Thesis Research Master Social Sciences, July 2015
The high-profile case as ‘fire object’: following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case through the media
Student: Lisette Jong Student number: 5609429
First supervisor: Prof. Dr. A.A. M’charek Second supervisor: Dr. K. Krause
The high-profile case as ‘fire object’: following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case through the media
LISETTE JONG, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Abstract In 1999 a young girl named Marianne Vaatstra was found murdered in a rural area in the Netherlands. In 2012 the perpetrator was arrested. Throughout this period and after, the Marianne Vaatstra case never ceased to receive media attention and was part of public debate. How is it that this murder became a high profile case? I argue for an understanding of the Vaatstra case as a fire object. Law’s fire metaphor helps to attend to objects as patterns of absences and presences. In the Vaatstra case it is in particular the unknown perpetrator that figures as a generative absence that brings different versions of the case to presence and to proliferate. In this paper I present four versions of the Vaatstra case that were made present in the media that also differently shaped identities of concerned actors, victim, suspect and communities. Further research may look into how fruitful the proposed fire topology is for making the the dynamics of other high-profile cases comprehensible as well.
Key words High-profile case; fire object; STS; murder; trial by media
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Introduction
On the Saturday morning of May 1, 1999 friends and family of the 16-year old Marianne Vaatstra from Zwaagwesteinde, a small village in the northern Dutch province Frisia, went looking for her in the rural surroundings. She had not returned home after spending the night out partying in the nearby village of Kollum. They found her mutilated dead body in a meadow that was situated in between Kollum and Zwaagwesteinde. The following Monday newspapers reported that police investigations had indicated that Marianne had been raped before she was murdered and that the perpetrator had slit her throat with a knife. On November 18, 2012 the perpetrator, local farmer Jasper S., was arrested after the sample that he donated in a familial DNA mass screening resulted in a match with the suspect DNA. He confessed and was convicted for murder and sexual assault in 2013.
In the meanwhile not a year went by that the ‘Marianne Vaatstra case’, as it became known, had not been attended to in Dutch print and broadcast media. In 1999 the amount of articles mentioning the case in national newspapers ranged from 12 to 70 per source and the regional Leeuwarder Courant counted 131 articles mentioning ‘Marianne Vaatstra’. When Jasper S. was arrested and convicted about 13 years later, the case received perhaps even more widespread media attention than in the year of the murder. The Vaatstra case had become a high profile case; it was and still is a well-known case within and even beyond the Netherlands that generated a lot of attention and publicity. As a district attorney stated in a documentary on the case in 2001: ‘*The Vaatstra murder+ has become a national case... in which something apparently is at stake for everyone’1. And in a 2009 newspaper interview with Marianne’s relatives it was noted that ‘Marianne seems *to be+ of everyone’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 25- 04-2009). How is it that the murder of a young girl in a rural province came to engage so many?
In academics high-profile cases have been differentially approached. Criminologists Soothill et al. (2002; 2004) differentiate between ‘mega’, ‘mezzo’ and ‘routine’ cases in terms of the amount of press coverage certain homicides receive in a given period of time. Mega cases are understood as having intrinsic qualities, like having a stranger murderer involved or multiple dead bodies, that are different but all rather ‘unusual’ compared to other homicide cases, which make them particularly interesting (2002). Following the reporting trajectories of thirteen identified mega cases in the British Times, they suggest that mega cases follow a certain process linked up with the criminal justice system that is influenced by case related ‘incidents’ that generate peaks in media attention (2004). However, the
1 Documentary: Een nacht van 800 dagen (Omrop Fryslan), broadcasted June 2001
2 course of mediatization of in particular those high-profile cases that become entangled with ‘wider societal agendas’ turned out to be rather unpredictable (ibid. p.1). Sociologist Chancer (2005) studied how certain high-profile cases, an analytical subcategory she calls ‘provocative assaults’, indeed become ‘vehicles for crystallizing, debating, and attempting to resolve contemporary social problems’ (p.5). She in particular attends to how these cases become politically mobilized to address concerns regarding structural inequalities of gender, race and class. Chancer identifies a dualistic framework in media reporting and public debate aligned with the prosecution and defense positions that, sometimes problematically, forces people to choose sides.
Innes (2003; 2004) introduces his notion of the ‘signal crime’ that is related but not limited to high- profile cases, to account for ‘how media reporting of high profile offences encode and thereby signal wider concerns about levels of risk, security and social order in society’ (2004,p.351) and how these are constructed as meaningful by people in their everyday lives. Innes thus focuses on societal reactions to these cases and in particular to how people’s behavior and understanding of their environment changes in this context. He also interestingly points at the role of the police in the becoming of the high-profile or signal crime when they employ the media as investigative tool or resource (2003). Cottle (2005) however, analytically disentangles the criminal justice case from the public story in his work on the Stephen Lawrence case (p.50). Cottle is primarily concerned with the latter and suggests that this public story took the form of a ‘mediatized public crisis’ in which the Lawrence case became a ‘potent symbol and catalyst for change’ (p.51), here in addressing institutional racism in Britain.
The analytical notions briefly discussed above could all provide interesting perspectives on the Vaatstra case. They even may all apply, as the reader might infer from the analysis presented in this paper. But these perspectives either take the mediatized case as a given object with set characteristics that can be counted and/or focus on more or less structured representations and meanings constructed in and through the media that affect societal order. Either way, the mediatized case itself, the case as object, is left unattended. What kind of object is the high-profile case? And how may an answer to this question contribute to an understanding of its high-profileness? It might not come as a surprise that murders are rather messy and so are high-profile cases. Indeed, they qualify as ‘messy objects’; ‘objects that cannot be narrated from a single location’ (Law & Singleton 2005, p.348). More specifically, building on a qualitative in-depth analysis of the Vaatstra case through the media, I argue that the Marianne Vaatstra case and perhaps also other high-profile cases can be made comprehensible in terms of Law’s notion of the ‘fire object’.
