The 46-year-old Wim S. was acquitted on appeal of the murder of his girlfriend Heidy Goedhart in Kaatsheuvel. The Public Prosecution Service had demanded 17.5 years in prison. The court in The Hague ruled that S. may have been tempted under pressure to confess to murder and Goedhart may have been killed by a burglar.
On December 19, 2010, S.’s 34-year-old partner was beaten on the head with a stone and strangled in the garden of their home in Kaatsheuvel. Their children, two years old and less than six months old, were upstairs in bed. The Public Prosecution Service accused him of wanting to cover up the crime by staging a burglary.
S. was sentenced to twenty years in prison by the court in Den Bosch in 2018. The Supreme Court overturned this ruling and determined that the Court of Appeal in The Hague had to do the case again.
According to the Supreme Court, more motivation had to be given whether and if so how much S. was tempted by undercover agents to confess to murder in 2014 in Marbella, Spain. S. thought he would get a well-paid job at an IT company if he confessed.
This police tactic is known as the Mr. Big method and, according to experts, increases the risk of a false confession.
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