Interpol said Friday it had identified a cold case victim nicknamed “The Woman with the German keys” more than two decades after her corpse was found at the Dutch seaside.
This is the fourth case to be solved by the international police organisation’s “Identify Me” campaign, founded in 2023 and tasked with identifying women who were found dead across Europe in recent decades, murdered or in suspicious circumstances.
Interpol named the woman as Eva Maria Pommer, a German citizen aged 35 at the time of her death.
Her body was found on July 4, 2004 in the dunes in Meijendel, a nature reserve in the southern Netherlands. The cause of her death remains unknown, and Interpol would not rule out foul play.
According to the law enforcement agency, Pommer was found dressed in an unusual number of layers of clothing for the summertime, including two pairs of trousers.
“Her keys, clothing, and glasses all seem to point to Germany,” Interpol added.
The discovery that one of the keys on her person had previously been delivered to a company in the German city of Bottrop, not far from the Dutch border, allowed investigators to probe the German connection.
But the destruction of the company’s archives in a fire prevented them from tracing the key back to Pommer’s address, a Dutch police spokesperson said.
After two programmes bringing the affair’s Bottrop connection to light were broadcast in October 2024 on both Dutch and German television, the police received “hundreds of tip-offs about the case”, which allowed them to link the key to “a number of potential addresses”.
In parallel, a Dutch foundation specialised in unresolved cases traced “a very interesting lead about a German woman who was said to have been missing for some 20 years”, before sharing the information with the police.
DNA analysis then confirmed Pommer’s identity matched that of the body on the shore.
Interpol has asked the public to come forward with any information about Pommer to the Dutch authorities.
The breakthrough comes just weeks after the Identify Me campaign announced it had finally put a name to the so-called “Woman in Pink”, revealing her to be Russian national Liudmila Zavada.
Earlier this year, 33-year-old Ainoha Izaga Ibieta Lima was identified when Paraguayan authorities matched fingerprints uploaded by Spain against their own national databases.
In 2023 it also led to the identification of Rita Roberts, a British woman who was found murdered in Antwerp in 1992, after her relatives recognised her tattoo.
The Identify Me campaign is still trying to solve the cases of 43 unidentified women.
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