Dora Woortmeijer was supposed to die. A man had come to her door, hit her with a lead pipe and left her on the floor believing she was dead. She was a widow and a former lover of the Utrecht criminal who had sent him, and she recovered well enough to give the police his name. Without that the Dutch police would have had a dead shopkeeper, a dead milkman, a woman bludgeoned in her own home in Amsterdam, and no reason to connect any of them.
Johannes Marinus van Zon was born in Utrecht on April 20, 1942, and was remembered by the people around him as a neat, intelligent, charming young man who could not hold a job. Accounts describe him losing several for petty theft. 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 a relationship with Coby van der Voort, who was thirty-seven. He made money selling pornographic photographs of both of them. The arrangement held until April, when van der Voort ended things and, by his account, would not leave him alone.
On April 29 he went to her house with a lead pipe he had made himself and beat her to death with it. Then he arranged the scene. He mutilated the body so the killing would read as a robbery gone wrong, took her jewelry, and gave it to Gigli.
He could not keep it to himself. He told Arnoldus Rietbergen, a Utrecht criminal in his seventies known across the city as Ouwe Nol, Old Nol. Whether Rietbergen then extorted him or whether van Zon had latched onto him as a father figure is not settled in the Dutch accounts, and it is the most interesting unanswered question in the case. What is not in doubt is what followed: Rietbergen began directing him, and the two of them split the proceeds.
Van Zon built a weapon for the work, a hollow stick with a switchblade fitted into it. Rietbergen sent him to two robberies and an attempted third. Jan Donse was eighty and kept a shop selling party supplies; he was known locally as Uncle Cupid. Reijer de Bruijn was a milkman. Both were killed for money and jewelry that a man in his seventies took a share of.
The third was Dora Woortmeijer, and she was Rietbergen’s own former lover, which tells you something about the arrangement. Van Zon struck her with the pipe and left. She survived, identified him, and the case collapsed inward from there. He was arrested on December 13; Dutch and English accounts give the year as 1967 and as 1970, and the record available here does not settle it.
He was convicted of three murders and one attempted murder. Rietbergen was tried too, and received seven years.
Two earlier deaths have followed van Zon ever since and he was never charged with either. Elly Hager-Segov was stabbed in July 1964, and by the usual account she had spent the evening with him and was killed after refusing his further advances. Claude Berkeley, an English-born film director who was openly gay in the Amsterdam of the mid-1960s, died in 1965; van Zon is described in most accounts as having been involved with him.
He confessed to both and then withdrew the confessions, reportedly claiming that what he knew of the two killings had come to him in psychic visions. No court tested either claim. That leaves the arithmetic of this case in an unusual place: three deaths established in court, two more carried by a confession he took back, and a total of five that appears in almost every published account of him and rests on his own retracted word.
His life sentence was commuted to twenty-eight and a half years and he was released in 1986, which is short of the commuted term and is not explained in the sources available here. He died at Delfzijl, in Groningen, on May 11, 1998, at fifty-six.
He is usually described as the first identified serial killer in the post-war Netherlands, and the description is defensible if the two uncharged deaths are included and doubtful if they are not. What the established part of the case actually shows is narrower and stranger than a body count: a young man who killed a woman he had been living off, told the wrong person, and then spent the rest of that year working as an instrument for a pensioner who had found a use for him.