“Anyone with information is asked to contact the local police”, wrote Observant on 9 September 1993. Just over a week earlier, first-year student Tanja Groen (18) had disappeared without a trace. This May, the police and Public Prosecution Service closed their investigation into the case.
It remains one of the most harrowing stories from Maastricht’s student community. After attending a party organised by the student association Circumflex on the night of 31 August, Tanja Groen set off by bicycle for her student room in Gronsveld. She never arrived there. Neither her bicycle nor any personal items belonging to her, including clothing, have ever been found.
Deadline
It quickly became clear that the police were treating the disappearance as a likely criminal case. Circumflex put up missing person posters around the city but removed them in late October 1993 at the request of her family and the police. According to the latter, the posters had “lost their relevance”, Observant reported in a brief note. The case also featured on the Dutch true-crime television programme Deadline. “It prompted ten phone calls, but no concrete leads”, Observant wrote.
Porter
Groen’s name did not appear again in Observant until 1998. In a feature article exploring what happens on campus after dark, entitled Maastricht University by Night, university porter Frank Thijs recalled receiving a phone call from the police, asking whether Tanja Groen had been seen. “As a porter, there’s very little you can do. It’s not that you feel guilty, but it does affect you when you read in the paper the next day that she’s been missing for days.”
Rabbit warren
Groen was never found, despite countless searches over the years. Nineteen years after her disappearance, amateur divers searched the Meuse River south of Maastricht after a dowser claimed her body might be there. A week earlier, a black bicycle had been discovered nearby, but it turned out not to be hers. In 2020, excavations were carried out in a cemetery in Heugem. Soon afterwards, there was speculation that Groen might have fallen victim to the Belgian serial rapist and murderer Marc Dutroux. Belgian investigators had already looked into that theory, without finding any evidence. Hopes that advances in DNA analysis might finally provide answers came to nothing. In 2022, the Public Prosecution Service searched several sites on the Strabrechtse Heide, acting on information from an investigation led by Peter van Koppen (now an emeritus professor of Legal Psychology, who also taught at Maastricht University). But the reported “soil disturbances” in the nature reserve turned out to be nothing more than a rabbit warren.
This April brought a brief moment of hope when a convicted prisoner in Belgium named the person he claimed had abducted, sexually abused, murdered and buried Groen. But the police later stated that “this information is not credible and at least partly incorrect”.
Peter R. de Vries
Silent march, in the middle the parents of Tanja Groen and at the left, Peter R. de Vries' daughter Kelly
Photo: Observant/Yuri Meesen
The renowned Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, who was murdered in July 2021, devoted years to the case. Just a month before he was killed, he held a press conference to launch a crowdfunding campaign aimed at raising one million euros in exchange for the tip that might finally lead to the recovery of Tanja’s remains.
“Please, ladies and gentlemen, join us, help us and donate”, he said at the press conference, where he appeared alongside her parents. “Show that this does not leave you unmoved. Do it for Corrie and Adrie. Bring Tanja Groen home.” The crowdfunding initiative was organised by his foundation, De Gouden Tip (“The Golden Tip”).
On 31 August 2021, Observant published a photo report of a silent march through Maastricht, organised by Circumflex and De Vries’s foundation to draw renewed attention to the disappearance. Hundreds of young people in their twenties participated.
But the “golden tip” never came.