The sun is shining and the beer is flowing freely. The thousand visitors to the FreezeForze Beach Fest in It Sylersplak recreation park in the village of De Westereen will not only see De Kast perform, but will also be served metal, rock ‘n’ roll and dance this Saturday in July 2017.
After having barbecued on a friend’s boat, 37-year-old Tjeerd van Seggeren joins the Frisian party around 7 p.m. Van Seggeren runs a successful online store for motorcycle parts – opvoeren.nl – and lives with his wife Jessica and their three children, aged eight, eleven and twelve, in Kollumerzwaag, a village of three thousand inhabitants. At the insistence of his wife, he decides last minute to go to the festival. The couple texts back and forth that night. “Love you,” Jessica sends. “Make me beautiful for you. Call me when I need to come pick you up tonight/night.” Van Seggeren sends back a smiley with bulging heart eyes.
The following morning, around half past ten, Tjeerd van Seggeren is found dead in a meadow a few hundred meters from the festival site, his pants low on his hips and boxer shorts half down. He has a complex skull roof and skull base fracture, multiple brain contusion, shattered nose and broken jaw, the medical examiner noted. A few yards away in the grass are his wallet and phone.
The police in the north of the Netherlands are coming out en masse and setting up a Large-Scale Investigation Team to investigate Van Seggeren’s death. The investigation of this special investigative team is given the name Fogelsang, after the road on which the meadow is located where the entrepreneur is found. The team is investigating four scenarios, according to the criminal file. Was Van Seggeren in the wrong place at the wrong time? Was he hit? Was there a criminal conflict? Or is it ‘partner killing’?
The latter scenario is soon deemed the most likely. While Van Seggeren is still dead in the grass, a man at the barrier is told by a man that -Tjeerd and his wife were having marital problems. In interrogations, relatives of Van Seggeren soon tell the police that they think Jessica B. is behind the murder.
monetary gain
The investigation finds that B. had a clear motive: monetary gain. The couple did indeed have marital problems and as a last resort followed couples therapy at their church in De Westereen. A divorce was emphatically on the table. But because of the prenuptial agreement, Jessica wouldn’t get a red cent. It was different with Van Seggeren’s death. In addition to the home and online store, she would then be entitled to EUR 600,000 from the life insurance policy.
In the months after the murder, the circumstantial evidence against B. piles up. She was present at the crime scene, around half past twelve in the morning, to pick up her husband (in vain). She erased all kinds of WhatsApp messages from the days before the murder and she cleaned her Mercedes thoroughly the day after the murder.
It also appears that B. made an appointment before the murder at a clinic for a breast augmentation, while the family would be on holiday in Malta. During witness interrogations, the police heard that Van Seggeren expressed the suspicion in his environment that B. tried to poison him. Her online search history then shows that B. searched for the poisonous foxglove around that time. Despite the cleaning, the police find some tiny blue paint particles in the Mercedes. They match the alkyd paint particles on Van Seggeren’s smashed skull and are believed to be from the murder weapon.
But the smoking gun is missing. There are no witnesses to the murder and no CCTV footage. The murder weapon has not been found. And Van Seggeren’s body is indeed covered by DNA traces of B., but because of their relationship that says little. Finally, B. does not make a confessional statement. On the contrary: she swears that she has nothing to do with the murder.
Also read: 20 years in prison for involvement in husband’s murder
Despite her denials, the court of Leeuwarden B. in July 2019 to 20 years in prison for the murder of her husband. At the end of 2020 she will receive the same sentence on appeal of the court of Arnhem-Leeuwarden, now for complicity in the murder. According to the judges, the ‘little’ Jessica (1.70 meters, 60 kilos) could never have killed her husband (1.92 meters and 85 kilos) alone and she committed the murder with an – never found – accomplice.
heavy violence
This Tuesday it will become clear whether the Supreme Court upholds the conviction of Jessica B.. There is a significant chance that her conviction will be terminated and that the highest court in the country will decide that the criminal case against her will have to be renewed. The Advocate General, who advises the Supreme Court independently and whose advice is usually followed, states that B. should never have been convicted on the basis of the collected evidence. The Frisian Festival Murder – as the case has come to be known – raises the question: when will there be enough (indirect) evidence to convict someone of murder?