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STS and the high-profile case as object
The quite interdisciplinary approach taken in this paper builds on work in the field of Science, Technology and Society (STS). One of STS achievements is to shed light on how things become objectified as matters of fact in specific practices that hold them together as such (e.g. Latour 1987). The division between the social and scientific, nature and society then becomes problematized (Latour 1991, Haraway 1988, 1991, Barad 2007). As such, it may be regarded as a rather constructivist approach that is no longer merely social but ‘ontological’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011, p.87). The relational ontology on which much work in STS thrives implies the premise that things do not pre-exist their relating. As relating is considered an activity, these practices become the object of study. Consequently, identities are not fixed or inherent essences but are made ‘intra-actively’ and need to be continuously (re)worked (Barad 2007). Instead of taking predefined case characteristics as a point of departure for analysis, the study presented in this paper then rather analyzes how relevant identities are made and unmade in the process.
Introducing the notion of ‘matters of concern’ Latour aims to once and for all open up matters of fact for a relational understanding: ‘The discussion begins to shift for good when one introduces not matters of fact, but what I now call matters of concern. While highly uncertain and loudly disputed, these real, objective, atypical and, above all, interesting agencies are taken not exactly as object but rather as gatherings’ (Latour 2005, p.114). Matters of concern is then suggested as a mode that thickens the reality of objects and, following Haraway, entails protection and care rather than debunking criticism (Latour 2004,p.232). Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) adds ‘matters of care’ to Latour’s notion of matters of concern. More than ‘concern’ the notion of ‘care’ is affectively charged and taken as a doing, as everyday practice. It shifts attention to the otherwise neglected things that uphold everyday reality and their implicated politics.
Matters of care and concern thus open up objects as political gatherings, but do not yet specify the relations that objects are made of. In STS different versions of objectness have been suggested to think the relationalities that hold them together (see M’Charek 2014, p.3-4). In this paper I argue that the Vaatstra murder as high-profile case resonates with Law’s notion of the ‘fire object’ (Law & Singleton 2005). Law employs the metaphor of fire to consider an object as a pattern of presences and absences: ‘Fire-like objects… are generated in juxtaposition with realities that are necessarily absent, even though they bring versions of those realities to presence’ (p.345). In the Vaatstra case it is primarily the unknown perpetrator that figures as the generative absence; he figures as the other that is not there but
4 has to be there for the different versions of the case to proliferate. The versions of the Vaatstra case that I deal with in this paper bring to presence realities of senseless violence, road lighting, asylum seekers and forensic DNA while at the same time transforming those discontinuous realities. These versions also relate to other others, local issues and (inter)national concerns; defining the spaces in which the Vaatstra case becomes a high-profile case. Paradoxically, as Law & Mol write, in fire objects the ‘global is already included in the local’ and how these inclusions work is indeed a matter of concern (2001, p.619). Following Choy (2011), analyzing the forms of these acts of relation drawing is important as ‘we need to make explicit the stakes and politics that attend particular lines of comparative thinking, bound up in the very concepts and scales through which, seeing an example, we think to draw a comparison’ (p.6-7). In his ethnography of entanglements in environmental and Hong Kong politics, he develops the notion of ecologies of comparison as a ‘mode of attention’ rather than a theoretical framework (p.11) that attends to the ‘conceptual practices through which a given event or form of life came to matter’ (p.18). Specificity, example and comparison are acts of drawing connections highlighted by Choy that also proved helpful to think with in analyzing the high-profileness of the Vaatstra case.
A note on data
The dataset used in this study is composed of all articles mentioning ‘Marianne Vaatstra’ in twelve national and two Frisian regional Dutch newspapers and several Dutch news and opinion magazines for the period of May 1999 until December 2014, that were available through the LexisNexis database. This searching strategy enabled the methodology of following the case through the media and accordingly to attend to its public reality beyond the course of the criminal justice system. Besides the written data I included broadcastings of crime watch shows, news programs and documentaries in which the case figured that were available online. The eventual database comprised 2844 newspaper articles and 24 broadcastings.
I choose the local Leeuwarder Courant as the initial source to work from. This newspaper presented with the most hits for the search terms used. But more importantly, a local newspaper addresses local concerns and events that do not appear in national newspapers or are not that elaborately reported on. As such newspapers partake in the activity of scale-making. This focus enabled me to take into account how the murder locally came to matter not only through accusations and suspicion towards the local asylum seekers as was also widely attended to in the national media, but through the notion of ‘senseless violence’ and the ‘unsafety’ of unlighted cycle paths as well. Interestingly, the Leeuwarder
5
Courant publishes quotes from interviews and written materials in the local Frisian language when they were gathered as such while the main body of the text is in Dutch. For the purpose of this paper however, all have been translated to English. Where certain specificities of the Dutch or Frisian terms matter, I elaborate on the translation in footnotes.
Versions of the Vaatstra case
Below I present four versions of the Vaatstra case that were made present in the media. In what they bring to presence these versions differently shape identities of concerned actors, victim, suspect and communities. Articulating these boundaries, following Law, thus also depends on what is othered, what is absent. The first section attends to how the Vaatstra murder as a case of ‘senseless violence’ drew particular relations with other absent present incidents. Different and shifting concerns with the dark cycle path along which Marianne was murdered will be addressed in the second part. The third section is concerned with the societal turmoil regarding the incrimination of asylum seekers in relation to the murder. The final version discussed in this paper deals with how the regulation of forensic DNA technologies in the Netherlands was entangled with developments in the Vaatstra case. The accounts presented here are by no means pretended to be exhaustive. As they present the Vaatstra case as a pattern of presences and absences they also do make otherness; as always ‘things will escape’ (Law & Singleton 2005, p.349). The aim here is to work towards a suggestion for how to understand the complexities of the high-profileness of the Vaatstra case and perhaps also other criminal cases.
