[imagesource:interpol]

The woman found in a bin in Amsterdam in 1999 sparked a search by Interpol into the identities of 22 women whose deaths remain unsolved.

For the first time, Interpol has involved police agencies from three European countries in a search for the names and it all started with a Forensic detective named Carina Van Leeuwen, who was trying to solve the Amsterdam murder.

She has been trying to solve the mystery since joining the city’s first cold case team in 2005. In Holland, a case typically becomes “cold” when it stays unsolved after three years.

Frustrated, the detective reached out to neighbouring countries that share porous borders with the Dutch, and to their horror, learned of many more possible murder cases with unidentified women victims.

Belgian police had seven cases, Germany six and the Netherlands nine. Most of the dead women were aged between 15 and 30.

The ease with which you can travel between these countries makes human trafficking and global migration much easier. In turn, identifying bodies is harder when police work in silos.

It can make identifying bodies more challenging, and women are “disproportionately affected by gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual assault, and trafficking.”

In the Netherlands, almost all of the unidentified bodies of women appear to be murder cases.

Detective Carina Van Leeuwen is however determined to find all of them, saying “If you don’t have a name, you don’t have a story. You’re just a number. And nobody’s a number.”

The full list – available on Interpol’s website – includes details about the women, photographs of possible identifying items such as clothing, jewellery and tattoos, and, in some cases, new facial reconstructions and information about the cases.

The body of the Amsterdam woman is now buried in a cemetery in Amsterdam, behind rows of other nameless graves and near a train line. Her marker simply reads “unidentified deceased”.

Hopefully, with people like the detective, she won’t have to lie nameless forever.

[source:bbc&interpol]