September 24, 2021 - Update at 22:00 Dana Adamcova: New Details, Chat with Mystery Croatia Woman Family
September 22, 2021 - It has been a day of revelation in the case of the mystery woman on Krk, Croatia. RTL Direkt interviews the waiter who took her to the remote spot she was found, and the American journalist who first identified her.
Yesterday, some 9 days after being rescued in a dehydrated and disorientated state with no memory of who she was, there was little information about the mystery woman on the island of Krk, Croatia, despite global news coverage.
Day 10 since her rescue has been an altogether different affair. Two concrete leads from California enabled TCN to identify the woman as Daniela A. this morning. Her surname - Adamcova - has since been published, and details of an interesting past published.
Croatian police confirmed that a 57-year-old Slovak woman was the mystery woman in a press statement, although they did not name her.
But while her identity may have been established, there has been no information on how she came to be at the isolated spot on Croatia's largest island, or who was the first to work out her identity. A lot more light was shed on both these things in a television report for RTL Direkt Potraga on Croatian national television this evening. The key points were covered in an article by Index.hr.
Adamcova is currently in the Rijeka KBC hospital. She is physically well, but she does not remember anything yet. In Slovakia, her family has been contacted, which should ease the whole situation.
RTL interviewed a waiter, Stiv Sviličić, who transported her to the bay with her friend. She had only 100 kuna with her.
"The lady came to my cafe, asking me about a ride to that fisherman's house so she wouldn't go on foot. And that same day my friends and I were planning on going to the sea. And I told her if she would wait for me to finish my shift, I could take her. And when I finished around 3:00, 3:30, we took her there and after that we went our own way, and she went her own way," Sviličić told RTL, which has worked out a chronology of the mysterious case.
The information provided by the waiter was the first real clue that brought the Krk police at least one step closer to revealing the identity of the poor woman who has been lying in a psychiatric ward in Rijeka for days without knowing anything about herself.
"Did she say who she was, what she was, where she was from? She said she was from the city of Bermington (Editor note: Birmingham?) in the United Kingdom, she said the name, but unfortunately none of us can remember, we forgot," said Sviličić.
By morning, she had forgotten him too. Sviličić and his friend transported her from Klimno to Sulinj Bay on Saturday at around 3 p.m.
"She spoke English, we communicated in English. Pretty good English. She didn't have that British accent, but she spoke English quite well. She had no money, so I treated her to coffee.” She had a backpack, a cell phone and a beach bag. She said she was going to meet up with friends. She told him that she had walked from neighboring Čižići.
Asked if there was anything weird about it in all of this, Sviličić replied, “No. No, she looked normal to me, just that she was a little tired from the sun because it was quite warm so she said she wouldn’t really like doing the whole circle, walking. Only a little bit of that, exhausted, but everything is OK anyway, "
She paid the boys properly, took the last 100 kuna out of her wallet when they unloaded her on the pier next to the fisherman's house."And what did she say why she was going there?" "So that she would meet her friends, 5, 6 of them would come. I don't know, we didn't talk too much, she just said she would meet with them, I didn't really ask too much because I wasn't interested, I just wanted to do her a favor so that she didn't have to walk too far."
That was on Saturday, Sept. 11, around 4 p.m.
"On September 12, at 8:30, the police received a report from a citizen that a woman near the sea shore, on the sea shore, was in a place or position in the so-called Sulinj, in the area of Dobrinj municipality," said the head of the Krk Police Station, Dejan Hriljac.
She was mentally in a very bad condition, she spoke English. It was already clear to the police at that time that the lady was mentally in a rather bad condition.
"When the police arrived at the scene, the lady was visibly upset, visibly dehydrated, lost. It was obvious that she was not aware of where she was. When she arrived at the hospital, medical treatment revealed that she did not know hr identity, that she does not know where she was, that she did not know how she came to be in the place she was in. She knew absolutely nothing about the event and the circumstances, added Hriljac.
She was scratched, but without injuries indicating that she had been attacked.
"At first, the lady spoke English with some accent of the Slavic-speaking area. However, as time went on, we got information from the doctor, after all, and the police when she talked to her, that the English was getting better and better. So no more those mixtures of the Slavic dialect, but certainly the English-speaking area, "says Hriljac.