A case of ‘senseless violence’
In the late 1990’s part of Dutch public debate was concerned with what was referred to as the increase of ‘senseless violence’2. The term ‘senseless violence’ was originally coined by the district chief of the mid-Frisian police force in 1997 to characterize the murder of a young Frisian man who had died after he got into a physical fight on his way home from a night out in the provincial town of Leeuwarden. This case became a reference point that mobilized media attention for cases that were now, also retrospectively, grouped under the label of senseless violence (Pouwels & Vegter 2002; Leeuwarder Courant, 15-09-1997). This labeling performed an equivalence between cases that were, as De Haan points out, very ‘different’ events (2011, p.37). Senseless violence was not a judicial category. However, in 1999 the Ministry of Justice came up with a definition of senseless violence that characterized cases
2 The Dutch term Zinloos Geweld (‘senseless violence’) resonates with the social concern with ‘random violence’ in the United States (Stengs 2007, p.159).
6 as spontaneous and incidental acts of intentional violence against a randomly selected victim (Ministry of Justice 1999). Although the suspect and his motivations were unknown, this way of qualifying and condemning violent incidents was initially also mobilized in making sense of the Vaatstra murder. It situated it in Dutch society and shaped the expression of emotions and moral outrage.
The Friday after the murder friends of Marianne organized a ‘silent march’3 that was attended by thousands of people from all over the Netherlands. The silent march figured as an event that was not only an act of commemoration and mourning of the victim, but also a protest against senseless violence. Through the silent march the murder became related to other lethal incidents that were qualified as cases of senseless violence. But it also figured as a qualifier: the silent march for Marianne became an exemplary case (Choy 2011) in the discussion of whether a silent march for a dog would be appropriate (Leewarder Courant, 14-08-1999). The Vaatstra case thus became part of and added to a national concern, a process that was reported on in and constituted by the media.
A grievable life
Marianne’s name was added to a list of victim names printed on a long riband that was carried during the ritual march on the yearly National Day Against Violence. This act materialized Marianne’s belonging to the category of victims of senseless violence and newspaper reporting on these events reiterated the case as one of senseless violence. In Butler’s terms, the names on the ribbon could be considered a collection of particularly ‘grievable lives’; lives that become eligible for public mourning (2009). They were presented as innocent victims, recognizable human lives, stressing the similarities between them and the majority of Dutch society. What came to matter in the identity of these victims was thus their ‘likeness’. Marianne was in the media accordingly presented as a school going daughter of Frisian parents, who worked in the local grocery store on the weekends and regularly enjoyed the night life in nearby villages. A Frisian family expressed this familiarity as follows: ‘It could have been one of our children. It is such a terrible thing. We should do something about it together’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 03- 05-1999). The ‘it’ translated into senseless violence, transforming the Vaatstra murder into a symptom of a societal problem that affected not just the victim and her relatives but a broader ‘we’. Caring for Marianne as a victim of senseless violence thus implicated a politics of belonging. This reality also depended on absences, things that not came to matter as senseless violence, that were othered.
3 In its form and organization the silent march resonates with the ‘white marches’ in Belgium (Boutellier 2005).
7
To illustrate this othering I will attend to an(other) incident of public violence in the course of the Vaastra case. The asylum seeker center nearby Kollum and its residents had been under attack ever since the murderer was by a significant group of villagers believed to be found there. In October 2000 a resident of the center was suddenly stabbed by two guys when he was on his way home from the train station. The asylum seekers organized a protest march in which the stabbing came to stand for the still prevalent violence and hatred they were confronted with since the Vaatstra murder. The protestors articulated the particularity of the stabbing, but the director of the center claimed that it was just a case of ‘bad luck’; the victim could ‘just as easily have been a Frisian’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 10-10-2000). In the newspaper the offenders were identified as a bunch of ‘troublemakers’ that would stab ‘anyone’ for the slightest provocation. In this account the stabbing was singled out as an incident, the particularities of the context were denied and the identity of the victim accordingly kept from mattering as he was made into an ‘anyone’; a not so grievable, othered life.
The unexpected suspect
The notion of senseless violence, however vague, suggests an image of the perpetrator and his relation to the victim that contrasted with the first offender profile made by the investigation team. They suspected that the offender had sexually abused women before and had carefully planned this crime as he managed to leave such few traces (Leeuwarder Courant, 16-06-1999). The case was then framed as a planned lust murder and this connected the case to a type of crime; a relation that manifested in the public call for women in the area who had recently experienced assault by ‘strangers’ to report to the police (Leeuwarder Courant, 03-05-1999). Thus the framing of the murder as a case of senseless violence existed next to the reality of the offender profile made by the investigators, but in terms of Law & Singleton, these realities were ‘other to each other’; they could not be included in each other (2005, p.347).
The profile of the first suspect that was arrested in the Vaatstra case however resonated with the image of the ‘remarkably unremarkable’ perpetrator (De Haan 2011, p.37) that was associated with spontaneous, incidental acts qualified as senseless violence. The arrest of the 32-year old man from Zwaagwesteinde was reported to be met with met with ‘surpise’ and ‘disbelief’ in his village. Although it was stated that he might have had drinking problems and wasn’t welcome anymore in some of the local bars, it was also explicated how he was ‘one of us’ (Leewarder Courant, 31-05-1999). He was eventually released after a DNA test.
