De Telegraaf launches podcast ‘Ontvoerd naar Noord-Korea’
New podcast investigates mysterious disappearance of Dutch woman possibly linked to North Korea
De Telegraaf launches the new podcast Ontvoerd naar Noord-Korea, a journalistic search into the mysterious disappearance of Dutch woman Leidy Kaspersma in Ireland in 1978. Nearly fifty years later, De Telegraaf reporter Marcel Vink and podcast maker Marieke Mager investigate a striking scenario: was she the victim of an abduction by North Korea?
Ten years ago, De Telegraaf reporter Marcel Vink first heard about two Dutch women who were supposedly abducted to North Korea. He had never heard of this story before, so he started digging: who could they be? His search leads him to one of the oldest cold cases in the Netherlands: the mysterious disappearance of Leidy Kaspersma in the rugged southwest of Ireland. But how likely is it that a cold case will ever be solved if not a single piece of new information has surfaced in almost 50 years? And how do you investigate a disappearance when crucial sources appear to be located in the isolated state of North Korea?
Together with podcast maker Marieke Mager, Marcel tries to find out what happened in 1978 to the woman from Overijssel who disappeared without a trace. Is she one of the two Dutch women allegedly being held in the totalitarian dictatorship? The podcast follows the investigation into the disappearance of Leidy Kaspersma and the clues that have emerged over the years. Central is the question of whether she became the victim of an abduction by North Korea, which caused several foreign citizens to disappear in the 1970s and 1980s.
Using archive material, interviews with those involved and new journalistic research, the creators reconstruct step by step the events surrounding her disappearance. They also look at other European women who may have been abducted by the North Korean regime.
“We are investigating a completely new scenario in one of the oldest cold cases in the Netherlands, which has received little attention for almost fifty years,” says Marieke Mager. “Our starting point is a single source, but it does not provide the proverbial smoking gun. In the podcast, you follow our search for additional information and for people who may be able to confirm what happened to Leidy Kaspersma at the time.”
In the series, not only the possible link with North Korea is central, but also the journalistic investigation behind a disappearance case from the pre-internet era. The creators travel to Ireland, speak to sources who remained out of sight for years and follow leads that went unnoticed for decades. Ontvoerd naar Noord-Korea shows how a cold case can gain new momentum after almost half a century, and how small clues can still lead to new insights.
