BROTHER,
It breaks my heart to have you locked up, but believe me when I say that I am in there with you. I will give you a life sentence, but I will have the same. A life full of fear, until the moment my time comes. Or, like you say, “When you see him running toward you with that piece, you still have a moment. A moment to think, ‘I wish I hadn’t done it.’” But I did it. I would have liked things to be different, but you left me no choice.
In 1996 you started hunting for Cor. You had Cor, Sonja, and Richie shot at, in front of their house, the house that you pointed out. I knew the hunt was over when I stood next to Cor’s lifeless body in the mortuary in 2003. After two failed attempts, you told Sandra, you finally succeeded: Cor was dead.
In the following years, you wreaked death and destruction on everyone close to you. In 2006 you were arrested for extorting Willem Endstra and Kees Houtman, among others. Not for murdering Endstra or Houtman, just for extorting them. And that was wrong.
Still, when you went away to jail, at least we’d gotten room to breathe. But as soon as you were released in 2012, it started all over. That is why I have testified. Peter would have to go, just like Thomas, who you took care of on your first day inside. Sandra’s son, he would have to go, because he knows people you have problems with. Your sister would have to go, since she wouldn’t give you the money she made from the book about the Heineken kidnapping by Peter R. de Vries. Your sister, who has to flip a coin to decide which of her children will go first.
I have to testify, because I know you will execute your threats. Or, as you would say, “I don’t threaten, I just tell you what to look out for.” The message is clear: You don’t threaten, you execute—that is, you have others execute; you never do it yourself. “You know what I’ll do, right?”
Yes, we know what you’ll do, and we know what you have done. Like the serial killer keeping his trophies, you’ll never let us forget.
I know I’m the last one you expected to do this, just like I was the last to believe my big brother would harm his family so profoundly.
“We are the same,” you often told me. And that is partly true. I can think like you, reason like you, and act like you. That is the reason you are in prison.
But those similarities don’t make me the same as you. Because everything you do hurts other people. And that’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
I know you trusted me. I have betrayed that trust. I don’t like that about myself, but I did it deliberately. I feel I was justified, because you betrayed Cor, and many others.
Your unsuspecting victims let you into their houses and into your lives, let you spend time around their children and their families. And all along, you always had your own agenda. I have had one myself for the last couple of years. I’ve had conversations with you, for years, with only one aim: to document everything you’ve done in order to prove that you actually did tell me about your crimes.
Was it necessary to record conversations with you? Yes, because nobody would believe me otherwise. Everyone told me that if you denied the allegations, I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. So I did what Endstra had wanted to do for years but couldn’t because in doing so he would have revealed his own criminal acts. I taped you.
You know enough now. You know this is the end of the road, because of everything you’ve told me.
You know you will go to prison for life.
To others, I still have to explain why you deserve that. I have tried by testifying against you, but those testimonies lack nuance. To understand who you are and what you have done—to me, to yourself, and to all of us—I would have to explain my life story.
And a whole life is much too complicated to write down in a few testimonies. No police interrogation, not even dozens of them, could capture our relationship, your complexity, or our common reality.
It’s an insane reality.
With you, nothing is what it seems. When you don’t talk on the phone or get visitors in prison, the police think this should be comforting for us. We, on the other hand, get really scared, because we know what that means. You are staying out of contact with the outside world, so that when we are out of the way you can play innocent: “But, Your Honor, I have not called anyone or seen anyone in prison. How could I have given an order to assassinate them?”
If you wonder, Wim, why I did this to you, this is my answer: for Cor. For Sonja. For Richie. For Francis. For all the children who have lost their fathers because of you. And for all the children I want to spare that suffering.
It’s time to stop the killing.
That Sonja, Sandra, and I will have to pay with our lives for testifying against you, you know that. We know that. The only reason you’re still alive is that you want to take our lives.
But despite that certainty, Wim, I still love you.