Feb 07, 2020 In any event, after all, I do always have my cell phone. But then, so did Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon. Kris (right, above) and Lisanne, 21 and 22 respectively, were students from the Netherlands (incidentally, I’m half-Dutch myself on my mom’s side. Over half a year ago, their daughter Kris Kremers (21) went with her friend Lisanne Froon (22) on a trip to Panama. On April 2, they did not return to their guest house in the village of Boquete. In late June this newspaper spoke for the first time with the Kremers family - the family Froon was there also at the time, but they are nowadays.
Map of the Dyatlov Pass region (sheet P-40-83,84) scale 1:100000 (in Russian) Deathly Urals location draws in tourists; Complete photo gallery including search party photos (in Russian) Some photos and text (in Russian) Photo gallery including: party photos, photos of some investigator's documents including termination of criminal case act (in. Nov 11, 2016 The Map Of The Story of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon. The map of where the two girls went missing in Panama and where their remains were found. This helps to put things into perspective: Notice that the backpack was found at a considerable distance from where the girls started their trip. Over half a year ago, their daughter Kris Kremers (21) went with her friend Lisanne Froon (22) on a trip to Panama. On April 2, they did not return to their guest house in the village of Boquete. In late June this newspaper spoke for the first time with the Kremers family - the family Froon was there also at the time, but they are nowadays.
For ten days, search teams had scoured the dense, Panama rainforest. Dogs, helicopters, ground teams.
But not a single trace of the two missing women had been found.
There was nothing for it but to call off the search.
It seemed no one would ever know what had happened to Lisanne Froon, 22, and her best mate Kris Kremers, 21.
They were both students.
And they’d both saved up for ages for their trip to Panama.
It was to be the experience of a lifetime. They’d study Spanish, volunteer at a local charity and stay with a host family in the small town of Boquete, on the edge of Panama’s sprawling and vast rainforest.
A whole ten thousand kilometers from their home in Amersfoort, the Netherlands.
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On 1 April 2014, they’d been in Boquete a fortnight.
First thing that morning, they had Spanish lessons.
Then, at 11am, Lisanne and Kris decided to go on a walk.
They’d take the Pianista trail, a path running along the edge of the rainforest.
It’s a path well-trod by tourists. An accessible way to see some of the rainforest within a safe distance of Boquete town.
Local guides arrange tours for visitors who like hiking, or who want to spot some of the region’s rare plants or even rarer birds.
It follows a winding river known to locals as the Serpent. And it wasn’t the kind of trail that’d be a problem for Lisanne. She loved extreme sports, had been mountaineering in the Alps many times before.
Anyway, it wouldn’t be a massive hike.
Both Lisanne and Kris wrote on Facebook before putting on their rucksacks and setting off that they were just going for a short walk.
But they never came home.
That night, Lisanne and Kris’ host family raised the alarm.
Local authorities launched an aerial search. Authorities in the Netherlands sent search and rescue teams, too.
Sniffer dogs and rescuers follow Lisanne and Kris’s trail (Photo: Alamy)
Nothing was found of Lisanne or Kris.
And then, in June, two months after the search had been called off, a woman walked into a Boquete police station.
A Ngobe woman – one of Panama’s ancient indigenous peoples.
She’d found something while tending to her crops about five miles down the Serpent River from where the two women had last been seen.
Lisanne Froon’s rucksack.
It was covered in more than 30 unidentified fingerprints.
Inside the rucksack were Lisanne’s sunglasses, $83 cash, a water bottle, Lisanne’s digital camera, Lisanne’s Samsung Galaxy mobile phone, and Kris’s iPhone 4.
Mobile phone records showed someone had made several attempts to make calls from both handsets over a period of ten days from 1 to 11 April.
While rescue teams had still been looking for the missing women.
But out there in the rainforest, the signal was non-existant. None of the calls connected.
And then there was the camera.
On it, a hundred photos.
The first dozen or so were taken on the morning of the hike.
Selfies, mostly. The two young women beaming happily into the camera.
But after that, photo after photo of the jungle. Taken after dark and using a flash.
Piles of rocks, some from a distance, some close up. Twigs and branches decorated with plastic bags. Sweet wrappers arranged on top of a boulder. Sheets of toilet paper lain out across the earth.
