A murder victim known only as ‘the woman with the flower tattoo’ has finally been identified as a British 31-year-old after three decades, with the hunt for her killer still underway.
Rita Roberts was violently killed before her body was dumped in a river in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1992.
She’d moved to Antwerp from Cardiff in February of that year and her family last heard from her when they received a postcard a few months later, in May.
Shortly after, on June 3, her body was found floating against the grate of a water treatment plant in the Groot Schijn River, near Ten Eekhovelei, with detectives saying it had possibly been in the water for some time.
She was wearing distinctive neon sports clothes and her most notable physical feature was a tattoo on her left forearm of a black flower with green leaves and ‘R’Nick’ inscribed underneath.
She remained unidentified for thirty years until an international effort to identify her body was launched this year and a relative recognised her tattoo, allowing her agonised family to say goodbye at last.
Rita’s body was discovered near Antwerp’s Sportpaleis events hall in a busy residential and shopping area in the Deurne district of the city.
The river, which runs alongside the A1 motorway, flows from the Provinciaal Groendomein Riviernhof towards a water pumping station.
When an appeal to discover her identity started in May this year, detectives described her as being aged between 20 and 50 years old, about 170cm in height and of a stout build.
She had light skin and mid-length dark hair and was wearing a t-shirt and dark blue Adidas training trousers.
Now that she’s been identified, Belgian authorities are calling on the public to come forward with any information they may have as they continue to search for her killer.
An international appeal was launched which saw Belgian, Dutch and German police collaborate with INTERPOL to try and identify 22 women thought to have been murdered.
The pioneering Operation Identify Me marks the first time INTERPOL has made public some details of Black Notices, which share critical pieces of information about unknown bodies.
While many of the victims’ identities are still unknown, a family member in the UK recognised Rita’s tattoo on the news and came forward, contacting The International Criminal Police Organisation and Belgian authorities online.
However, did her family not contact the police in the United Kingdom so that they could contact the police in Belgium when they realised something was extremely wrong? Did the police not join the dots of the woman’s dead body that they discovered, and why did it take so long?
Traces of DNA on a body that has been in the water for a prolonged period of time erode depending on how long the body has been in the water, so I’m assuming that the body had been in the water for a long time, but with such a unique tattoo, it’s odd that it’s taken so long to identify the body.
I know that if I had a family member that I’d not heard from in weeks, let alone decades, I would be actively seeking their whereabouts, and if a family member has only just come forward then something majorly wrong had happened with the investigation.
Antwerp is a hotbed of crime now, even more so than back then, and it would have probably had a lot of bodies piling up. It’s a transient population with lots of illegals, so I would imagine that she just got logged as a Jane Doe and periodically appeared in cold case reviews and she fell through the cracks.
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