Sebilla Alida Johanna Niemands was thirty-two years old in late October of 1959. She had worked as a prostitute for most of her adult life after leaving an unhappy household and striking out on her own as a teenager. Though her dark, curly hair would eventually earn her the nickname Dark Molly, for some reason this appellation would later morph into Blonde Dolly, the name under which she is most popularly known.
Dolly owned her own home in the Hague in the Netherlands, and entertained clients by night while doing charity work and appreciating the arts by day. On Friday night, October 30th, she was presumably working as she was most nights, but this particular evening was evidently to be her last.
No one noticed that Dolly wasn’t around until after the weekend had ended. On Monday, November 2nd, a friend of hers dropped by the house, and became concerned when she noticed that the window blinds were still drawn, and that Dolly’s dog was desperately whining and barking from inside the locked home. The friend summoned the police.
Two officers arrived in short order, and upon breaking into the house, they discovered Dolly, dead under the covers in her own bed, significantly not the bed she used for business. There was no sign of violence on the body, and at first investigators believed that she had simply died of natural causes. However, after an autopsy was performed, it was determined that she had actually been strangled, and authorities commenced a murder investigation.
It seemed apparent from the beginning that robbery had not been the motive for the crime. Dolly was an exceptionally wealthy woman, owning several houses and even keeping a stash of gold coins under a floorboard in her bedroom, but nothing whatsoever was taken from the house, and it did not even appear that anyone had attempted to find anything worth stealing.
Police were not short of suspects, as any number of Dolly’s clients could have been her killer; but further than that, the solving of the case proved somewhat daunting.
A promising suspect emerged in the form of Dolly’s bodyguard, known as Gerard V., who she had hired after another local prostitute named Marietje was murdered. Gerard was reportedly in love with Dolly, even to the extent of telling his relatives that he was engaged to marry her, but in reality Dolly had spurned his advances.
Authorities also found it telling that Gerard, who had been present in the house when the body was taken away, allegedly told another person later that Dolly had been strangled, even though investigators at that time were still operating under the assumption that she had died of natural causes. Gerard was subsequently arrested, but was eventually released when no solid evidence could be found connecting him to the crime.
Investigators next focused on Dolly’s “little blue book,” in which she had written the names of all of her clients, some of whom, not surprisingly, were rather prominent individuals. The existence of this book and the tantalizing hints of the names it contained fueled much speculation about police being forced to botch the investigation in order to protect some powerful man who did not want his association with Dolly made public.
Proponents of these conspiracy theories pointed to the fact that Dolly’s house had an unusual level of security for the time, including alarms, and also that the head of the police force in the Hague investigated her murder personally, which seemed odd since Dolly was “only” a sex worker.
Even further out there were the whispers that one of her clients had been a Russian spy who had killed her after she had learned a little too much information about him, though there was next to no evidence to support this particular claim. In the end, all the hypothesizing and rumor-mongering in the world failed to solve the mysterious murder of Blonde Dolly.
In 2011, a journalist named Casper Postmaa, who had studied the case for seven years, published a book about the crime in which he argued that bodyguard Gerard V. had been the killer all along. Gerard was eighty-two years old at the time of the book’s release, but authorities deemed it pointless to attempt to put him on trial, and the strangling of Blonde Dolly still stands as officially unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 