They took her fingerprints but did not find her in the Croatian database, which was expected since there are only fingerprints of persons who committed a crime in that database. So they sent her prints to colleagues in neighboring countries. And as her mental state did not change, the police published photos of her after three days and asked the citizens for help. One of the reports was crucial, and the woman's personal belongings were a mile away from where she was found, in terribly inaccessible terrain.
"So, we received about 30 reports that mostly came by e-mail, and these are people who came from Croatia, and even from America, a few, from Lithuania, France, the Netherlands, so from the European Union. These are people who they know people who look like the person who was found," Hriljac said.
The RTL journalist and the police chief had this conversation yesterday morning. One of those emails, it would be shown by the end of the day, was key to establishing her identity. At that time, the police did not know that yet. The only new thing that morning was that the police, after reporting the men who were driving her by boat, once again searched the terrain looking for the backpack and bag they mentioned.The photo shows the path they took looking for any clue. At least a mile away from where they found Daniela, in terribly inaccessible terrain, they found a backpack and hoped to finally find out who the unfortunate woman was.
"We found her belongings, so the police, in cooperation with the Public Fire Brigade of the city of Krk and the accompanying fire brigades from the island of Krk, repeatedly searched the terrain, which is really inaccessible over a large area. We found her personal belongings, a backpack. However, we did not find anything in the backpack that would lead us to that person's identity. But did you find some common things that tourists have? Common things, towels, clothes, shoes," says Hriljac.
And a completely empty wallet. No money, as she had told Sviličić, but no document. Except for a soaked notebook that revealed the first connection to Slovakia. But nothing personal that could confirm her identity.
"We visited her in the hospital, the police have been with the doctors and with her several times. in order to establish identity," Hriljac said.
."Simultaneously with what I have said, all diagnostic procedures should be taken to confirm or rule out any organic causes of amnesia or inability to remember, including head trauma, brain injury, concussion, epilepsy, stroke or some kind of demented development. In that sense, if we had some real, objective data from some other people," said Letica Crepulj, a psychiatrist at the Rijeka Clinical Hospital.
But they didn’t have info from anyone since in all those ten days no one has asked for Daniela.
"They called from the police station, gave us a description of the lady, asked if anyone had reported any disappearance, if we knew anything about it, let's ask local caterers, local agencies, renters if they have a missing or missing guest. However, no one knew anything. Now, the question is whether she may have been accommodated in one of the cottages in private accommodation, we don't know that part ", says the director of the Dobrinj Tourist Board Boris Latinović.
Did she come to Croatia by train?
That part is still unknown. However, what RTL Potraga published was that she allegedly came to Croatia from Slovakia by train. That latest information began to unravel last night, when the RTL journalist got in touch with a man who is one of the most influential in revealing Daniela's identity.
"Last Sunday I decided to take a break, open a newspaper, see what's going on in the world. I wanted to find something that would take my mind off research and the first thing I saw was that photo and story in The Sun, a British tabloid," says Forrest Rogers.
Forrest is an American journalist and a man who, among other things, helped the FBI detect the attackers on the Senate in January this year. He specialises in searching faces on the internet, but in this photo he was tormented by so much blood on her face.
"I took that photo and removed all the blood using the photo tools I have. Then I got a very good photo of the lady's face. I put it in the face recognition program I have and I was able to identify it with great certainty at a Christmas party in Los Angeles. California."
A mole in an identical spot on both of these photos gave another confirmation. But to make sure it was the same person and, after all, who it was, he got in touch with the other people in the photo, as well as with the staff of the organization where Daniela was at the party in 2014. And that's where he found out what makes it clearer why no one has been looking for this 57-year-old woman all these days.
"It was her second stay in Los Angeles and it wasn't that successful. It was 2014 and 2015. We all have problems sometimes. It was a very difficult period for her. She had a problem finding an apartment and a job," she says. .
She ended up with these problems in the association that published her photos. Namely, it is an organization that helps the homeless and people struggling with addiction. After all this information, it was no longer difficult to find out who it was. Forrest thanks the Krk police for that.
A woman without an identity was given a name and surname. The Slovak embassy will take care of it. But the priority is for doctors to bring her into a functional state. According to Potraga, her sister was also informed about everything. The goal has been achieved to some extent - she is connected with her family. About the case of disappearance, some other things remain unknown, at least for now.
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