By a canal in Amsterdam’s red-light district, one of the “window women” is actually a hologram which Dutch police hope will help solve the gruesome murder of a sex worker in 2009.
Peering through a frame out onto passers-by, a human-sized likeness of Bernadett “Betty” Szabo — in skimpy shorts and a leopard-print bra, a dragon tattoo covering much of her torso — taps the pane and fogs the glass with her breath.
The word “HELP” appears, chillingly, on the screen.
NICK GAMMON/AFP via Getty Images
“Fifteen years ago, Betty was killed in a horrible way and the investigation was never closed,” Amsterdam police spokesman Olav Brink told AFP.
Aged only 19, Hungarian-born Betty was stabbed multiple times in her brothel room in the centuries-old red-light district, known as De Wallen, just months after giving birth to a baby boy.
Despite a large-scale police probe, the case went cold.
During a review, however, police found “promising clues” and decided to reopen the investigation, Brink said.
They hope the likeness of Betty, created with 3D visualization technology, will jolt the memories of people who may have information about her murder.
“Betty was murdered in one of the busiest areas in Amsterdam, maybe even in the Netherlands. It is really almost impossible that there are no people who saw or heard something unusual at the time,” cold case team member Anne Dreijer-Heemskerk said in a statement. “We hope witnesses who may have been afraid before or kept silent for other reasons now have the courage to come forward.”
Waiting for the “golden tip”
“There are still people who know what has happened to Betty,” said Brink, hoping that 15 years on, “people feel freer to share information with the police.”
The initiative also aims to raise awareness about the violence faced by sex workers.
Around 78 percent of prostitutes in the Netherlands have faced sexual violence and 60 percent report being physically attacked, according to a 2018 report by Dutch charities and sex worker rights groups.
Concerns about violence also rose during the Covid-19 pandemic, when loss of income forced some prostitutes to continue working illegally and reduced their ability to report crimes to the police.
In the week since the hologram and accompanying information about Betty went on display, the police have seen “that a lot of people are talking about it.”
“We find it quite special that Betty can bring attention to her case this way,” said Brink.
In the streets of De Wallen, lined with women watching from red-lit window booths, groups of locals and visitors pause and strike up conversations about the unusual display, entitled “Who was Betty?”
Amsterdam Police
Theo, 80, who lives outside Amsterdam, said he read about the project in the papers and “came especially to see it” when he was in the city.
Soyoon Jun, 34, lives near the red-light district, “so it was more shocking for me that there were neighbors who are going through this type of horrendous event.”
For Jun, who works at a Christian charity, the hologram made the murder “real.”
“It wasn’t just information that was given out,” Jun explained. “People could feel the helplessness that Betty would have felt.”
The police have already “received several tips because of the campaign,” Brink confirmed to AFP.
They are still waiting, though, for the “golden tip” that will lead them to the murderer, which comes with a 30,000-euro ($31,600) reward.
“Special way of getting attention”
According to Brink, the hologram is a “special way of getting attention for this case” — including by putting it in De Wallen, which is “one of the busiest places in Amsterdam and probably the whole of the Netherlands.”
This may not last, though, since Amsterdam’s sex workers may soon lose the centrality and visibility of their windows.
The local government plans to relocate the red-light district to a purpose-built centere south of the city in the hope of reducing petty crime and tourist footfall in De Wallen.
The move is opposed by tens of thousands of locals and sex workers, who are calling instead for better crowd control and surveillance in the existing red-light area.
Miranda K, a 57-year-old who lives near Amsterdam and declined to give her full surname, said the relocation plan was a “pity” because she felt “safe” in De Wallen.
She said the out-of-city center would be in a “dark” area, whereas De Wallen has “tourists and people and locals and everything here. So I think it’s safer.”
“For me, it’s not just about finding Betty or who was Betty,” she said, “but it’s about… these other ladies on the streets too.”
Ongoing effort to identify cold case victims across Europe
The search for Betty comes amid a wider effort to solve cold cases in the Netherlands and beyond. Last month, Interpol launched a new campaign to identify 46 women whose remains have been found across Europe in unsolved cases, some dating back decades.
The initiative from the Lyon-based organization builds on the success of the first Identify Me campaign, which last year helped identify the body of a woman — dubbed the “woman with the flower tattoo” — found murdered 31 years ago in a Belgian river as Briton Rita Roberts.
The original initiative launched to identify 22 deceased women saw some 1,800 tips received from the public.
Now the campaign has been expanded to include cold cases from Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as unexplained deaths from new participating countries France, Italy, and Spain.
Most of the women were “murdered or had died in suspicious or unexplained circumstances,” the organization said.
Among the women Interpol is seeking to identify is the body of a woman — dubbed “the woman in the suitcase” — with an estimated age of between 16 and 22. In the autumn of 2005, her corpse was found in a red suitcase lying in the canal in the town of Schiedam in the west of the Netherlands.
The oldest of the cold cases, “the girl on the parking lot,” dates back to 1976. Her body was found along the A12 highway in the Netherlands.
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