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Nightlife violence
In the late 1990’s senseless violence was popularly associated with an apparent increase in ‘nightlife violence’. Marianne was out partying on the night she was murdered, which may have facilitated the relation of her death to this notion. In the media the concern with nightlife violence was particularly present in the form of parental worries about their teenage children. In the Leeuwarder Courant a woman who called for Dutch society to hang the flag at half-mast with a black mourning ribbon as protest against ‘nightlife violence’ after the Vaatstra murder, was explicitly identified as a parent of a teenage son (04-05-1999). Similarly it was reported to be a group of ‘mothers’ who introduced an awareness campaign in Frisian nightlife and established the foundation Against Senseless Violence Northeast Frisia a year later in response to the murder (Leeuwarder Courant, 08-07-1999).
But there was also something related to this notion of nightlife violence working as an absent presence that shaped the becoming of the Vaatstra case. After the reference incident in 1997 the police in Leeuwarden investigated the nightlife violence in the city which resulted in the publication ‘Committed to nightlife’ (Bunk et al. 1998). The report was discussed in the Leeuwarder Courant. The highlighted reasons for the suggested increase in violence and conflict were the use of alcohol and the observation that going out was increasingly becoming a group activity. Confrontations between groups were understood through the differences between groups articulated in terms of class and ‘cultural backgrounds’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 24-06-1998). In a later article this conclusion was also exemplified in terms of gendered relations:
‘A remarkable conclusion of the report ‘Committed to nightlife’ was that nightlife violence is often caused by “intolerance and discrimination” between groups of allochtones and autochtones. “Deviant cultural beliefs lead for example to non-conforming ways of approaching women”.’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 05-01-1999).
When located in Frisian nightlife through the police report and the Frisian media, the notion of senseless violence became differentially specified. The implicated opposition between groups of ‘allochtones’ and ‘autochtones’ resonated with another story that was related to the murder. Marianne had supposedly been ‘threatened’ in a bar a few weeks before she was murdered (Leeuwarder Courant, 05-05-1999; Algemeen Dagblad 22-05-1999). As it was narrated, she and her friends had gotten into a dispute with a group of teenage residents of the asylum seeker center in a local bar. One of the boys had told Marianne to ‘shut up’ and had made a slitting gesture at the throat while doing so. However it was suggested that
9 this particular boy would have been ‘very stupid’ to have actually done so, reiterating this account furthered the suspicion on asylum seekers in general.
In order to counter the incrimination of asylum seekers the family of Marianne and the mayor wrote an open letter to the public in which the moral values implicated in the act of the silent march were invoked to condemn the anger that some of the villagers directed to the residents of the asylum seeker center: ‘Thousands of people have shown their aversion against senseless violence through their participation in Friday’s silent march. The family wishes for the murder investigation to proceed without senseless violence’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 14-05-1999). However, as shown above, there was an interfering absent present tendency in the national concern with senseless violence and nightlife violence to mark out particular conflicts, differences and causalities as for instance ‘conflicting cultural backgrounds’4.
Unsafe cycle paths and the demand for road lighting
Following articles in the Leeuwarder Courant, the demand for road lighting had been a pending issue in the rural area before the murder. After the Vaatstra murder the issue was reinvigorated as the crime scene was mobilized to claim that unlighted cycle paths are ‘unsafe’. In newspaper articles that discussed the road lighting issue it was explicated that Marianne was murdered ‘next to the dark cycle path along the Keningswei near Veenklooster’ (e.g. Leeuwarder Courant 19-06-1999, Leeuwarder Courant 05-07-1999). Relating their worries about dark cycle paths to the murder, a group of villagers united under the slogan ‘Light gives Sight’. They collected thousands of autographs in a petition to demand lighting of the cycle paths that they offered to the councilors of the municipalities Kollumerland and Achtkarspelen in June 1999. After struggling with the finance, Kollumerland eventually made a difference but Achtkarspelen didn’t. This resulted in some main cycle paths between villages becoming lighted only halfway (LC 30-10-2001).
The nightly bike ride
After the Vaatstra murder the Telegraaf (22-05-1999) reported from Berlikum, another part of Frisia, about the ‘discobus’ that drives between the villages on party nights. This bus connection had already
4 In her research on the notion of senseless violence in the Netherlands, Stengs points at cases in which the perception that ‘the division between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ parallels the ethnic distinction between ‘we’ (i.e. autochthonous Dutch and victims) and ‘them’ (i.e. Moroccans and perpetrators)’ was more explicitly expressed (2007, p.177).
10 been around since 1988 and was initiated by the local government to reduce the amount of alcohol related traffic accidents and stolen bicycles during the weekends (De Faenster 14-07-1988, Leeuwarder Courant 10-03-1990). In 1999 however, it was presented as a solution to the unsafe situation on the dark cycle paths between villages. A night bus connection did not appear in the media as an option for the villages around the crime scene, neither did a call, if there was any, for more police on the streets make the newspapers as had been prevalent after the senseless violence reference case in Leeuwarden. Following an older woman from the village of Zwaagwesteinde, young people there were not used to having the police around anymore as the police had been removed from the country side and centralized into the cities (De Volkskrant, 19-06-1999).
The demand for road lighting resonated with a form of self-organization that was explicated in news articles that dealt with the nightly bike ride of young people from the rural villages surrounding the crime scene. Cycling home alone at night time was presented as rather unusual for young girls: if not taking a taxi or being picked up by parents, young people made sure to cycle in small groups (Telegraaf, 22-05-1999). This informal rule of conduct was seemingly broken by Marianne as she had presumably been on her own on the night she was murdered. Following the accounts of the boys who had accompanied her halfway, Marianne had insisted to part from them and cycle the last kilometers by herself. Apart from that they shouldn’t have let her go, as they had not kept the rule, it was by some believed that this couldn’t have happened for Marianne ‘wasn’t the girl to do that’5. Amongst these people was Marianne’s father who doubted in particular the statement of one of the boys, Marianne’s boyfriend at the time, and was reported to hold him partly accountable for the death of his daughter (Leeuwarder Courant, 28-04-2000).
