The saying, a photograph is worth a thousand words is well and true. One man knows its value more than most, Martijn van Oers, a Netherlands native and photographer, was infatuated with photography from a young age.
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Rather than focus on fading modern-day photography trends, Martikjn was captivated by old photographs and this love ended up allowing him to solve an 89-year-old mystery. A mystery which landed him straight to the police station and to worldwide notoriety.
1.Childhood Passion
This wasn’t just a fading pastime for Martikjn, he had always been intrigued with capturing images of his local town and its people, in a realistic and raw way. It all started when he received his first camera on his 12th birthday.
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Most 12-year-olds would be busy taking pictures of pets and parties but Martikjn used his new gift to photograph an eerie or sinister undercurrent of his town. Naturally, his mother wasn’t too impressed by her son’s new passion and worried that he might get himself in trouble one day and it seems like she was right all along.
2. A Morbid Passtime
You see, Martijn wasn’t like other children. Instead of spending time with friends and participating in normal activities for a boy his age, Martijn chose to spend his time alone, taking pictures of whatever appealed to him.
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He’d wander through the streets of Breda, photographing the old crumbling buildings and exploring abandoned places. To his mother’s dismay, his obsession with what she perceived to be macabre only grew as the years passed.
3. Teenager Years
As Martijn grew up, the walls of his room were filled with the photographs he had collected. From floor to ceiling, every inch of wall space was filled with photographs. But these weren’t snaps of friends, family or bands.
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Rather, they were snapshots of the town’s darker side. A gloomy take on a small town. Some he had taken himself, but others were photos he had found in thrift stores. Knowing now, how this story ends it seemed like there was no better person that Martijn to have come across the fateful camera.
4. Regular Day
Martijn’s hobby of learning the dark secrets of his town had made him a regular visitor of antique stores, where he would often find old forgotten pieces of history that no one cared about anymore.
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On one fateful morning in 2017, Martijn was walking through town when he found himself again at the thrift store close by. He had to be somewhere soon and just wanted to take a quick look and that is when he spotted the old camera.
5. Meant To Be
There, on the lowest shelf, was a vintage camera. But it wasn’t just any camera – it was a Zeiss Ikon 520/2. While this might not mean much to you and I but for Martijn, this was a find which couldn’t be ignored and when he took a closer look, he was surprised to see that it was in amazing condition.
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In fact, it didn’t look like it had been used at all! He knew right then and there that he had to have it. It would be the perfect gift for his wife, who was also fond of old cameras, he thought happily. We wonder if Martijn knew what he was really taking home that day, would he have been this enthusiastic about the old camera?
6. A Thoughtful Gift
“When I came home and gave the camera to my wife as a gift, she was over the moon. After dinner I told her I was considering using the camera to take pictures with since all the mechanics from the camera seemed to be in pristine condition,” Martijn said in an interview later.
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“I normally shoot all my photos with high-end gear. So working with an old-school piece of equipment seemed like a lot of fun.” But little did know Martijn know, that this old camera would be life-altering.
7. Something Inside
Excited by his new find, Martijn began to inspect the old camera’s inner workings. But when he opened it up, there was something inside. “I wanted to see if the camera still worked if everything opened and if the wheels were still turning.
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To my great surprise, there was a roll…” This was rather odd and exciting since most if not all cameras found at thrift stores and antique stores had any old film found removed before selling them. This camera, however, still had the old owners film inside.
8. A Closer Look
Already interested in all things old and macabre, Martijn’s investigative mind was raising all kinds of questions and he couldn’t wait to get this film developed but before he could do that, he had to remove the delicate film from the camera.
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He recounts that he held his breath throughout the whole process with just one wrong move and he would have wrecked the negatives. His hands were trembling as he gently shook the tank. After that, he unspooled the reel again. Everything was going smoothly, so when he saw the faint outline in the film he was thoroughly spooked.
9.The Wolf-Man Of Hanover
Martijn was obsessed with all things macabre, so naturally, he was familiar with the story of Fritz Haarmann — the man who had terrorized Hanover during the 1920s. 27 teens and children went missing from 1918 to 1924.
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Martijn had even read the man’s personal journals and knew he had had a camera, which was a rare luxury at the time. But the camera had never been found and yes, there is a very important reason we are mentioning this little tidbit. Could what Martijn had in his hands be the missing camera? After all, Hanover was only a hop, skip and jump away.
10. Decisions
The obvious question was, did he really want to toy with the possibility that the camera could have belonged to a serial killer? Martijn thought long and hard before he made a decision.
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The thought was terrifying. Worse still, the roll of film inside could be scarring. Should he hand the camera to the authorities? Or should he try to develop them before he did anything too hasty? Was he overreacting? But, in the end, he knew that he simply had to know what was on the camera’s roll of film.
