Eight years later, however, a potential new lead has surfaced. And the new director of the Criminal Investigations Directorate in Uganda has reopened the investigation into Sophia’s mysterious disappearance. Instead of a croc or a big cat, it now appears that Sophia may have fallen prey to the most dangerous species of all: man.
In conversation Marije comes across as articulate and precise. Her gaze is steely and intense, and one senses that she does not suffer fools lightly. It seems clear that this woman would be a very formidable enemy. You can’t envy any Ugandan bureaucrat or official who crosses her, let alone someone who may have harmed her daughter.
However, the next morning at around 11 a.m. rescue workers discovered more of Sophia’s clothing and personal effects. The items found included a small souvenir purse she’d bought in Kampala, which was completely empty. One boot but only the sole from the other boot. A pair of sunglasses and a half-torn thousand shilling banknote.
By all accounts Sophia adjusted easily to life in Uganda, and quickly became a favorite with the hospital staff—in no small part due to her charismatic and engaging personality. “The house where we are staying is fairly big but there is hardly any furniture. In the living room only a couch and a small desk. In essence we sit on the floor,” Sophia wrote in one of her first letters home after arriving in Uganda.
“This evening I asked [the] guys in the house if they could teach me some Luganda. One of them taught me ‘olinga toya’ which means ‘I am funny,’ according to him. I liked having learned this. Then he wrote it on my arm and a bit later I found out that it meant: ‘I am a toilet.”’ “She is always happy and very social, interested in everybody around her,” said Rondagh, who like Sophia studied medicine and is now a third-year student in psychiatry in the Netherlands. Rondagh also said that Sophia was committed to her future in medicine.Her strong work ethic also shines through in her letters home, as Sophia repeatedly shows genuine interest in her patients and true passion for science.
The good times seem to have lasted all the way to the end of the internship, and her last letter home indicates she was in high spirits and thinking about the future. There was no blood on any of the recovered items, leading park rangers involved in the search to deny the hypothesis that an animal was responsible.