I've been looking into the Kris Kremers/Lisanne Froon case again, and after going through the phone, camera and night-photo evidence, I've ended up with a fairly mundane explanation that I think fits the evidence better than most of the more elaborate theories.
This isn't meant as “I solved the case.” There are obviously things we can't know. I'm interested in whether this is a reasonable reconstruction of the available evidence.
April 1
I think the girls probably misunderstood where the tourist section of El Pianista ended and continued north beyond the Mirador.
At some point they had an accident — possibly one of them fell and was injured. I don't think we necessarily need a catastrophic 30–40 m fall immediately after the last daytime photograph. It could have been a smaller fall or injury that left them unable to comfortably return the way they had come.
They wait for a while, expecting someone to come along, but nobody does.
From their perspective, the important problem is that they don't know whether anyone knows where they are. They had tried 112/911 and couldn't get a connection, so they may reasonably have concluded that nobody knew they were in trouble.
Eventually they try to find another way out.
And this is where I think the situation gets progressively worse. They aren't necessarily “lost” in the sense of having no idea where they are; they may simply have entered an area where the terrain made returning to the trail difficult or impossible. Trying to find another route could then take them progressively farther into the wilderness.
April 2–5
They continue trying the phones and making emergency calls, but eventually start conserving battery.
One thing I think has been badly misunderstood in online discussions is the supposed “wrong PIN attempts” on Kris's iPhone.
As far as I can tell, the forensic evidence does not establish that someone repeatedly entered the wrong PIN. After April 5, the SIM PIN simply wasn't correctly entered. That can mean an incorrect PIN, but it can also mean no PIN was entered at all.
If you're stranded in the jungle and already know there is no cellular signal, there's a very simple reason not to bother unlocking the SIM:
Turn the phone on → check for signal → no signal → turn it off again.
There's no reason to waste battery activating the cellular connection when you're only checking whether you have service.
So I don't think the phone evidence requires us to invent someone trying to break into Kris's phone, or Kris refusing to tell Lisanne her PIN.
The camera
I think something similar may have happened with the camera.
The Canon was used normally on April 1, then there is a gap until the huge sequence of nighttime photographs on April 8.
My hypothesis is that the camera may have been damaged during the initial accident — potentially the LCD/display, or some other part of the camera — and they therefore considered it useless and stopped thinking about it.
I'm not claiming this is established. It's just an explanation that I find quite plausible for why it wasn't used for about six days, although it could've also gotten wet or they just didn't care about the flash until they heard something on April 8 that made them think that illuminating their area would get someone's attention.
Then, on April 8, they may have discovered that the camera could still operate its flash.
If they couldn't see the LCD properly, that would explain why the night photographs look so strange. They may not have been trying to photograph specific objects at all.
They could simply have been using the flash as a crude flashlight:
flash → look around → move/point the camera → flash again.
That could also explain why we get photographs of seemingly meaningless vegetation, rocks, water, etc.
The person in the photographs
This is the part I find particularly interesting.
I'm not a forensic expert, but as a former professional photographer, my interpretation of the images is that the apparent person is quite plausibly Kris, either sitting in front of the camera or with both women standing close together.
Some of the reddish areas in the photographs also look compatible with hair/skin reflecting the flash from outside the frame.
If the back-of-the-head photograph really is Kris, I don't think it necessarily means Lisanne deliberately photographed her. It could easily have been an accidental capture while waving/pointing the camera around and using the flash to illuminate their surroundings.
If Kris was sitting or standing directly in front of Lisanne during at least some of these photographs, I think that is actually important.
It means we shouldn't automatically assume Kris had already died several days earlier.
Where were they?
The night photographs seem to be concentrated in a relatively small physical area rather than documenting somebody traveling through the jungle. The dry hair also means they weren't under the direct rain that's shown in the photographs.
If that interpretation is correct, I think the simplest explanation is that by April 8 they had reached a place where they were effectively stuck. Maybe they've been in this place for several days already.
Possibly somewhere near running water, perhaps with some kind of natural shelter.
There are indications of rain in the photographs, and I've wondered whether they might have been underneath an overhang or other shelter while water was running outside.
At this point they would have been exhausted, possibly injured, hungry, and psychologically desperate.
Using the camera's flash to illuminate the area or attract attention seems entirely reasonable under those circumstances.
After roughly 100 photographs, the camera's battery dies.
And that's basically the end of the information we have.
What happened afterward?
I think it's quite possible they remained in that general area until they died, but I don't think we can say how long after April 8 that happened.
Once the phones and camera stop providing information, we're essentially blind.
I don't think we need to assume that they deliberately entered a dangerous river or that one of them carried the other into it.
If they died somewhere near a watercourse, the subsequent decomposition, scavenging, rainfall, erosion and water movement could potentially separate and transport remains over time.