11. Learning More
He looked carefully at the roll of film again. The words “EXPOSE” were emblazoned on its side. “I thought that probably meant that the roll has been exposed and used,” he explains. Martijn knew that the camera was old, but just how old was the roll of film?
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He began to research, searching for the brand of film and the year it was made. And the date he arrived at sent a chill down his spine. “I found out the camera was built around 1924,” Martijn said. That would make the camera at least 89 years old.
12. A Piece Of History
The age of the film made it unlikely that any of the images would have survived for so many years, but Martijn knew he had to try. He called his friend Johan Holleman, an experienced photographic developer.
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It seemed like this chance antique shop purchase was hiding many secrets, all Martijn needed to do was find a way to uncover them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just going to be that easy. Johan told him that it would be extremely difficult to develop the old film, but after some persuasion, he agreed to try.
13. Learning And Researching
Most modern-day camera users might not remember the old film rolls and cameras and we won’t bore you with all the technicalities but know this, that these cameras used a photo-sensitive roll of film to take pictures but when exposed to sunlight, the film and the pictures were taken on it would be destroyed.
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The camera, Matijin had found still had the roll of the original film but it couldn’t be opened and exposed to sunlight, Martijn and Johan couldn’t see if there were even images to salvage.
14. Determined
If anyone else had bought this camera, surely they would have discarded the old film and thought of it but it looked like it was meant to make its way to Martijn who was the ideal person to have bought the film. He was the only one who would have tried his best to learn more about the film.
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But, determined he was. Sitting in Johan’s kitchen one Tuesday morning in total darkness. The duo decided to bite the bullet and fiddle with the roll of film to finally develop the pictures, hidden inside.
15. It Worked!
When the process was complete, both men were left astonished when they saw that there were faint outlines on the negatives. But what images had lain hidden for so long inside the old camera?
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The pair made do with what they had and used the shower to hang the negatives to allow them to dry. They were also getting impatient and hastened the process by using a blow dryer. The faint lines appearing was a very good sign that their little experiment had worked and that they were truly onto something special.
16. The Images
When the negatives were finally dry, the men grabbed a projector to inspect the photographs. There were four images in total. While not the gold mine, they were initially expecting it was better than nothing.
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The pictures were also very blurry but they were still able to make out what the photographer had captured all those years ago. It looked like a woman was staring back at them, like a ghost from the past. She was standing beside a cement pathway running along a mountainside.
17. A Women?
The pictures looked mundane and ordinary, not the gruesome scenes of murder and horror, the pair were expecting. The subsequent photographs were similar to the first, with the same woman standing in the foreground.
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Still, though, the nearly 100-year-old photographs warranted many questions. What was the story behind these decades-old photographs? The men had committed too much time and effort to lose momentum now. They had to find out, with the fourth and final photo provided some answers to the mystery.
18. So Many Questions
The fourth photograph was quite different from the rest and was of an elderly man. The big clue to tracking down the owner of this camera was staring at them. The man had the camera’s carry case slung over his shoulder.
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The men naturally concluded that he must have been the one who had taken the photographs. But ultimately, Martijn’s extraordinary find left them with more questions than answers. Where had the photos been taken? And when?
19. Social Media Help!
Martijn had seen many other old mysteries solved through Facebook and that is where he headed. He posted the old photographs on there in hoped that maybe someone could help him solve this mystery.
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And to his surprise, one of his friends reached out with an interesting photo of their own, and it helped to unravel the mystery a little further. The man who reached out on Facebook after seeing Martijn’s post was convinced that he knew where the photos had been taken.
20. The Final Piece
He sent Martijn a Google Street View of Biarritz in France. And when Martijn inspected it further, he became convinced, too. Then, someone else reached out and cracked the case wide open.
Facebook/Martijn van Oers
A Dutch woman named Marion Jurrjens recognized the people in the photographs immediately. They were her grandparents! And the person who had owned the camera had been a man named Theo Lammers. Furthermore, she knew that he had visited Biarritz with his wife, Elisabeth Lammers-Berveling.
21. The Final Plan
So, the camera didn’t belong to a serial killer after all and while most people would have been relived, there was a small part of Martijn which had been overjoyed at finding a macabre piece of history.
Facebook/Marion Jurrjens
But still, that didn’t mean that he wouldn’t see this mystery through. Martijn knew he had to reunite the pictures to its rightful owners and set up a GoFundMe account to cover the travel cost, and soon, donations were pouring in from all over the world!
22. Reunited
Marion was currently living in Canada, so the trip would be an expensive one but it seemed like Martijn wouldn’t have to worry about cash flow as thousands of people, were just as invested in this story as him.
Facebook/Martijn van Oers
When he had the funds collected, he when he saw Marion she was beyond thrilled. “I love all of the pictures and I would like to keep them all together as that is how they are meant to be,” Marion said happily. “My house is already rather full since my grandfather was also a painter. But I hope I can find a spot to put them on the wall so I can remember this whole event.”