It was a little past six p.m. on the evening of Tuesday, January 4th, 1994. Eleven-year-old Kim Heyrman and her eight-year-old brother Ken left their home in Antwerp, Belgium, and went to visit their friends David and Natacha Musik. David was not at home, though, having earlier traveled to the nearby town of Merksem to play football. Kim and Ken boarded a tram to the football pitch so they could watch the game; numerous witnesses saw the siblings on the tram and confirmed that they had gotten off at Schijnpoort. After they disembarked, the children’s whereabouts were unclear.
Over the following few days, there were some reported sightings of Kim and Ken; one person claimed to have seen them in a movie theater on Wednesday, January 5th; another witness asserted that the siblings had been in a café on Thursday, January 6th; and still another individual purportedly saw them on a bus bound for Putte on Friday, January 7th. None of these sightings could be confirmed, and indeed, in light of later events, it would seem that the witness accounts might have been erroneous.
Hundreds of volunteers in Antwerp fanned out all over the city looking for the missing children, but for more than a month, they had no luck. Then, on February 11th, the body of eleven-year-old Kim Heyrman was discovered. The little girl had been raped and viciously stabbed numerous times in the neck, chest, and abdomen. A mariner found her floating in the Asiadok at the port of Antwerp, her bra ripped off, her underwear around her ankles. No sign of her eight-year-old brother Ken was apparent.
As Kim was found clad in the same clothes she had been wearing on the day she went missing, it was presumed that the subsequent sightings of her that had taken place on the days following her disappearance had been cases of mistaken identity.
Despite a massive search in the years since the incident, Ken Heyrman has never been found. He was presumed murdered alongside his sister, and he was declared dead in 2004. Ominously, two weeks after Kim’s body was fished out of the water, someone dumped Ken’s jacket in the same area, and several weeks after that, this same mysterious individual also pushed Ken’s football gloves through the mail slot at the Heyrman family home. Though it seems obvious that this person was likely the killer, and that he was possibly taunting law enforcement and the family of the murdered children, no hint of his identity has ever been established.
However, Belgian police did have one fairly solid suspect: Manuel Heyrman, who was Ken’s biological father and Kim’s adopted father. Manuel had divorced the children’s mother Tinny Mast several years before, and had an extremely weak alibi for the time of the siblings’ disappearance. In addition, he also sent a letter to investigating authorities, claiming that the children had been murdered and then thrown into the Albert Canal, a location not far from the actual spot where Kim’s body would later turn up. In addition, Manuel Heyrman attempted suicide only four days prior to his adopted daughter’s body being recovered. Though Manuel was extensively questioned, it seemed there was not enough physical evidence to tie him directly to the crime, particularly since Kim’s remains had been too decomposed to obtain a semen sample from her murderer.
Another person of interest was Belgian serial killer Ronald Janssen, who was convicted in 2011 of three murders: that of eighteen-year-old Annick Van Uytsel in April of 2007, and the double murder of eighteen-year-old Shana Appeltans and her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend Kevin Paulus in early January of 2010. Janssen also admitted to committing at least five other rapes, though authorities speculate he may have perpetrated four times that many between the years of 2001 and 2010.
As of February 2023, Ronald Janssen is serving a life sentence at a prison in Limbourg, Belgium. He has not admitted to the slayings of Kim and Ken Heyrman, and their murders remain an open investigation.
Crime Immemorial 