Everyone sympathized when on April 3, 2014 word came out that Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, who were staying in Panama for vacation and work, had not returned from a hike. Just like the Panamanian government, everyone assumed that the two would be found. After all, tourists often get lost in the jungle and in the vast majority of cases SINAPROC, the Panamanian civil protection, brings them back home. But as days became a week, hope slowly melted and by the time the first week turned into a second, most became convinced that the girls were no longer alive. Speculations about what must have happened grew with the discovery of Lisanne’s backpack and their personal belongings in it. Troubling night shots were found on camera and the cell phones showed that the women tried to call the Dutch and Panamanian emergency numbers several times.
Until eleven days after their disappearance, the two were still alive while the area in which they got lost had been searched thoroughly. Eleven days in which cold and pitch-black nights alternated with hot days, in which hope and despair must have met every time the sun went down and no rescue party had appeared.
In June of that year, the investigation into the disappearance of Kris and Lisanne was handed over to the police and from then on treated as being a crime against life and personal integrity. Prosecutor Betzaïda Pitti Cerrud was assigned to the case.
A few days later, human remains and garments are found that turn out to belong to Kris and Lisanne. Although it is then fairly quickly established that the girls died, it remains unclear what happened between April 1 and April 11, the last day on which one of them two probably still alive. Despite the fact that many answers were not found, in March 2015 newspapers headed the conclusion of the Panamanian government that Kris and Lisanne had an accident and ended up in the river.
With that conclusion, the media closed this mystery.
At the beginning of September 2019, we took place in a roller coaster in which our vision tilted several times. We talked to witnesses, found letters of confession, hired a cartographer and a photo specialist, had the original photos examined, examined the camera and the forensic reports of the backpack, talked to Internet detectives, private investigators, journalists, expats, forensic experts, a survival expert, vanishing experts, behavioral psychologists, but also experience experts, rescue workers, and, finally, the Panamanian Public Prosecutor of the case became our third author: Betzaïda Pittí Cerrud.
Our search ended in the early spring of 2021 after we held all the facts from the police file against all current and less common theories.
This book tells the story of this search.
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