Philipsburg:--- The prosecutor's office has decided that they would have to place the murder investigation of Leta Cordes into their cold files for the lack of evidence.Chief Prosecutor Hans Mos told reporters on Friday that his office has done all they could to bring the perpetrator that is responsible for the disappearance of the 47 year old woman to justice but they were unable to do so for the lack of evidence.
Mos said they had someone in custody for the Cordes case but that person had to be released due to the lack of evidence. "In our system we have to prove that the person that is charged with such a crime is in fact the person that committed the crime, and in this case we did not have that hard evidence that is needed."
The chief prosecutor said while they have decided to place the case into their cold files at this stage, should they get new information they can always reopen the case.
The Chief Prosecutor said one of the set backs the police and his office are having is that people are just afraid to come forward and tell the police what they know about heinous crimes. He gave an example on the Afoo murder investigation which he said is on camera. Mos said that murder was committed by youngsters but people are not coming forward with information that would lead them to the killers.
Another example, Mud and Mos gave was the Julot murder case which they are still trying to solve. They said the first ever TKO team was set up in this case with 25 officers who tried to do every single thing to find the killer or killers but that too did not happen. Mos said only some months ago St. Maarten was able to get some more people to work in its forensic department. "It has been years we had only one person who was processing all the murder scenes and sending the evidence to the Netherlands. Today, that department has been beefed up with more people but we still cannot process finger prints. We have taken thousands of finger prints but we cannot process them because the license for the program was never paid." Mos said.
Mos said last year the prosecutor's office and the police were able to solve at least 40% of the murder cases, while in 2008 that was not possible. He said their aim is to solve all crimes committed on St. Maarten but they have not reached that point yet.
