US exhumation of 'Miss Molly' could crack open case of missing Brussels woman

US exhumation of 'Miss Molly' could crack open case of missing Brussels woman
A DNA test will reveal whether a Dutchwoman who vanished from Brussels is an unidentified woman murdered in the U.S. in the eighties. Credit: Netherlands Police

A recent exhumation in the United States could link together a cold-case murder with the mysterious disappearance of a woman who vanished from Brussels decades ago while pregnant with her second child.

In 1982, 28-year-old Anna Agnes Maria Neeft vanished from Brussels — where she had moved from her native Haarlem, in the Netherlands — presumably taking her four-year-old child with her.

Neeft's family said she fled to England to escape her violent husband. While they believed she had given birth to her second child there, they thought she was in Canada when they last heard from her in 1984, according to HLN.

Years later, the body of an unidentified woman was found floating in a creek in the U.S. state of Kansas in 1986. Authorities failed to establish the woman's identity and "Miss Molly," as she became known, was buried over thirty years ago.

The woman's body was exhumed on Monday in a renewed attempt by Kansas authorities to establish her identity through DNA testing after Interpol investigators reached out about a possible connection between the two unsolved cases.

An autopsy at the time of the body's discovery established that the woman, who had been "severely beaten," had died from drowning, that she was between 25 and 35 years old and that she had recently given birth, according to ABC news.

The tests, which could take up to eight months, could crack open the cold-case murder in the U.S. and finally establish whether "Miss Molly" and Anna Agnes Maria Neeft are actually the same person.

While a DNA match would break open both cases, questions would still remain regarding the fate of Neeft's children, whose locations remain a mystery.

Gabriela Galindo

The Brussels Times


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