Peter Rudolf de Vries (14 November 1956 – 15 July 2021) was a Dutch investigative journalist and crime reporter. His television program (Crime Reporter; 1995–2012) covered high-profile cases and set a Dutch television viewing record. For decades he was famous in the Netherlands for his works in unsolved crimes. He also became internationally renowned for his programme covering the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. In 2005, he founded his own political party which was disbanded soon after.
On 6 July 2021, de Vries was shot in the head after leaving the television studio of RTL Boulevard in Amsterdam where he had appeared as a guest. He was taken to a hospital in critical condition, where he died nine days later.
Early life and career
Peter Rudolf de Vries was born on 14 November 1956 in Aalsmeer in the Netherlands. He attended primary school in Amstelveen and secondary school in Amsterdam. From 1976 to 1977, he was conscripted into the Royal Netherlands Army, where he achieved the rank of sergeant.
In 1978, de Vries became a journalist for the daily newspaper in The Hague and later in Amsterdam. He gradually moved from general journalism to crime reporting by covering major criminal cases in the Netherlands. In 1987, he resigned from and became chief editor of the weekly magazine , which he transformed into a crime magazine.
Investigative journalism
De Vries previously worked for several publications and was an unaffiliated crime journalist from 1991. He investigated the murder of Christel Ambrosius, and revealed that Mabel Wisse Smit knew the drug lord Klaas Bruinsma better than she had previously admitted, before she married Prince Friso, a brother to the king. Another important issue in his show was a found floppy-disk. This disk contained detailed information from AIVD research, the Dutch secret service. It turned out that the service observed the murdered politician Pim Fortuyn; the service that he had sexual relations with Moroccan men.
Kidnapping of Freddy Heineken
In 1983, De Vries followed the case of the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken for the Dutch newspaper . He attended proceedings and sometimes visited the hotels in France where the kidnappers Cor van Hout and Willem Holleeder were being held under arrest.
He wrote two books based on his investigation. The first was (The Heineken Case, 1983), released in the same year as the kidnapping. This was followed by (The Kidnapping of Alfred Heineken, 1987), a novel from the perspective of Cor van Hout based on interviews De Vries conducted with Van Hout and Holleeder over a period of four weeks during his last hotel arrest in Évry, Essonne in 1986. The novel was later adapted as (2015) starring Anthony Hopkins as Freddy Heineken.
In 1994, De Vries tracked down Frans Meijer, one of the kidnappers, in Paraguay.
Louis Hagemann
In 2001, de Vries took up two unsolved murders from the 1980s, namely the triple murder of the Corina Bolhaar and her two daughters in 1984 and the disappearance of Joanne Wilson in 1985. The Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world to have a statue of limitations on murder, which stands at 18 years after the offense is committed, which gave de Vries only a short period of time to expose the killer. De Vries accused Louis Hagemann, a member of the Hells Angels Amsterdam chapter, of the murders as he exposed new evidence that the Amsterdam police had overlooked. The Hells Angels attacked de Vries's camera crew with rocks in an attempt to intimidate de Vries into ceasing the investigation of Hagemann. The statue of limitations expired on the murder of Joanne Wilson before any charges could be filed, but Hagemann was convicted of the murders of Bolhaar family.
Police corruption investigation
On 13 September 2006, De Vries was arrested in Oisterwijk and detained for several hours in Tilburg when he tried to confront a police officer with allegations about questionable actions concerning the inheritances of elderly women. He was charged with one count of trespassing. The case was dropped in January 2007 "in view of the final results of the persistent search for the truth and the results of the disciplinary inquest" into the behavior of the police officer in question.