Some of the photos were taken just seconds apart. Some, hours. And not a single person in any of the pictures…except for one.
A photo of Kris. A wound to the side of her head, blood on her skin, in her hair.
Investigators couldn’t tell if Kris was alive in the photos. Or dead.
They couldn’t understand why the photos had been taken.
Or by whom.
Lisanne?
Someone else? If so, who?
Authorities launched another search of the area where they believed Lisanne and Kris may have gone missing.
This time, they made a chilling discovery.
A single walking boot. Identified as Lisanne’s.
And in that walking boot, a sock. And in that sock, the bones of Lisanne Froon’s left foot and ankle.
![Kremers Kremers](https://imperfectplan.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Missing-Panama-Girls-Map-kris-kremers-lisanne-froon.jpg)
Scattered around were other tiny bone fragments. Some belonged to Kris.
The rest belonged to as many as three others.
Three unidentified others.
On a rock nearby, investigators found Kris’s stonewashed denim shorts.
The very pair she’d been wearing in the selfies taken on Lisanne’s camera.
They’d been zipped up and folded neatly.
Nothing else was found of Lisanne Froon and Kris Kremers.
The families of the missing women join the search (Photo: Alamy)
In the weeks after the discovery, Panama’s attorney general released a statement saying the two women must have had a hiking accident and their remains dragged out of the rainforest by the Serpent River.
Could they perhaps have got lost, and left Kris’s shorts, took those strange photos as a kind of Hansel and Gretel trail for whoever came looking for them?
It was possible. But not everyone agreed.
How, for instance, had Lisanne’s rucksack been washed five miles down the serpent river…and yet the electronics inside it remained undamaged?
When bodies decompose, they leak fats and grease. Why had nothing of the kind been found on the rucksack, or on the other items found in the rainforest?
What of the unidentified finger prints? The neatly folded shorts?
And if it were an accident, why haven’t more remains been found – big bones, skulls, things rainforest animals wouldn’t eat.
For some, Lisanne and Kris were the victims of a ferocious crime.
Ambushed, abducted, murdered. Their clothes and their remains hidden deeper in the rainforest or destroyed.
But if the pair had been ambushed, why hadn’t their attackers taken the $83 cash, the electronics?
No one knows what happened. Or who’s responsible.
A gang of criminals. Perhaps the jungle itself.
But while the search for Lisanne and Kris’s remains has been called off, the search for answers continues.
In March 2014, two Dutch women named Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon went to Panama for a vacation. It was a reward trip to themselves for graduating and working months prior to save up for the trip. Reaching Panama, they headed for the town of Boquete and was being hosted by a family.
Apparently, they arrived in Boquete a week early. The program administrators weren’t ready for them, and the assistant instructor had been “very rude and not at all friendly” about it, as Kris wrote in her diary.
On April 1st, 2014, Kris and Lisanne vanished as they were hiking trails in the forest around the town of Boquete – near the Baru Volcano. This was strange in itself because they had scheduled for a tour guide to assist them on the trails for the next day.
Witnesses say Kris and Lisanne left the trailhead, just north of Boquete, at about 10 o’clock on that sunny morning. They were dressed in light clothing, and with only Lisanne’s small backpack to share between them.
Nevertheless, the two women made their way for the trails and was accompanied by a dog named “Blue” that belonged to the hosts’ family. When Blue arrived back home later that evening without the girls, the family became concerned and tried contacting the mother of Lisanne Froon, who then proceeded to try to make contact with her daughter, but of no avail.
The following day was April 2nd, and the tour guide Feliciano was waiting for Kris and Lisanne to show up for their hike. They never arrived. Confused, Feliciano went to the host family the ladies were staying at, but they weren’t there as well. In fact, most of their belongings were still there prior to their disappearances, but the two women did have their cell phones on them.
Panic began to seep in, so the police were contacted and an extensive search began. Locals, detectives, search dogs, helicopters and more were scouring the area. The search lasted for ten days, yet no trace of Kris and Lisanne were found.
Two months pass, and a local finds a backpack belonging to Lisanne. To everyone’s shock and horror, skeletal remains were also discovered and after DNA testing it was shown to be a match for both women.
