On December 12, 1967, a young man came to the home of Elisabeth "Dora" Woortmeijer on the Haverstraat in Utrecht, struck the sixty-six-year-old widow on the head with a lead pipe, and left with her savings, believing he had killed her. She lived. When she had recovered enough to talk to the police she picked him out from photographs: the young friend of one of her former lovers, the Utrecht criminal Arnoldus Rietbergen. Hans van Zon was arrested the next day, December 13. Within three days he had confessed to four murders, and the Dutch press soon had its trial of the century.
Johannes Marinus van Zon grew up in Rotsoord, a working-class quarter of Utrecht, and was remembered there as a neat, well-spoken charmer in a three-piece suit who could not hold a job; accounts describe him losing several for petty theft. His birth date is reported as March 6, 1941, and as April 20, 1942. The newspaper obituaries of 1998 gave 1941, and his age at arrest, twenty-six, fits that year. By his mid-twenties he was living off women.
In 1967 he was being kept by Caroline Gigli, a forty-seven-year-old Italian woman, while conducting an affair with Coby van der Voort, thirty-seven, of Amsterdam. He made his money selling intimate photographs of both. When he ended things with van der Voort in April, she would not, by his account, leave him alone. On April 29 he went to her home carrying a lead pipe he had made himself and a butcher's knife. By some accounts he first drugged her with sleeping pills. He beat her to death, cut the body with the knife so the killing would read as a robbery, and gave her jewelry to Gigli as a present. Her body was found a few days later.
He could not keep it to himself. He confessed the killing to Rietbergen, a revolving-door Utrecht criminal in his seventies known as Ouwe Nol, Old Nol. Whether Rietbergen then extorted him or van Zon attached himself to the old man as a father figure is not settled in the Dutch accounts. What they agree on is that Rietbergen knew which people in the city kept money at home and where, pointed van Zon at them, and split the proceeds, always keeping a little more for himself.
Van Zon carried the pipe hidden in an umbrella sheath and once inside a pastry roll, and for the robberies he also built a hollow stick with a switchblade fitted to it. On May 31, 1967, he called on Jan Donse, eighty, a disabled man who ran a party-supply shop called Cupido in Utrecht, beat him with the pipe and robbed him; Donse died of his injuries. On August 12 he robbed and beat to death Reijer de Bruijn, a dairyman who lived alone, for a few hundred guilders. The third target, Dora Woortmeijer, was one of Rietbergen's own former lovers, and he knew she always kept a good deal of money at home and in her bag.
The trial was held at the Utrecht courthouse on the Hamburgerstraat in February and March 1969, before national and foreign reporters who called him the beast-man. The prosecutor, Somerwil, told the court that the Netherlands had never in peacetime seen a man as dangerous. Van Zon was convicted of the murder of van der Voort, the robbery-killings of Donse and de Bruijn, and the attack on Woortmeijer, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with TBR, detention at the state's disposal for psychiatric treatment. Most sources date the verdict to March 11, 1969; others give March 1970. Rietbergen was tried alongside him and received seven years.
Two earlier deaths have followed van Zon ever since, and he was never charged with either. Elly Segov was killed in July 1964 in what the police regarded as a sex murder; by the usual account she had spent the evening with him. Claude Berkeley, an English film director who was openly gay in the Amsterdam of the mid-1960s, was killed in 1965, and most accounts describe van Zon as having been involved with him. He confessed to both and then withdrew the confessions, reportedly saying that what he knew had come to him in psychic visions. The police never found enough to bring either case to court, so the figure of five that recurs in published accounts rests on his own retracted word.
He was held at the Utrecht psychiatric observation clinic now called the Pieter Baan Centrum, where he began a relationship with a therapist and social worker, Riet van der Brink, and married her in 1974. His life sentence was commuted to twenty-eight and a half years, a third of which was remitted for good behavior, and he was released in 1986. He lived out his last years with Riet in Wirdum and then in Delfzijl, recognized wherever he went and drinking heavily. He died in Delfzijl on May 11, 1998, of a stomach or esophageal hemorrhage, at fifty-seven, or fifty-six if the 1942 birth date is right. He had once described himself as the biggest bastard in the world.