, not being the father or mother, or other person touch the shoe-lace of this boy exactly at the locations where the perpetrator touched it? It's not very likely, so we thought, let's have a look at the locations where we found common alleles, not matching the two victims."
He did so, finding that these alleles occurred in other locations from the crime-scene too. There was no possibility of an innocent explanation of all this DNA. They had the DNA of the killer and it did not match Borsboom. There was no doubt about it; Borsboom had been proven innocent by Eikelenboom's investigations, but this was covered up. Eikelenboom was not the Reporting Officer and Ate Kloosterman's report was very selective. It allowed Kloosterman to advance an explanation for the alleles that had not been deposited by either victim in court that he must have known stretched credibility at best. The profiles that would have proved innocence were not included in the report and Kloosterman must have known that it was ambushing Borsboom's defence. Borsboom was tried and convicted and served four years in jail for crimes he did not commit. This disgraces the Dutch criminal justice system.
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