The story of Peter R. de Vries’ murder arrived as it did for everyone else, on a warm summer evening in July 2021. The light lingered, terraces were full, and the city of Amsterdam eased itself toward an evening that promised nothing but pleasure. In that suspended, sun-soaked moment, De Vries was shot at point-blank range in the very heart of the city. He died three weeks later. The Netherlands was stunned.
Almost immediately, his murder was linked to Nabil B., the key witness in the prosecution of Ridouan Taghi, the country’s most notorious criminal. In the years before De Vries’s death, two other men, Nabil’s brother and his lawyer Derk Wierum, were murdered in broad daylight. Those killings had already shocked the country. Yet nothing unsettled the Netherlands more deeply than the murder of De Vries. It struck at a quiet conviction that some form of decency still lay at the core of the country’s identity, even among its criminals.
Why murder a reporter? Why Peter R. de Vries?
On 4 June 2020, Peter R. de Vries and his longtime friend, the criminal defense lawyer Peter Schouten, stood before the press to announce that Nabil B. had asked them to assist him in the case against Ridouan Taghi. Schouten would act as his lawyer and De Vries as his counselor and confidant. To an outsider, the arrangement might seem peculiar. Why would a journalist relinquish the conventions of neutrality and objectivity to aid a key witness in a high profile criminal trial? Yet to a Dutch reader, to anyone familiar with Peter R. de Vries, which is to say almost everyone in the Netherlands, the decision was entirely consistent with who he was and how he had always worked.
At first, the story seemed clear-cut. A crime reporter is murdered because he crossed lines others would not. The message attributed to Taghi appeared unmistakable: association with key witness Nabil carried a death sentence. The story seemed to explain itself, but it did not. The longer we stayed with the material, the more it resisted order. To add structure felt imposed rather than discovered. Any clean arc began to feel like a betrayal. The story did not collapse into meaning; it metastasized, spreading into countless other narratives.
All stories are ambiguous to some degree and perspective always matters. But this was different. Take for example the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken. De Vries’s book on the case remains a bestseller, long regarded as the definitive account. When we first read it, we accepted it as such. Only later, after reading other accounts, did the narrative begin to shift. What changed was not just the background to the crime, the prehistory that led up to it, but also the understanding of who had done what, and how responsibility was distributed among the kidnappers themselves.
This kind of disorientation repeated itself as we researched other stories in which De Vries played a central role: the case of Joran van der Sloot and the disappearance of Natalee Holloway; the hostage drama in Helden; the prosecution of Willem Holleeder; and the trial of Ridouan Taghi. Each time, the story fractured into parallel interpretations, none definitive. As storytellers, we grew frustrated at first, only to gradually recognise the rare pull of a story that refuses to behave, that will not submit to easy summary or convenient conclusion. Not despite its unruliness, but because of it. Peter’s story does not end with his death. It continues there. Although we have been working on this 4-part documentary series since early 2022, it feels as if we have only just embarked on a truly remarkable journey.