Peter R. de Vries
This doubt was publicly reinforced in 2003 when crime reporter Peter R. de Vries attended to the issue in his popular crime watch show on Dutch television. In the Vaatstra case De Vries, however harshly criticized, emerged as a ‘super hero’ for the Vaatstra family that had publicly declared their loss of faith in the criminal justice system. As Reijnders describes this image: ‘where the police cannot or will not act De Vries steps in and comes to the aid of innocent victims’ (2005, p.646). The 2003 episode in which De Vries interviewed a ‘witness’ whose account was presented as contradicting the statement of Marianne’s boyfriend on the bike ride, indeed worked to criticize the investigation team that apparently
5 See crime watch show Peter R. de Vries (2003).
11 had not followed up on this cue. Father Vaatstra figured to confirm De Vries savior status when he appears at the end of the item to repeat that ‘something is not right’ about the boyfriend’s story.
The concern with the dark cycle path and bike ride disappeared from the media until it reappeared in a different guise in 2012 when Peter R. de Vries spent an entire episode on the Vaatstra case. Things had changed and he had now joined forces with the police. The show was granted the opportunity to present the most recent offender profile and investigative technologies to the public. The statement by Marianne’s boyfriend was no longer doubted but served as a cue that Marianne may have known her killer and maybe even had planned to meet him that night. In the 2012 episode the dark cycle path was enrolled to reinforce this scenario. Through a reconstruction of the crime scene, the investigators concluded that the gender of a random passerby couldn’t be read from a distance due to the darkness. It was suggested that this made it less likely for Marianne to have become the random female victim of a well-organized male lust murderer and more likely that she had a planned ‘rendez-vous’ or a casual encounter and was familiar with the person who killed her. The notion of the perpetrator as a well prepared rapist, ‘a predator waiting for his prey’, was accordingly overturned. He was now presented as an ‘occasional offender’, who had a friendly encounter with Marianne before he had possibly ‘flipped’. Thus following the concern of the unlighted cycle path through the media, the composition of stakeholders and the role of the darkness shifted and so did the image of Marianne and her murderer change shape. Darkness made unlighted cycle paths unsafe for innocent girls. But the image of Marianne as a girl who complied with the rules was challenged when the darkness became otherwise enabling of the suggestion of a secret rendez-vous in the 2012 scenario.
Incrimination of asylum seekers
Most of the societal turmoil and media outlets in the context of the Vaatstra murder were concerned with the incrimination of asylum seekers by a significant part of the local village population. The proximity of the center for asylum seekers and the fact that Marianne’s throat was slit with a knife added up to put suspicion on its residents. In these accounts slitting the throat was qualified as a ‘non- western’ way of killing, something that in particular ‘a Frisian’ would never do (e.g. Trouw, 16-10-1999; Parool, 27-06-2001). The fact that this claim was only a few times substantiated as resembling Islamic practices of ritual slaughter, suggests that it resonated with a tacit notion regarding a potentially dangerous Other that required no further explanation in newspaper articles. Accordingly, Populist Party leader Pim Fortuyn confirmed the argumentation behind the suspicion as ‘a reasonable thought’ in his
12 widely read and cited column in the magazine Elsevier (16-10-1999). In line with one of his major campaigning issues, Fortuyn continued to denounce the Dutch asylum policy in the piece.
Racism and policy critique
Soon after the murder the municipality of Kollumerland decided to build a new asylum seeker center in the village that would be granted a permanent status. This was met with dismay by the villagers and several groups assembled to protest the plans6. The Vaatstra case was mobilized in the argumentation against the center. The mayor of Kollumerland, as quoted in the Leeuwarder Courant, asked rhetorically: ‘Is the decision on the establishment of the asylum seeker center dependent on the nationality of the perpetrator?’ (16-07-1999). The public announcement in July 1999 that two former residents of the asylum seeker center were internationally sought after in relation to the murder, fueled the sentiments in the area. This culminated in a rally during a public information meeting about the new asylum seeker center in October 1999. The mayor was pelted with eggs by some young men and in a speech by the spokesperson of one of the protest groups the center was derogatively addressed as a ‘hotbed of criminal activities’ (NRC Handelsblad, 15-10-1999). Also in other parts of Frisia plans to appoint locations for new asylum seeker centers were countered in terms of the Vaatstra murder. In Lemmer for example, a letter was written to the local government by concerned parents stating that the presence of an asylum seeker center would pose a ‘sexual danger’ to their children (Leeuwarder Courant, 05-10-1999).
The local and national news media wrote predominantly in understanding of the sentiments of the protesting villagers in the context of the murder (see also Rigter 2002, p.37). The State Secretary of Justice addressed the ‘racist exclamations’ in a radio interview: ‘I understand the emotions, but I don’t want to condone them’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 18-10-1999). More critical voices argued that the murder simply served as a mediator that manifested the slumbering xenophobia in the village population. Thus in response to the murder the identity of the protesting Frisians became also at stake. Were they blunt racists acting out of prejudicial notions or did they point at flaws in the Dutch asylum policy that supposedly affected all of Dutch society? The latter argumentation was employed in a controversial article by an editor of the Leeuwarder Courant titled ‘The Westerein7 is not racist’. The issue was not only a matter of identity and discourse but also of scale-making and connection, as he writes: ‘The people in the Westerein read newspapers and watch television. They also know that there is something
6 See also Rigter (2002) who studied the protest against the permanent asylum seeker center in Kollum as a social movement. 7 ‘Westerein’ is the official Frisian name for the village of Zwaagwesteinde.