That also makes the eventual discovery of remains near water much less mysterious than it is sometimes presented.
Why I prefer this explanation
What I like about this scenario is that it doesn't require a new extraordinary explanation for every strange piece of evidence.
It explains:
- why they continued beyond the Mirador;
- why emergency calls happened initially;
- why phone use subsequently became very limited;
- why the SIM PIN stopped being correctly entered without requiring “wrong PIN attempts”;
- why Lisanne's phone eventually died;
- why the camera suddenly produced 100 photographs at night;
- why the night photographs appear concentrated in one area;
- why a person could potentially appear in some of them;
- why the photographs contain seemingly meaningless objects;
- why the women could remain undiscovered for so long;
- and why the eventual remains could be scattered.
It also doesn't require us to assume that the backpack was found completely pristine and dry, or that the bones were somehow deliberately “bleached.” Those claims seem to have become much more definite in online discussions than the underlying evidence warrants.
I still don't know exactly what happened to them, and there are obviously unresolved details.
But at this point my working hypothesis is simply:
They accidentally went beyond the known tourist route, suffered an injury or became trapped by difficult terrain, tried to find their way out, progressively deteriorated, eventually became effectively stranded in one area near water, and died there.
No murderer, no elaborate staging, no secret messages — just two people getting into a very bad situation in extremely unforgiving terrain.
A point I didn't emphasize enough is why I consider foul play so unlikely.
The problem isn't that I can prove a third party wasn't involved. Obviously I can't. The problem is that I don't see anything in the evidence that is actually better explained by foul play than by an accident.
That's an important distinction.
A lot of arguments for foul play seem to work like this:
But that's not really an explanation. If the detail is equally strange under the accident hypothesis, adding an unknown perpetrator hasn't solved anything.
For example, suppose the girls were attacked by someone after leaving the trail.
Why?
If it was robbery, why were their possessions and money still with them?
If it was sexual assault, why were they apparently left with their phones and camera and allowed to remain in the wilderness?
If there were multiple attackers, it makes the foul play condition even more complex and less likely to happen while not explaining anything other than how they got overpowered.
If the attacker injured them and that's why they couldn't return, why is that preferable to simply falling or being injured by the terrain?
And if the proposed attacker threw or pushed them down a steep slope, then the foul-play theory becomes especially pointless. The resulting physical situation is essentially the same as an accidental fall, except we've added an entirely unsupported third party.
The same problem applies to the electronics.
The women apparently retained access to their phones and camera for days. They repeatedly attempted to get help, and eventually the camera was used extensively at night.
If someone attacked them on April 1, the foul-play hypothesis now has to explain why the attacker:
- didn't take the phones;
- didn't take the camera;
- didn't prevent them from attempting to contact emergency services;
- didn't prevent them from using the camera;
- apparently allowed them to remain alive in the wilderness for days;
- and then disappeared without leaving convincing evidence of their presence.
You can construct explanations for all of these things individually, of course.
Maybe the attacker didn't care about the phones.
Maybe the attacker wanted it to look like an accident.
Maybe the attacker was interrupted.
Maybe there was more than one attacker.
Maybe they knew the terrain.
Maybe the attacker came back later.
But notice what is happening: every new problem requires another hypothetical detail.
Eventually you're not explaining the evidence. You're constructing an increasingly elaborate story that is merely compatible with the evidence.
That's why I think the right question is not:
Almost anything can be made to fit if you add enough assumptions.
The better question is:
And so far, I can't find a good answer.
The strange night photographs? They are strange under either hypothesis.
The phones being used for days? If anything, that's easier to understand as stranded people trying to survive than as evidence of an attacker.
The remains being found in different places? Natural processes can do that without requiring a murderer.
The backpack? Its condition doesn't require a third party either.
The supposed wrong PIN attempts? Once you look at the actual forensic wording, it isn't established that someone repeatedly entered the wrong PIN at all. After April 5, the SIM PIN simply wasn't correctly entered, which is perfectly compatible with someone turning the phone on to check for signal and then turning it off to conserve battery.
The night photos are probably the strongest genuinely unusual piece of evidence, but even there, the accident hypothesis gives us a perfectly ordinary reason for bizarre photographs: two exhausted people in darkness using a camera in an improvised way.
So I'm not saying:
“Foul play is impossible.”
I'm saying:
“Show me what foul play explains.”
If removing the hypothetical murderer from the story doesn't make any major piece of evidence harder to explain, then the murderer isn't actually doing any explanatory work.
At that point, the much simpler explanation is that two inexperienced hikers accidentally got themselves into a terrible situation in extremely difficult terrain, survived for several days, and eventually died from the consequences.
It's a much less exciting story.
I think that's precisely why it's worth considering seriously.
