For more than 30 years, the Dutch public broadcaster has been broadcastingwithout a trace out, good for more than 600 episodes and a GoudenTeleviziering, one of the most important TV prizes in the Netherlands. Themakers look for lost relatives of the participants – often people who wereonce adopted and now looking for their biological parents, or children ofsingle mothers who want to know who their father was. Often the program makersalso succeed in finding family members, which leads to emotional television.
ALSO READ. TV show reunited people with their biological families, but now itturns out that serious mistakes have been made (+)
But now it turns out that the fixer that works for the program in Colombia wasnot always reliable. That came the RTL5 program Scammers tackled on the track.
The man is said to have been involved in at least 16 investigations. They areall now being re-examined. Nu.nl knows that a ‘mismatch’ has already beendiscovered in at least four cases. Mistakes with major consequences. Forexample, a man paid for his brother’s studies in Colombia for years, while itwas not his brother or stepbrother at all. And a woman with a heavy heart hadto realize that the woman she thought was her biological mother, had noconnection with her at all.
Colombian fixer
Now the makers of the program themselves are coming out with Isabel’s story.She was adopted in 2006 by without a trace brought together with herbiological mother. But now, sixteen years later, her dream has burst like abubble. The woman she thought was her mother all those years turns out to be acomplete stranger to her.
Isabel was overjoyed when the team of without a trace found her biologicalmother in Colombia in 2006. ‘After that first meeting, she traveled toColombia twice more, to stay there for a longer period of time and get to knowher mother better.
“Isabel and her brother were of toddler and preschool age when they wereadopted to the Netherlands from a children’s home in Colombia. Unfortunately,the adoption was not a success story and Isabel has always dreamed of Colombiaand hoped to see her biological mother again. In 2005 she wrote without atrace at. With only little data, the search initially came to a dead end,” saythe program makers.
Emotional Reunion
But Isabel did not give up and later came up with the name of an employee ofthe children’s home where she stayed in her first years of life. “This ladywas found and be a local employee of without a trace on to the mother. Thiswoman, Maria, did indeed say that she gave up a son and a daughter underdifficult circumstances. She indicated that Isabel and the older brother areher children and wanted to see her daughter again. The emotional reunionfollowed in 2006 and aired that fall.”
Although contact in the following years was often very difficult due tocultural differences and the language barrier, Isabel met her mother severaltimes and cherished contact with her.
Yet Maria began to have doubts, she admitted. Because their stories or whatthey remembered from the past didn’t seem to match completely.
“Denna was taken from both this year. The result turned out to be negative, sothere is no mother-daughter match.”
Since 2019, DNA research has been carried out in every file, the makers of’Spoorloos’ say.