13 extensively wrong with the asylum policy in the Netherlands. They also know that the increasing dissatisfaction with that policy does not emanate from racism’ (10-08-1999). Here, the media is mobilized to extend the concern and connect the local unrest with national policy critique that resonated with Pim Fortuyn’s political opinions.
Another story about knives
Besides in terms of criticism towards national policy and policy makers, the entanglement of the murder with hatred against asylum seekers appeared as criticism directed at local state actors. Expressed distrust in both the municipalities and the Frisian Public Prosecutor was related to the idea that the asylum seeker center was not immediately taken into account by the investigation team and the municipal proposition to build the permanent center. The issue was taken up by the media as a conflict between the villagers and the authorities in which the voice of the asylum seekers was notably absent. What seemed to be at stake in the discussion was citizenship: who was entitled to be taken care of by the government? Building on the presumption that the murderer was an asylum seeker, the villagers believed that their government was more concerned with the wellbeing of asylum seekers than the safety of the Frisian villagers. The riot police was mobilized at the center as there were rumors that some villagers had decided to take matters into their own hands (Leeuwarder Courant 15-05-1999).
And this recalled another story about knives. The people from the village of Zwaagwesteinde are traditionally called ‘knife pullers’ in the provincial area. This refers to the historical typification of the poor community as one with anarchist tendencies that preferred to take matters into their hands and knives; especially when in conflict with outsiders (Boonstra 2004, p.33)8. In the context of the Vaatstra case, this violent image of the people from Zwaagwesteinde was interestingly not brought to presence in relation to the crime itself, but rather in relation to how some villagers expressed their anger, suspicion and distrust towards both the authorities and the asylum seekers. Asylum seekers did not feel safe around Kollum anymore and requested to be moved to centers elsewhere in the Netherlands (Leeuwarder Courant, 23-07-1999).
8 The local saying ‘My Herder (shepherd) is my savior’ relates to the preferred brand of knives; ‘Herder’ from Solingen, Germany.
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Trial by media
In August 1999 Peter R. de Vries had shown the pictures and full names of the two former residents of the asylum seeker center, that were marked as suspect and witness respectively, in his crime watch show9. Building on the fact that the men had ‘disappeared’ from the center on the day of the murder, this new investigative scenario substantiated and legitimized earlier rumors. Although the Public Prosecutor stressed that one of them, Ali H., was marked as a suspect and not the perpetrator, in media reporting he was already convicted of the crime. As such, the incrimination of Ali H. became a ‘trial by media’10. He was addressed as a ‘fugitive’ and the fact that he wasn’t considered as a suspect from the beginning was criticized as ‘failure’ of the police. When Ali H. was arrested in Istanbul in October 1999, it was insinuated in the Leeuwarder Courant that his place of residence was purposively chosen in relation to his presumed guilt: ‘He didn’t pick another European country where his fingerprints would have been filed in the police computers… He must have travelled over land on a false passport. Those are easily attainable through criminal organizations that transit people to Canada through asylum seeker centers’ (14-10-1999). Ali H. was ‘guilty until proven innocent’ (Greer & McLaughlin 2012, p.4). In a 2001 documentary on the Vaatstra case, the Public Prosecutor confessed that the arrest of Ali H. in October 1999 was made under pressure of ‘public opinion’ while he was already considered irrelevant by the investigating team. This fueled public debate on the influence of the media in criminal investigations that was eventually discussed in Parliament in relation to the Vaatstra case. Ali H. was indeed exonerated when his DNA profile didn’t match the DNA of the traces found at the crime scene.
Despite his exoneration, Ali H. continued to figure as a suspect related to the Vaatstra case in extensively mediatized accounts in 2007 and 2010 that suggested that the man arrested in 1999 was ‘not the right Ali’. The idea that an asylum seeker had murdered Marianne never disappeared from the media. The indeterminacy of the figure of the unknown suspect translated into the incrimination a generalized Other. As father Vaatstra put it in a documentary interview: ‘If our daughter’s murderer is not going to be caught, never is going to be caught, it will always be an asylum seeker to everyone, and to us as well’ (IKON 2003). In this regard, the Vaatstra murder was mentioned amongst events that are considered as Muslim terrorist attacks in a 2005 survey on the perceived increase of feelings of anxiety
9 Showing head shots and full names of suspects on television was a controversial act. As the Public Prosecutor commented: ‘this could be in conflict with journalistic ethics and the protection of individual privacy’ (Trouw, 31- 08-1999). 10 Greer and McLaughlin define ‘trial by media’ as ‘a market-driven form of multi-dimensional, interactive, populist justice in which individuals are exposed, tried, judged and sentenced in the ‘court of public opinion’’ (2012, p.3).
15 and unsafety amongst the Frisian population (Leeuwarder Courant, 10-12-2005). And in 2010 anti-Islam party PVV similarly enrolled the Vaatstra case in renewed municipal discussions on locating asylum centers in Frisian villages:
‘Do you acknowledge that Marianne Vaatstra has possibly been murdered by one or multiple asylum seekers? If so, taking the sentiments of the local population into account, do you acknowledge that it is inappropriate to house that many asylum seekers right in the area where the murder has been committed?’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 8-10-2010)
Forensic DNA
According to the Leeuwarder Courant, with the arrest of Ali H. a total of 25 DNA profiles had now been compared to the DNA that was found in the traces allegedly left by the perpetrator. After his exoneration the style of media reporting jumped from a ‘trial by media’ exposure to highlighting the uncertainty surrounding the unknown perpetrator. The Public Prosecutor was quoted stating that at this point ‘it could have been anyone’ (16-10-1999). Presented as a ‘last resort’ by journalists but ‘a powerful weapon’ by the police, in December 1999 a DNA dragnet was announced (Leeuwarder Courant, 08-01- 2000). This was only the second time that this forensic method was applied in a criminal case in the Netherlands and it attracted a lot media attention. The presence of the press even slowed down the process as people in the first group of ‘men whom Marianne associated with’ that was called to participate, were hesitant to donate a sample in presence of the cameras (De Volkskrant, 11-01-2000). The naming of this category was critically received by Marianne’s relatives, as her brother claimed: ‘It sounds like Marianne was a nympho. This is not acceptable to us’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 29-12-1999). Apart from that the category potentially challenged the innocent image of Marianne; the critical reception of the dragnet was shaped by the local distrust in the investigation team. Accordingly, some men stressed that they participated primarily as an act of care for the Vaatstra family and definitely not to please the authorities (ibid.). The dragnet did not lead to the perpetrator, but it did lead to public debates about the forensic technology involved. Not only in terms of a cost-benefit analysis, also the voluntary basis of participation was questioned in light of the ‘peer pressure’ in the small village community and the highly mediatized case of the recusant-turned-suspect whose DNA was eventually extracted from his trash. Here the boundaries of the criminal justice system were at stake11.
