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New leads have been found for a decade-old cold Dutch case after Rotterdam police used a life-sized hologram to identify the unknown suspect. The unorthodox approach has resulted in 300 tips to the police hotline, and 40 men have now been invited for voluntary DNA testing.
In 2010, an as-yet-unidentified man sexually assaulted two teenage girls at knifepoint in Schiedam and Vlaardingen, near Rotterdam, in the storage area under their apartment block while they were locking up their bikes. A third girl, who was also attacked, managed to escape. The offender has never been found.
That was until the cold case team at the Rotterdam Police Unit decided to construct a three-dimensional, life-sized hologram of the suspect.
"This was the first time that we used a hologram to identify a criminal," Elianne Mastwijk, a spokeswoman for the Rotterdam police, told Newsweek.
The hologram was shown on television screens and displayed in a holobox to passersby in shopping centers throughout Schiedam and Vlaardingen.
Today, facial reconstruction is widely used to identify suspects, with a two-dimensional drawing, three-dimensional clay or a computer-generated model. Holograms could act as an additional tool in this arsenal and be used in cases where a suspect cannot be identified using traditional methods.
"We hope that people will recognize the suspect," Mastwijk said. "We think it will be easier to recognize him because it's a life-size presentation of the suspect. You can see him move and can see every detail of his body in real life. Compared to a drawing that we made earlier in the investigation, this is more recognizable for people."
"After receiving 300 tips of who the person could be, we did more research and selected 90 people for voluntary DNA testing," she continued. "We start with the first 40 now, and if that won't lead to a match we ask the next 50 persons."
The selection was based on objective criteria, such as where the men lived.
While seeing a life-sized representation of your attacker would likely be traumatizing for the victims, Mastwijk said that, so far, there had been no negative reception to the technology.
"In our investigations, we're always looking for new ways and technology to solve a crime. We have to decide per case if we use this technique or any other," she said.
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About the writer
Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more