The unexplained deaths of Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon, who disappeared while hiking in Panama, is made especially unnerving by the evidence discovered during the search for the girls. The two dutch students were looking forward to volunteering with children and learning spanish during their trip to Panama, but did not get the chance to do either. On the 1st of April 2014 they set off into the forests around Baru Volcano, and were never seen alive again.
After the pair failed to attend a pre-arranged appointment on the 2nd of April the local police were alerted to their disappearance. The search involved aerial searches of the forest and enlisting local farmers and tribesmen to comb the local areas. As the days passed and the search continued to turn up nothing, special forces with dog units and detectives from the netherlands became involved.
Approximately 10 weeks after the search had started a Ngobe woman stumbled across a discarded backpack while she was tending to her rice paddy. The backpack contained items that belonged to both Froon and Kremers, including both their phones and Froon’s camera. Part of the tragedy of the situation is that the phones revealed they had made multiple attempts to contact the authorities, dialling both 911 (the emergency line in Panama) and 112 (the emergency line in the Netherlands).
The unnerving aspect of the discovery was the time stamps of when the phones were last switched on. The final time Kremer’s phone was switched on was the 11th of April, 10 days after the girls went missing. Numerous false pin numbers were entered into Kremer’s phone after the 7th of April, with no successful attempts. 77 emergency phone calls were placed by this phone between the 7th and 11th of April, before the phone was turned off and never switched on again.
The photographs taken on Froon’s camera add to the sinister mystery. There are photograph’s taken on the 1st of April, showing the girls on their hike, enjoying the views and the sun. Then there are a collection of photographs taken on the 8th of April, these were all taken between the hours of 01:00 and 04:00 am, at a rate of one taken every 2 minutes. They show the jungle in pitch black darkness, In one photograph Kremer’s head appears to be visible, with blood staining her temple.
The bodies of the two women were discovered two weeks after the backpack was uncovered. Their bones were scattered along long distances of a river bank, Froon’s foot was found still inside her boot, while Kremer’s jean shorts were found neatly folded on a rock a few kilometres away from where the backpack and bones were found. Froon’s bones were discovered with some skin still attached to them, however Kremer’s bones appeared to have been bleached.
What happened to the two students remains unexplained, and their cause of death is unknown.