Astrid Holleeder secretly recorded her brother’s murderous confessions. Will he exact revenge?
The “mega-trial,” as the Dutch press calls it, has become such a spectacle that people often line up at dawn in the hope of securing a seat in the small public gallery. Part of the allure is Astrid herself. In 2016, she published a memoir, “Judas,” about growing up with Wim, and about her decision to betray him. The book sold half a million copies in a country of seventeen million people. Although Astrid is now a famous author, she has met almost none of her readers.
Wim was a tall and handsome teen-ager, with muscular arms and a Gallic nose. Like his father, he was temperamental, and the two often clashed; Wim started going out in the evening and coming home very late. He sometimes woke Astrid on his return and whispered, “Assie, are you asleep? Has Dad gone to bed yet? Did he go crazy again?” Astrid whispered back, “He was yelling that you were late. But Mom turned back the clock so he wouldn’t catch you.
Astrid excelled in school, and, feeling confined by the Jordaanese slang she’d grown up speaking, made a point of mastering “proper” Dutch. Wim mocked her for putting on airs. She learned English, too, and found it comforting to have access to a language that her abusive father could not comprehend. Even today, she finds that slipping into English provides an emotional refuge.
The hostages were not released when the money was delivered, but around this time the police received an anonymous tip that led them to the Amsterdam warehouse. Inside, they found Freddy Heineken and the chauffeur. “I was chained by my left hand, limiting my freedom of movement to almost nil,” Heineken said, in a statement, adding that he’d combed his hair with the tines of a plastic fork. “Trying to establish a rhythm gives you something to do,” he said.
While Wim and Cor were in France, Astrid fell in love with an artist named Jaap Witzenhausen, who was twenty years her senior. He was nothing like the men in her family; he had a mild temperament, and was happy to subordinate himself to Astrid. “He was my housewife,” she recalled, fondly. “He did the household chores. He cooked very nicely. He was the total picture.” When Astrid’s family visited and saw Witzenhausen vacuuming, they found it hilarious.
The Heineken family never attempted to recover the balance of the ransom by pursuing legal action against Cor and Wim. De Vries explained to me that Freddy Heineken was traumatized by the kidnapping, and fearful that these criminal entrepreneurs might strike again.
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