Hans van Zon, born in Utrecht in 1942, killed in and around Amsterdam between 1964 and 1967, and is usually described as the Netherlands' first identified post-war serial killer. Five deaths are attributed to him: two women with whom he was involved, a man he had a relationship with, and two men killed in the course of robberies. He stabbed or beat the victims, in one case with a lead pipe.
He was arrested in 1967 and sentenced to life imprisonment the same year. The sentence was later reduced, and he was released in 1986. He died on May 11, 1998.
Dutch accounts differ on how many of the five killings he was actually convicted of, several of them resting on his confessions rather than independent evidence; the figure of five is the attributed total.