You just have to have the courage. On the day that a seventy-year-old woman from Cuijk was to have her husband cremated, three men attacked her at home on Robijnlaan in July this year. Police said they may have known the man had recently died. They escaped without any loot, but the emotional damage they caused was great. “I don’t dare to sleep alone anymore.”
“He was my great love,” says the widow in a reconstruction in Opsporing Verzocht. “We were together for over fifty years and married for 48 years in May. My husband had COPD (a lung disease) and at the beginning of this year he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Because cure was no longer possible, he was admitted to a hospice. He died there on July 9.”
“He lay in state at home, that’s what he would have wanted.”
De Cuijkse still misses her husband every day. “Especially his company. That’s why we laid him out here at home. I liked that and he would have wanted that too. We had had a nice farewell meeting, but I was still nervous about the next day. The real farewell had to be a beautiful memory.”
Whether the burglars were aware of the man’s death and the upcoming cremation: the police have not ruled it out. “In that case, they are callous perpetrators who apparently assumed that the widow was home alone,” a police spokesperson said in the investigation program. According to her, it is even questionable whether they were impressed by the coffin in which the man lay in state.
Her son and her 16-year-old grandson also slept in the woman’s house that night. The burglars didn’t know that. About two o’clock in the morning the boy was awakened by a noise that he could not immediately identify. The perpetrators entered the house by forcing the front door with a crowbar. One of them entered the woman’s bedroom. Her grandson, who had now noticed what was happening, shouted as loudly as he could. His father then woke up and together they chased the burglars out of the house, shouting.
“I told my husband he missed a lot.”
“This is almost unbelievable. What about the cremation tomorrow?” my son wondered. “And even though I was exhausted before the new day had even started, fortunately everything went well.” The woman sat down with her husband for a moment: “I was in a daze. Why do people do this. I talked to my husband for a while. Like: you missed a lot.”
Sleeping alone is not an option for the Cuijk woman for the time being. “I have tried, but it doesn’t work. Either I spend the night somewhere else or I make sure someone is with me.”
Images from a doorbell camera show the car in which the burglars were traveling. It was probably a dark-colored Mercedes. Two of the three perpetrators appear to be quite small in stature: one is estimated to be around 1.70 meters and another around 1.75 meters. The latter would have a somewhat sturdier build. According to the victim’s son, the trio spoke Dutch with a Brabant accent.
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