Guilty verdict in parachute murder
Els Clottemans, the 26-year-old primary school teacher accused of murdering a love rival by sabotaging her parachute, was last week found guilty by a jury in Tongeren. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Els Clottemans is sentenced to 30 years, amid much criticism of the case
The three-week trial attracted wide-spread attention, including from the foreign press because of its love- triangle aspect and because it is reportedly the world's first skydiving murder. Clottemans was alleged to have cut the cords on Els Van Doren's parachute, causing her to fall to her death in November of 2006.
Among evidence brought to court was a video of the fatal fall made by a camera on Van Doren's helmet. A parachute expert offered testimony that came as a surprise to the public: the sabotage was not actually enough to be fatal: Van Doren's main chute failed to open, but the reserve was undamaged and should have opened. Instead, it became entangled in her strapping and, despite her struggles, she was unable to free it on time.
The trial was also notable for the complete lack of forensic evidence. Clottemans was in the end convicted on the basis that she was, as the victim's lawyer, Jef Vermassen, said, the only one who could have done it. She alone had a motive, he said in his closing statements.
Van Doren was involved in an extra-marital relationship with another member of the parachute club, Marcel Somers, while Somers was also occasionally seeing Clottemans. The desire to remove Van Doren from the picture, the prosecution said, led Clottemans to commit the murder. However, there was no physical evidence linking her directly to the crime.
The public prosecutor pointed out that the defence had not offered any ideas as to who might have cut the cords if it wasn't Clottemans. Critics argue that this ignores several suggestions made by the defence and goes against the principle that it is the task of the state, not defence lawyers, to identify suspects.
Observers in the verdict were surprised by the extent to which the jury followed the line of the Van Doren family's lawyer, Vermassen, in listing the reasons for their decision.
According to Freddy Mortier, an ethicist at Ghent University, the prosecution did not prove Clottemans guilt. A whole other set of circumstances, he said, could be chosen from all of the facts of the case and made to fit another suspect - who would also not necessarily be guilty.
Others pointed out that, considering the availability of forensic science techniques, the lack of any evidence in the Clottemans case shows either an incompetent criminal enquiry - from which no-one should be found guilty - or a criminal mastermind, able to foil the best that investigative science has to offer.
Police revealed that they had quickly excluded as suspects both Somers and Van Doren's husband, Jan De Wilde. De Wilde had no motive, they said, because he only found out about his wife's affair after her death. De Wilde's ignorance of his wife's affair is reportedly supported only by his own statements. Police also found that Somers had no motive for the killing. But neither man was investigated fully.
The defence decided this week to appeal the verdict to the Cassation court, but that rules only on procedural questions. Unusually in Belgium, a verdict of an assizes court cannot be appealed to a higher instance. The chances of success are somewhat slim, since everything seems to have gone according to Belgian law.
Another option is an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where Belgium has already been criticised for allowing interrogations of suspects with no legal representation. Portions of the 110 hours of such interrogations of Clottemans in this case were used as evidence in court.
