Rotterdam carpenter was already dead....

DEN BOSCH - Gerrit Snoeren (29), the Rotterdam carpenter whose mutilated body was found on Easter night 2003 in the cargo box of an all-terrain vehicle that had crashed into a couple of trees, must have been dead before he got into that car.This conclusion by forensic physician Ms. Dr. Selma Eikelenboom of Indepent Forensic Services (IFS) in Nunspeet forced Mr. C. Revis, the attorney general at the court of appeal in Den Bosch, yesterday to demand an acquittal for 25-year-old Rudie S., who was sentenced to four years in prison just last June for manslaughter.

So far, justice had followed the vision of pathologist Dr. R. Visser of the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), who believed that Snoeren had been the victim of the collision of Rudie S.'s Nissan Patrol against trees at De Rietschoof campsite in Aalst, on the Maas River in Gelderland.

Doubts

But right from the beginning of the police investigation, police accident analysts, a medical examiner, Gerrit's relatives and De Telegraaf reporter Jolande van der Graaf had their doubts: something wasn't right.

The medical examiner who stated that Gerrit's skull was crushed to such an extent that it "felt like a bag of loose chunks," already indicated that such injuries are really only to be expected in serious accidents in which the victim was run over. Journalist Van der Graaf tracked down witnesses who were certain that Snoeren had not collided with Rudie S. and his passenger Pieter V., and discovered that accident expert Sgt. Pieter Biemans (60) also did not give credence to the tree collision as the cause of death. The attorney general asked for acquittal, but not wholeheartedly. For the sake of due diligence, he would have preferred Dr. Eikelenboom and her colleague Dr. Visser to face each other again at a subsequent hearing, but the trial court allowed the wish of Snoeren's next of kin to conclude the affair now to prevail.