Murder of Jaqueline Wittenberg

On the evening of 23 September 1999, Jaqueline Wittenberg, a widow, was murdered in her home in the Dutch city of Deventer. Her body was found several days later. Phone records showed that her personal tax advisor, Ernest Louwes, had been the last person to call her that night, though he stated he had been outside Deventer at the time of the call.

In December 2000, Louwes was sentenced to twelve years in prison. The court's central piece of evidence was the result of an odour-identification test performed on a knife said to have been used in the killing, and his appeal to the Dutch Supreme Court was rejected.

In July 2003, the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider the case after the odour test was found to be unreliable; the tested knife was, in fact, not the murder weapon. Louwes was released pending further proceedings. Forensic investigators then used DNA profiling on the blouse the victim had been wearing when she was killed, and the results were reported to again implicate Louwes. In February 2004, a court in Den Bosch convicted him a second time and imposed the same twelve-year sentence.

The DNA evidence has itself been disputed. It has not been established where the blouse was kept in the period immediately after the murder was discovered: of two detectives originally assigned to the case, one stated in writing that he did not know the blouse's whereabouts during that period, and the other had left the investigation shortly after the body was found. Both detectives have faced the possibility of a perjury prosecution.

In January 2006, the Dutch Ministry of Justice announced a new exploratory examination after an opinion pollster and a legal psychologist publicly raised concerns about the original investigation, pointing in particular to the victim's handyman, who had been questioned as a witness shortly after the murder. Louwes' defense appealed to the European Court of Human Rights without success. The DNA evidence was re-examined by the British Forensic Science Service, and in November 2006 the victim's grave was opened after a witness reported seeing the handyman nearby holding a knife; nothing was found besides a small piece of metal. In March 2007, the Supreme Court concluded that the newly re-examined forensic evidence was, if anything, more incriminating for Louwes.

Dutch courts have continued to regard Louwes as the perpetrator. He was released in April 2009 after serving eight years in prison. The case remains publicly contested: the handyman and his partner brought a successful civil defamation suit against the opinion pollster who had campaigned for Louwes, with a court ordering the pollster to pay damages, later reduced from €120,000 to €45,000. In December 2011, a Dutch philosopher of science published a book arguing for Louwes' innocence, and in 2021 a feature film based on the case, De veroordeling (The Judgement), was released in Dutch cinemas.