Jessica B. (now 39) comes from Dormagen, Germany, near Düsseldorf. Because of her frail stature, the court considers it “implausible and inconceivable” that she is solely responsible for the “violent violence” with which Van Seggeren was murdered. That is why the councilors assume that B. committed the murder together with someone else.
With whom? The court dared not say that. The police file contains indications that Jessica’s mother may have traveled from Germany to Friesland together with B.’s now deceased uncle. But no one has seen them and camera images or convincing telecom data of their presence are missing. B.’s mother was arrested in 2018 for involvement in the murder, but was released after a few days and has not been prosecuted.
An important witness statement on the basis of which Jessica was convicted of co-perpetrating the murder, reads that around 12:30 am on the edge of the remote meadow where van Seggeren was found, two people were standing in front of a parked car. Jessica says she parked her car there when she wanted to pick up her husband. According to the witness, the two people of the car were walking towards the meadow when she cycled past and one of them – probably a woman – had an object in her hand.
False Statements
In B.’s conviction, three “lying” statements that she makes about the night of the murder also play an important role. After B. and her husband exchange sweet text messages, she takes a short car ride at 10 p.m. She explains that while her children are sleeping, she quickly takes the glass away to the glass container 840 meters away. However, the police and the court suspect that B. is collecting the co-perpetrator of the murder at that time. Google location data from her phone shows that she travels a longer distance than to the glass container: 2.5 kilometers.
B. also declares that after she tries in vain to pick up her husband near the meadow, she drives straight home. Her phone is not on at that moment – and according to B. it has failed. And so no Google location data is available for that route.
Using camera images from the area, however, the detective reconstructs that B. is taking an illogical detour. Instead of the 8 minutes travel time for the 5.5 kilometers home, she is on the road for 18 minutes. And that while B. declares that he drove home as quickly as possible, because the children were sleeping there without a babysitter.
Finally, according to the court, the woman is also lying about the search for her husband. After coming home around a quarter past one, she calls her in-laws in a panic. Together with Van Seggeren’s father, she drives again in the middle of the night to the agreed pick-up point at the meadow. According to B., she frequently calls her husband with her own telephone, but that is not apparent at all from the call history. When B. subsequently states that she called her father-in-law’s telephone, the father-in-law denies this. According to the court, B. does not really call because Van Seggeren’s telephone would have sounded and his body would have been found too early.
According to the court, the lies about the glass container, return journey and calling are all intended to cover up her active involvement in the murder. But B.’s lawyer Niels van Schaik, who specializes in proceedings at the Supreme Court, points out in his appeal in cassation that the Court of Appeal is wearing seven miles. According to Van Schaik, the discrepancies between her statements and the technical evidence can at most show that she is lying about certain points, but according to him those lies in no way connect her to the death of the victim.
quicksand
Advocate General Taru Spronken takes a similar position in her advice to the Supreme Court. She argues that the three lies are “too distant” from the offense for which B. was convicted. The fact that B. took an illogical detour on the way back from picking up her husband, cannot simply be concluded that she was transporting an accomplice and the murder weapon, as the court does.
Even stronger is Spronken’s opinion about the conviction of B. for co-perpetrating. According to the Advocate General, the Court of Appeal has drawn up a scenario that is ‘not substantiated by any evidence’ in important parts. B.’s conviction is therefore “based on quicksand”.
After all, co-perpetrating a crime requires joint execution or conscious and close cooperation with another person. But according to Spronken, it is not possible to conclude from the evidence that the Court of Appeal uses whether there was such a joint implementation or close and conscious cooperation at all and what B. then did.
Because the advice of the advocate general is often followed, there is a considerable chance that the Supreme Court will cancel the conviction of B. on Tuesday. All the more so because the Advocate General undermines not one, but two pillars on which the court’s ruling rests: the conviction for co-perpetrating and the use of the ‘lying’ statements as evidence.
Van Seggeren’s family has always been convinced of B.’s guilt. His parents’ lawyer says that they do not want to be publicized at the moment and therefore do not want to respond to the advice of Advocate General Spronken. Earlier, the parents issued a press statement in which they stated that “no punishment is an appropriate measure that does justice to the death and loss of Tjeerd, son, brother and father of his beloved children.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 19, 2022
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