A young woman fighting for her life: seen live on social media. A fatal stabbing between two half-sisters last Saturday evening seems to be a macabre first in the Netherlands. Footage of the seriously injured, bleeding woman, and possibly the stabbing, has been streamed live on Instagram, police said.
The stabbing started on Saturday in the joint home of the two half-sisters. The 20-year-old victim fled seriously injured to a neighboring house, where she died. The police arrested the 21-year-old half-sister at home. She is the only suspect. Police would not say whether she was sane or not.
The victim’s images were streamed through a suspect’s “(company) account,” according to the report Brabants Dagblad. The police possess these footage and are investigating. Screenshots are also circulating on social media: the police are asking people not to share these “nasty images” and to delete them.
‘Impulse killings’
There are more examples of live images by perpetrators abroad. In the Netherlands, security cameras sometimes record murder and manslaughter. Think of the murder of the Rotterdam Hümeyra in the bicycle cellar of her school in 2018, or the attack on lawyer Derk Wiersum in 2019, which was partly filmed from afar.
“But I don’t know of any examples in the Netherlands that a perpetrator records it live and streams it live,” says Eric Slot of murderatlas.nl, a nationwide murder survey. “Most murders are ‘impulse murders’ and criminals themselves usually have no interest in filming liquidations. At most, a photo of the corpse as a warning to others.”
“I also think it’s the first time,” says Gerlof Leistra, compiler of the annual murder lists of Elsevier, about the case in Den Bosch. “This seems very deliberately filmed.”
The Rotterdam court did this month verdict in a murder case, in which a film recording by the perpetrator also played a role, says lawyer Nelleke Stolk. That case involved a son who tortured his father to death, and filmed it for 40 minutes with his phone. Stolk: “Before he could do something with that film, he was arrested. Thank God it has not been made public.”
The son was declared mentally incompetent and received tbs with compulsory treatment. But the film did produce incriminating material: the judge was able to determine the minimum duration of the torture, that the son expressed that he wanted to kill his father, and despite his disorder, he had time to consider: in between he took a shower.
Psychosis
“I hope that the half-sisters in Den Bosch also had a psychosis or something like that,” says Stolk. “That means that the actions cannot be attributed to this girl. Otherwise it is very horrific to do something like this live.”
It could well be that comparable images will appear more often on the internet or in court, Stolk thinks: “For example, knife violence among young people is also regularly filmed, I have the impression. By perpetrators or by bystanders. Everyone has a camera these days, films something like that and puts it online.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of October 25, 2021
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