Willem van Eijk was born on August 13, 1941 in Korteraar, a village in South Holland, into a working-class family in an occupied country. He was first imprisoned in 1966, for a few months, for stealing lead and batteries. Accounts of his own explanation describe the collapse of a relationship, then dreams in which he killed women, and then the dreams acted out.
On June 20, 1971 he had been drinking in Amsterdam and was driving around when he saw fifteen-year-old Cora Mantel trying to hitch a lift home to Uithoorn, having missed the last bus. He drove her into the polder, raped her, strangled her with her own scarf, and left her in a ditch. She was found the next day and identified by an inscription in her watch. The case stayed open for years.
On August 19, 1974 the body of Aaltje van der Plaat, forty-three, was found in a cornfield beside a road. She had been stabbed repeatedly and mutilated.
He was arrested and confessed to both. In 1975 the court convicted him of manslaughter rather than murder, on the reasoning that both killings were impulsive rather than premeditated, and sentenced him to eighteen years with a hospital order. The details read out in court were such that some of the court staff were physically sick. He was sent to the Van Mesdag clinic in Groningen, where reporting says he refused to take part in therapy. He began a correspondence with a woman named Adri and married her in 1980 while still detained.
He was released in 1990. His clinicians took the view that the marriage would keep him stable. The psychiatric reports also carried a warning: if he were rejected by a woman again, the risk of him repeating was very high. He and his wife moved to the village of Harkstede in Groningen, which is where his nickname comes from.
Michelle Fatol was strangled in 1993, Annelies Reinders in 1995, and Sasja Schenker in 2001. All three were street sex workers in Groningen. Schenker's clothing was found close to his house, which turned suspicion onto a man who had been released from a hospital order, and police searching his home found the rope. He was taken from his bed early on November 12, 2001 and confessed once he was told what had been found.
The court in Groningen sentenced him to life on November 7, 2002. On appeal the killing of Sasja Schenker was held to be murder and the other two manslaughter.
At least eight street sex workers were killed in the province of Groningen in the eight years before his arrest, and only two of those cases were ever solved. He was investigated over Shirley Hereijgers, Antoinette Bont and Jolanda Meijer, and nothing was ever proved; he denied all three. He was also a suspect in the murders of the student Anne de Ruyter de Wildt in 1997 and of Marianne Vaatstra in 2000, and DNA testing showed he could not have committed either.
He died in the prison at Vught on June 19, 2019, aged seventy-seven. No cause of death was given. The journalist Sytze van der Zee, who interviewed him twenty-five times in prison, wrote the book that fixed the name the Beast of Harkstede to him; the Dutch press also called him the Dutch Jack the Ripper.