Planning a vacation to another country can be a life-changing decision except the harrowing disappearance of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon.
Experiencing a culture nothing like your own and relishing some of the most memorable places on Earth is truly divine. Sometimes, the experience can be fatal.
Especially when it comes to the tragic disappearance case surrounding two girls from Netherlands, Kris and Lisanne, on their trip to Panama.
The Journey
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Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon are two girls from the Netherlands who made their way to Panama to celebrate Kris graduating from school.
They arrived in the country on March 15, 2014, and explored around for two weeks before reaching their destination, the city of Boquete on March 29th. The girls allegedly had plans to volunteer to work with the local school and to improve their own Spanish.
On April 1st, 2014 at around 10 a.m. the girls embarked with the host family’s dog on a hike up the La Pianista trail, near the continental divide.
Everything seemed to go pretty well, and the host family believed everything was fine until a few hours later when the family’s dog returned home without the girls.
The host family immediately worried about their well being and decided to inform the police. Unfortunately, the national system of civil protection, or SINAPROC took the case very lightly and didn’t take action for four whole days.
The Disappearance
During this time span, local residents and tour guides were assisting the family and searching for the missing girls themselves since the police lacked any sort of desire for immediate action.
When they finally step up to search for the girls, the officials met with a huge complication. The girls didn’t exactly tell anybody, where they were going when they left, so search teams had little clue about their whereabouts.
The search then commenced to no avail. Hours turned into days, days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, until June 9th of that same year when a woman found a backpack and turned it into the police.
She had claimed that she found it on the riverbank of the serpent river Strangely it was dry and packed well. Inside were two bras, two pairs of sunglasses, a small water bottle, a camera, two smartphones, a passport, and 83 dollars.
The police decided to investigate the call records and photos that were on the phones and camera and what they found allowed them to start piecing together the puzzle.
Allegedly, the girls had over 100 pictures on their venture, the strange part is they click only about ten of them during the daytime. The remaining 90 plus were all in the late hours between 1:00 to 4:00 in the morning.
And 87 of those remaining 90 show nothing but blackness. A lot of mystery surrounds the final image of the girls took, which purportedly taken 8 days after the start of the hike.
The Search
It shows some sort of rock formation or a trail. However, the orientation of the camera is debatable. Some people claim it’s a shot looking forward down a trail, while others have stated that it could be pointing up a cliff.
One huge mystery that I can’t quite wrap, my head around surrounds the timing of this photo. Let’s think about it, the girls started their journey at around 10 a.m. on April 1st. This photo was taken on April 8th.
Presumably, by this point in time, the girls to our knowledge had a minimal amount of water and food on them due to the contents that found in the backpack. Could either of them be alive at this point to take this photo?
The human body can survive anywhere between seven to ten days without water with ten days being on the less common end of the spectrum.
The reason for the photos is largely unknown, but, say one of the girls did take it along with all 87 of the other pitch-black photos which were still meaningless.
The Phones Police were able to extract the call records from their devices and they found that the girls made their initial attempt to call two numbers, the Dutch emergency line and the Panamanian emergency line just hours after starting their hike.
This, tells us that on day one something went wrong. Through April 6th the girls would make intermittent attempts in the early morning or late night hours to power on their phones to check for a signal before powering them off again shortly.
Puzzle
A strange thing to note here is that after April 6th multiple incorrect pin attempts entered into the iPhone and police determined that a successful pin never entered by them.
Police found that the file names of the images numbered starting at 499. For instance, their first image was 499, the second image was 500, and so on. But one strange part about this is that they could never find image 509.
We have over 100 images left on the camera and the only image that is missing is 509. Why would the girls be so concerned with deleting only a single image from their phone, especially while in a situation like this?
That would be the absolute last thing one would ever be thinking of doing. Investigators and even Engineers were never able to recover the photo, and they had determined that it wasn’t deleted through the camera itself.
The Chilling Discovery
Months after the disappearance of Kris and Lisanne, locals found Lisanne shorts upstream from where the backpack and according to some stories the shorts found look neatly folded on a rock.
Two months later the locals claimed that they found Kris’s boot with her foot still inside. Along with the boot, a fragment of Lissane’s pelvis which appeared to be sun-bleached was discovered.
Soon multiple bone fragments located that belonged to the two girls. The police determined that Kris had fallen off a nearby monkey bridge and either went unconscious or dead and Lisanne had left to go to find help.
Since her backpack contained nothing of true use, she ditched it nearby, and with that her shorts since they could have been chafing her.
On the way back she used the camera to take photos of the blackness to light up the trail in front of her and during that trek back she exhausted or injured herself and passed away. Solved. Right? Nope!
Hiking Accident or a Murder?
Allegedly, other fingerprints found on the backpack however the findings proved to be useless since they weren’t tracking prints throughout the investigation.
Moreover, the forensic teams who analyzed their remains concluded that the body decomposition doesn’t look entirely natural and their deaths point to criminal human activity.
Also as we said before, SINAPROC took four entire days to begin the search mission, and as we know the first 24 hours are the most vital part of any search and rescue.
Last year a girl named Katherine Johanna was visiting the same region of Panama and was brutally strangled to death using her own shirt while she was hiking in the region.
To date, only one teen suspect has been identified in the case, what if this same person has something to do with the strange disappearances of Kris and Lisanne?
So is there a third-party involvement in the disappearance and subsequent deaths of Kris and Lisanne?
Or the disappearance of Kris and Lisanne very well could be a simple case of going hiking unprepared, getting lost, and death due to lack of food or water combined with a possible injury.
While we may never truly know where these girls went, or what transpired on those presumably endless ten days of agony.