11 See Toom & M’charek (2011) for a discussion of how different applications of forensic DNA technologies may conflict with the presumption of innocence.
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And this was not the last time. The course of the Vaatstra case and the development of Dutch legislation regarding the use of forensic DNA technologies in criminal justice had changed shape in close relation to one another12. The Vaastra case was enrolled in debates on these developments and alternated either as a reference case to stress the necessity of the implementation and regulation of these technologies or as an exemplary case in which the technologies had served the community, (non)suspects and the investigation for the better or worse.
A genetic suspect profile
In June 2000 the public prosecutor dealing with the Vaatstra case claimed that ‘the DNA profile of the perpetrator is still the most powerful weapon we have’ (Trouw, 14-06-2000). In the same month a new suspect profile was presented in which the perpetrator DNA was differently engaged. The forensic laboratory in Leiden had been asked by the Public Prosecutor to analyze the perpetrator DNA profile on geographic descent. The inference of personal characteristics from DNA in the criminal justice process was then still unlawful, so the space in which this happened was simultaneously other to and part of the Vaatstra murder as a criminal justice case. In 2003 these boundaries were reconfigured when the ‘law on visible personal characteristics’ went into effect to regulate this practice.
Based on a study of the hairs and DNA profile the forensic laboratory suggested that the offender was most likely a man of northwestern European descent. At about the same time the results of the analysis of six behavioral experts were made public. They concluded that the perpetrator most likely lived within a radius of 15 kilometer from the crime scene. The results of the two expert studies got merged in newspaper headings reading: ‘Murderer Marianne is white *male+ in the vicinity’ (e.g. Leeuwarder Courant, 13-06-2000; Trouw, 14-06-2000; Algemeen Dagblad 14-06-2000). The implicated translations; northwestern European became ‘white’ and a radius of 15 kilometer became ‘vicinity’13, both articulated closeness to the victim. However ‘clear’ and ‘powerful’ the DNA profile may have been, M’charek points out that the alleged ‘Dutchness did not help narrow the task of the criminal investigators’ (2008, p.525- 526) as it directed attention towards a majority instead of minority population. But it seemed that the primary purpose of the DNA analysis was to alleviate the social tensions surrounding the incrimination of the asylum seekers (De Knijff 2006). It was perhaps unlikely that the perpetrator was an asylum
12 See Toom 2011 for a more detailed account of the development of Dutch legislation regarding forensic DNA. 13 The Dutch word ‘buurt’ that was used may refer to ‘vicinity’ as well as ‘neighborhood’ which strengthened the association with ‘closeness’.
17 seeker based on the new suspect profile, it was not impossible and indeed, discriminatory and violent acts against asylum seekers in Kollum did not cease14.
The offender profile generated a potential suspect group of 20.000 men that lived within a radius of 15 kilometer from the crime scene. The Public Prosecutor however decided not to call all these men for participation in DNA testing. As a protest against this decision a group of ‘scared parents’ started a coupon campaign through a local newspaper through which men in the area could indicate their willingness to participate in DNA testing (Leeuwarder Courant, 20-07-2000). The Vaatstra family, represented by crime reporter Peter R. de Vries and well known lawyer Bram Moszkowicz filed a lawsuit against ‘the state’ in order to force the DNA testing of the 20.000 men. This attracted a lot of media attention and furthered fueled the concern with forensic DNA: ‘how far does the judiciary want to go with DNA research?’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 11-10-2000). ‘Men we want to exclude’
In 2003 two DNA tests in the category of non-suspects that was referred to as ‘men we want to exclude’ by the team that performed the second opinion investigation before the case could be (temporarily) closed, received a considerable amount of media attention (Leeuwarder Courant, 10-05-2003). In 1999 looked for as ‘witness’, the other ‘disappeared asylum seeker’ Mohammed A. now became part of this category and was later made into a ‘suspect’ to be traced down in Britain. He was released based on the test results. In resonance with the popular questioning of Ali H.’s exoneration, mother Vaatstra commented: ‘I have major doubts whether he was the right Afghani’ (De Volkskrant, 30-09-2003).
The other test was performed on a body that was dug up. The remains belonged to a man who had been interrogated by the police because he had been wandering in the area on the night of the murder. The Leeuwarder Courant followed up on the angry family members of the man who had not been given notice of the DNA test beforehand. They did not only file complaints against the police but also against media outlets that gave wrong information about their family situation and the manner of death. The story was taken up in a TV program on journalism and in 2004 the brother of the dead man discussed his brother’s psychiatric life history in an interview in the Leeuwarder Courant; a life story that would otherwise most probably not have made it to the press (21-02-2004).
