The Mysteries of Mata Hari's Daughter

No one had heard an intruder but nevertheless there was one in the MacLeod home on June 27, 1899, in Medan, Sumatra. Someone had slipped into the house and poisoned the two MacLeod children, Norman and Juana-Luisa. When their mother, Griet MacLeod, discovered the horror, a Dutch doctor was summoned but he could save the life only of Juana-Luisa - Norman, just two-and-a-half years old, was dead.

Why would anyone poison two children? The MacLeods were a military family, whose patriarch, John, bore the title of Chief Netherlands Military Officer, the garrison commander for the local Dutch Colonial Army. The MacLeods had left for the south Pacific in January 1897 and had lived in various cities of Java and Sumatra, known as the Dutch East Indies to Europeans. John MacLeod, a Scotsman serving in the Dutch Colonial Army, played the roles of father, husband, and military officer. However, MacLeod may have taken on more sinister roles.

Two stories subsequently circulated through Medan. MacLeod was known to a have a short temper that he displayed in his work and at home. It was known in the community that he had given a terrible beating to a native soldier who was in love with the MacLeod household nurse. The reason for the beating was never known. To seek revenge on MacLeod it was believed the soldier poisoned the children. The other version, and believed to be less true, was the theory that MacLeod had made successful advances to the nurse and the native lover discovered this and subsequently added poison to a sauce that was poured over the children's rice. Griet thought that the nurse had done it but didn't know why. The source of the trouble always seemed to point to John MacLeod. No one ever was prosecuted and the real reason for the poisonings was never discovered.

The tragedy weighted heavily on an already strained marriage. The family doctor noted to a writer that Mrs. MacLeod was always patient and well behaved despite insults John MacLeod directed toward her. He called MacLeod "unbalanced," and Griet claimed that he had threatened her with a pistol. MacLeod was transferred to Java and Griet and her daughter lived separately from John in a legal separation. Griet suffered an attack of typhoid fever. By 1902 the marriage seemed to be doomed. The MacLeods returned to the Netherlands.

While Griet realized her life with John MacLeod was over, she was desperate to find employment. Leaving Juana-Luisa with her father, Griet sought work in Amsterdam and The Hague but there was the allure of Paris. She had always been fascinated with the romance of Paris and finally decided she would go there. She arrived penniless and decided to pose as a model after she worked in one of the popular equestrian circuses where she performed a "temple dance" upon the back of a horse.[1]

In only a few weeks she created a new persona for herself that would become a European legend. "Griet," short for Margaretha, would change her Dutch name of Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod to the exotic title Mata Hari (Malaysian for Eye of the Dawn of Eye of Day) and become a colorful, veil-whirling Javanese dancer who would eventually attain notoriety throughout Europe as an erotic dancer and alleged espionage agent.

Juana-Luisa and the False Stories of her Espionage Life

Author Waagenaar rates the most absurd story associated with Mata Hari as Kurt Singer's (Spies Who Changed History) assertion that Mata Hari's daughter Juana-Luisa (whose nickname was "Non" but Singer for some unknown reason names her "Banda") received a letter from her mother just before her execution that stated Juana-Luisa was an orphan. According to Singer, Banda develops into a Japanese spy before the Second World War and an Indonesian patriot during the war, and was shot as a spy by Chinese communists in Korea at 5:45 a.m., the same time her mother was shot. Waagenaar declares that not even the time is correct.

Richard Deacon details the story in his Spyclopedia under the title "Mata Hari's Daughter" citing authors Bernard Newman (whom Deacon calls a "highly conscientious source"), Singer, and Charles Franklin. Deacon reports that Banda never spoke of her mother, went to college and became a teacher, then went to the Dutch East Indies and passed on information she heard from the enemy Japanese to the Allies, fell in love with a Malaysian guerilla who was killed by "communists" before Banda met her fate with the Chinese communists, but Deacon points out there is no proof any of it happened.

Author M.H. Mahoney writes of a spy named Gertrude Banda, born 1905, who was an Eurasian woman whose father was Indonesian and mother had been white. He relates the similar connection to Mata Hari but like most other writers believes that there was no relation between Mata Hari and Gertrude Banda, but says a woman named Banda did spy in Indonesia and was executed by the Chinese Communists, citing Howe, McCormick, and Ostrovsky as the basis for the Banda story.[2]

All of these stories have no basis in fact and are similar to the fabricated stories that writers spun around Juana-Luisa's infamous mother during and after her tragic life.

Juana-Luisa's Sad End

What is definintely known of Juana-Luisa MacLeod, the undisputed daughter of Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, is that in September of 1914 Margaretha desperately wished to see her daughter again and wrote a letter to MacLeod requesting a meeting. Mata Hari's fame had put her face on the packages of cigarettes as well as Dutch biscuits that had presented her likeness on all sides of a tin container.

Juana-Luisa, who had grown into a tall and beautiful young woman with an appearance that resembled her mother's, had graduated from teacher's college in The Hague and spent a year as a kindergarten teacher in Velp while she lived with her father in De Steeg and rode by streetcar to the school with her lunch stored in the Mata Hari biscuit tin. She had been trained as a kindergarten teacher just as her mother had when she attended a teacher's college. John MacLeod was reluctant to speak of Juana-Luisa's mother.

When a friend asked Juana-Luisa what she thought of her mother, Juana-Luisa replied, "I can't talk about my mother the way I'd like to. I have heard so many rumors about her life in Paris, but every time I ask my father about what happened, he gets terribly vague." Though the letter to MacLeod was met with a certain acceptance, no meeting ever occurred between Mata Hari and her daughter even though at one time both were living in The Hague.

Juana-Luisa wrote to her stepmother that while she lived in The Hague she passed by the house where her mother lived and "there were no men around but lovely curtains in front of the windows." In the end there seemed to be no effort on Juana-Luisa's part or her mother's to finally meet face to face.

Nearly two years after her mother's execution Juana-Luisa decided to move to the Dutch Indies and teach kindergarten children. On August 10, 1919, she went to bed planning to take a ship the next day. She never woke up.

She had died in her sleep, and in the end a survivor of a murder attempt, abandoned by her mother, victim of lies about her life, and a young woman forced to bear the execution of a mother she barely knew. The cause of death was never fully understood but a cerebral hemorrhage seemed to be a likely explanation as revealed by biographer Howe.

She was twenty-one years old.[3]

[1] Howe, Russell Warren. Mata Hari - The True Story, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1986, New York, p. 43.

[2] Mahoney, M.H. Women in Espionage - A Biographical Dictionary, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, California, 1993, pp. 15-16.

[3] Waagenaar, Sam. Mata Hari - A Biography, Appleton Century, New York, 1965, pp. 120-3, 190.