On June 20, 1971, fifteen-year-old Cora Mantel from Uithoorn had, by the accounts published since, missed the last bus home after a date with her boyfriend in Amsterdam and was trying to get a ride by the side of the road. Willem van Eijk, who had been drinking and was driving around, picked her up, 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. She had been due to start a new job at a jeweler's in Aalsmeer that morning, and for a while the jeweler was a suspect. Van Eijk said later that he was sorry, because she had lived such a short time. "But I finally had the chance," he said, "and I took it."
He was born on August 13, 1941, in Korteraar, in South Holland, into one of the large working-class families common at the time, and went to primary school in Ter Aar. He was an outsider there, called Crazy Little Willem, a name he later used to explain his behavior. He refused to learn and collected dead insects and dried frogs, and the village knew him for cruelty to animals: he liked tormenting dogs, drowning cats and kicking ducks to death. When he was eight his brothers called him evil in person. He drifted into petty theft and was jailed for a few months in 1966 for stealing lead and batteries. In adolescence he began to dream of raping and killing women.
On August 19, 1974, the body of Aaltje van der Plaat, a forty-four-year-old nurse, was found in a cornfield near Ter Aar, where he lived. She had been stabbed many times; he had cut open her abdomen and cut off her left nipple. At the end of the same road stood his small white houseboat, on which he had painted the words De Vrijheid, Freedom, in dripping blood-red paint. Several people had seen him on his moped that evening near the scene. That led the police to him. He confessed to the killing, and soon afterward to Cora Mantel's.
In 1975 the court convicted him of manslaughter for both, on the reasoning that the killings were impulsive, and sentenced him to eighteen years with a hospital order. The details read out in court were so revolting that some of the court officers vomited. The psychiatric reports described a man badly damaged in childhood by rejection and bullying, above all by women. At the Van Mesdag clinic in Groningen he resisted every form of treatment, for fear, he said, of disintegrating mentally, and was one of the most difficult patients the clinic ever had. Psychiatrists suspected brain damage from his birth, but he refused to be examined. He began corresponding with a woman named Adri and married her in 1980 while still detained.
He was released in 1990. His clinicians believed the marriage would keep him on the right path, though Adri's three children did not and broke off contact with their mother and with him. The psychiatrists did warn that if he were rejected by a woman again, the risk of his killing again was very high. The couple moved to a farmhouse in the Groningen village of Harkstede with one of Adri's children. The marriage soon went bad, and so did he. The village gave him his nickname, the Beast of Harkstede.
On November 5, 1993, the body of Michelle Fatol, twenty-three, from Romania, was found in a ditch near Enumatil. On January 21, 1995, Annelies Reinders, thirty-one, was found in the Eemskanaal at Appingedam. On July 17, 2001, the naked body of Sasja Schenker, thirty-four, was found in the Slochterdiep near Harkstede. Some months later her clothes turned up close to his house, in a plastic bag weighted with stones and thrown into a ditch, and suspicion fell on the former hospital-order patient. Early on November 12, 2001, police took him from his bed. He soon admitted killing all three women, who, the national news agency ANP reported, had all worked in Groningen's street prostitution zone.
He denied any part in three other cases: Antoinette Bont, twenty-four, whose torso was found in the Winschoterdiep on July 31, 1995, and whose limbs were later found in a sports bag; Shirley Hereijgers, strangled and found in Groningen on May 2, 1997; and her friend Jolanda Meijer, thirty-five, who disappeared around February 7, 1998, and has never been found. Excavators turned over his house and garden at Hoofdweg 167 and found nothing. At least eight street sex workers were killed in the province in the eight years before his arrest, and only two of the cases, Fatol and Reinders, were solved. He had also been suspected of the murders of the student Anne de Ruyter de Wildt in 1997 and of Marianne Vaatstra in 1999, and DNA tests showed he could not have committed either.
His lawyer, Wim Anker, withdrew when Van Eijk became an official suspect in Shirley Hereijgers's death, since Anker also represented her family. Van Eijk then went through a string of lawyers and slowed the proceedings considerably. At the trial in Groningen in October 2002 the prosecutor, T. Wiersma, asked for life. Van Eijk said he still did not know what had driven him to kill the women, that he had never meant to, and that he was deeply sorry; he had told investigators he killed each of them on impulse, and his lawyer, B. Ficq, argued for three counts of manslaughter. The prosecutor answered that strangling takes time, that every victim had fought back, and that he had had time to stop; Van Eijk replied that if he had stopped, they might have gone to the police. After the first killings, the court heard, he had made halfhearted attempts to warn his family doctor that he feared he would kill again. He refused to cooperate with a behavioral examination for fear of another hospital order, and two psychiatrists working from the file called him a psychopath with a very high risk of reoffending, of diminished responsibility and with no prospect of successful treatment. On November 7, 2002, the court in Groningen sentenced him to life. At the appeal in Leeuwarden he said his by then former wife had known about the killing of Annelies Reinders and had blackmailed him with it; the court refused to hear her. The appeal court imposed life again, holding the killing of Sasja Schenker to be murder and the other two manslaughter. In March 2005 the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal, which had rested on his not being allowed to see the videotapes of his police interviews.
In 2005 a fishing friend of his approached Sytze van der Zee, a former editor of Het Parool who had already written a book about Koos Hertogs, and asked him to write about Van Eijk. Van der Zee held some thirty conversations with him for the book De anatomie van een seriemoordenaar. At the first, a guard warned him to keep the table between them: the man was a monster and could kill him within thirty seconds, before he reached the alarm. Van Eijk showed no remorse. Only the bloody killing of Aaltje van der Plaat was hard for him to talk about; he saw himself as a clean killer and the carnage as beneath him. "I am a hunter," he said. "I know how to kill." He told Van der Zee he had killed five people, two first and then three more, and would not discuss the others. He died in the prison at Vught on June 19, 2019, aged seventy-seven.