14 The academically widely explored notion of the ‘CSI effect’ (e.g. Mopas 2007; Kruse 2010; Machado & Santos 2011) thus only partially connected to the Vaatstra case as the reality of the incrimination of asylum seekers here interfered with the belief in forensic science as a ‘super science’ that is always ‘accurate and infallible’ (Machado & Santos 2011, p.306).
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Familial searching
In 2007 father Vaatstra, informed by an expert from a private forensic services company, had already pleaded for a ‘Y-chromosomal research’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 30-04-2007). This was not yet possible as the method was not legal at the time. In February 2012 however, an article in the Leeuwarder Courant with the heading ‘New DNA method *brings+ hope in Vaatstra case’ announced that when the law that regulated familial searching in criminal investigation would go into effect later that year, the Vaatstra case would be the first case in which the method was going to be applied. In April the search for near- matches with the offender DNA profile in the DNA databank commenced. When this did not lead to any cues, a familial DNA mass screening was announced in which 8.080 men were requested to participate.
The familial searching technology was explicated to be particularly suitable in the Vaatstra case. The trace left by the perpetrator was qualified in relation to the technology as being of ‘top quality’ (Leeuwarder Courant, 18-02-2012) and the village community at stake as ‘geographically stable15’ and ‘in solidarity’ (ibid. 19-11-2012). More than ever before, media also played on the notion that ‘everyone in the region is suddenly a potential suspect’ (ibid. 26-05-2012). In this regard, several news articles addressed how participating in the familial search as an act of care for the community may conflict with care for one’s own family when the perpetrator would turn out to be a relative. The Public Prosecutor, mobilized a notion of care in the mediatized call for all men in the same family to still volunteer a sample; in case the murderer is found to be one of their kin, they would ‘share the burden’ of having led the trace to a family member (ibid. 08-10-2012).
An article published on November 19, 2012 in the Leeuwarder Courant headlined ‘Familial searching turned out to be unnecessary’. It addressed the fact that a full match was found between the DNA profile of one of the participants and the offender DNA profile in the Vaatstra case. Media exploded over this suspect’s arrest and one of the issues recalled was indeed whether the murder could have already been solved if the dragnet was expanded in 2000.
15 The Dutch word used here is ‘honkvast’ which more literally translates into ‘fixed to base’ and resonates with ‘stay-at-home’.
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Conclusion
‘…fires are energetic and transformative, and depend on difference – for instance between (absent) fuel or cinders and (present) flame. Fire objects, then, depend on otherness, and that otherness is generative.’ (Law & Singleton 2005, p.344)
Studying the Marianne Vaatstra murder as high-profile case made this paper also about senseless violence, dark cycle paths, asylum seeker centers and forensic DNA, amongst other things. These discontinuous realities gave shape to the high-profileness of the case while they jumped in and out of the space of the criminal justice system. Law and Singleton (2005) propose a topology of fire to make such messy and uncontrollable objects comprehensible. A fire object ‘lives in and through the juxtaposition of uncontrollable and generative otherness’ (p.347). What is present depends upon what is (made) absent, though versions of these absences may be brought to presence. The present absence of the unknown perpetrator in the Vaatstra case indeed took different shapes in the versions presented here. The incidental senseless violence offender was other to the investigator’s lust murderer; the Iraqi or Afghani asylum seeker was made other to the suspect generated by the genetic and behavioral experts. One could not transform gradually into the other; they rather formed a ‘pattern of discontinuous displacements’ (p.347). But at the same time the presence of the genetic suspect partially depended on the presence of racist violence in the village community. Thus, to reiterate Law and Singleton, these ‘versions are other to each other; they cannot be included in each other. At the same time (and this is the difficulty and the complication), they are also necessarily related to one another because they are part of the same [case] and interact with one another’.
The versions themselves can be understood in terms of fire-like patterns. The association of the case with senseless violence slowly burned out but left its marks in the poem inscribed on the Marianne Vaatstra monument in Zwaagwesteinde. The versions that incriminated asylum seekers left a path of destruction. The permanent center was never build and the one in proximity of the crime scene was closed in 2003. However, versions of the case in which an (generalized) asylum seeker figured as perpetrator continued to spread uncontrollably and came in different guises and different contexts, despite several attempts of the Public Prosecutor to extinguish the flames. Even after the arrest of Jasper S. the figure of Ali H. as perpetrator flamed through conspiracy theories. The relative popularity of these in Frisia was fueled by the criticism on how criminal justice institutions had handled the case.
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As the Leeuwarder Courant wrote, with the arrest and conviction of Jasper S. the villagers ‘woke up in a new reality… the perpetrator in the sensational Marianne Vaatstra murder case comes from their midst’ (Leeuwarder Courant 20-11-2012). Forensic DNA technology had generated Jasper S. as perpetrator. He confessed the rape and murder of Marianne and was convicted in 2013. Media exploded around his arrest and trial. Present in this version were care for his family with which the village community responded, a controversial TV interview with his lawyer who sketched a sympathetic profile of his client and discussion on Jasper S. alleged psychological suffering. This caring and individualizing approach to Marianne’s murderer is indeed rather remarkable in juxtaposition with the other, now othered, versions presented in this paper. As a woman from Zwaagwesteinde commented on the arrest: ‘When everyone believed the perpetrator came from the asylum seeker center, that gave at least a little comfort. You don’t want it to be a father from here’ (Trouw, 20-11-2012). This quote articulates how the different versions were also entangled with a politics of knowing and belonging.
In this paper I explicated the Marianne Vaatstra case as an inherently indeterminate object that became known as a high profile-case through its associations with multiple concerns. This becoming took the shape of a fire-like pattern of destruction and creation, generating and depending on absences and presences. This study focused on one particular murder case, although it engaged many others. Further research is required to see whether the dynamics of other high-profile cases resonate with the fire topology suggested here.
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