The contents of the backpack: two bras, two smart phones, and two pairs of cheap sunglasses, a water bottle, Lisanne’s camera and passport and $83 in cash.
![Lisanne Froon And Kris Kremers Google Map Lisanne Froon And Kris Kremers Google Map](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GeOPuP9yr24/XihEiECe7BI/AAAAAAAABlE/m6gri-0i-Q4SiLV1WPypw1UyynHvNfIQwCEwYBhgL/s280/10309482_687470967992564_6844297654633241850_n.jpg)
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The discovery of the backpack prompted a renewed search. By August, the local Ngobe people had helped authorities locate about two handfuls of bone fragments, all found along the shores of the Rio Culebra, or the River of the Serpent.
While continuing the investigation, cell-phone logs were released. The two women were trying to make 911 phone calls throughout this stretch of 10 days. Although believed to be a possible accident of getting lost and injured in the forest which therefore resulted in succumbing to the elements, strange discoveries were unearthed.
Inside the backpack there was a camera with 100 photos stored on the memory; taken within those 10 days of their vanishing. Most of these photos were of normality. Two young women who were having fun, enjoying life, their vacation, and simply documenting a moment of their life.
Thanks to photos recovered, we know the women made fairly good time up to the Mirador. They are smiling and seem to be enjoying themselves in these images, and there is no indication of a third party being along with them.
10 of the 100 pictures were taken within in the 10 days. The other 90 were taken afterwards around 1-4 in the morning, in complete darkness. It is believed that these pictures were merely taken with the “flash” button in order to get some form of visual at night, but it’s not confirmed.
These last images suggest them wandering off onto a network of trails not maintained by rangers or guides affiliated with Baru National Park. Such unmarked traces aren’t meant for tourists, but are used almost exclusively by indigenous peoples living deep within the forests of the Talamanca.
Around 4:30 that day Kris was dialing the emergency number. Something was wrong. It was the first of a series of calls that the girls made to the Dutch emergency line.
12 minutes later, another call was made, this time from Lisanne’s Samsung cellphone, calling the same emergency number. None of the calls had gone through due to a lack of reception in the area except for one emergency call attempt on April 3 that lasted for a little over a second before breaking up.
After April 5, Froon’s phone battery became exhausted after 5am and was not used again. Kremers’s iPhone would not make any more calls either but was intermittently turned on to search for reception. After April 6, multiple attempts of a false PIN code were entered into the iPhone; it never received the correct code again.
One report showed that between the 7th and 10th of April, there were 77 emergency call attempts with the iPhone. On April 11, the phone was turned on at 10:51, and was turned off for the last time at 11:56.
The skeletal remains that had DNA testing confirming it was the two women was also bizarre. There was a hiking shoe that still had a foot inside which belonged to Kris Kremers. Also found was a pelvic bone that belonged to Lisanne Froon.
A total of five fragmented remains were identified as belonging to Kris and Lisanne— but the Ngobe had also submitted bone chips from as many as three other individuals.
The evidence was sufficient to make a positive DNA match to the victims, but there were not enough remains for examiners to render a conclusive verdict as to cause of death.
Aside from the bras in the backpack and one of Lisanne’s boots—with her foot and ankle bones still inside it—very little other clothing was ever found. One of Kris’s (empty) boots was also recovered. As were her denim shorts, which were allegedly found zipped and folded on a rock high above the waterline near the headwaters of the Culebra—about a mile-and-a-half upstream from where the backpack and other remains were found.
As of right now, the police are in the state of mind that the two women went off the beaten path of the trail and one of them was injured. Then, the other woman was trying to provide help and became injured herself in the process, which then lead to starvation and dehydration.
Many of those who choose to believe Kris and Lisanne were murdered point to the fact that they didn’t leave behind any obvious goodbye messages to loved ones, as people stranded in the wilderness often do.
All of the photos were taken in a steep, jungle environment, and the timing between them varies from just a few seconds--likely as fast as the camera could fire—to 15 minutes or more. According to the timestamp made by Lisanne’s camera, these images were made on April 8. That means one of the women had already managed to survive more than a week without food or shelter in the wilderness.
So, what really happened to Kris and Lisanne? Will there ever be closure to the families of these women who were taken too soon?
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