'She kept going on and on about that sexual abuse. I wanted her to stop.'
How often he was abused and how far it went remains unclear during W.'s trial in 2001, because some of Freddy's statements are "provably unreliable," according to the prosecutor. Freddy lies, and lies continue to run like a thread through his life.It is lies that cause his relationship with his girlfriend Nancy to fall apart for five years. "He lived in a fantasy world," she would later tell police. He is not violent, but Nancy does notice that the abuse has left deep marks on Freddy, in whom she sees "pain and sorrow in the eyes.
Pain and sadness also seem to be the main drivers of Marita Schoenmaekers' annoying behavior. "I'm going to end it," she shouts through her cell phone to her boyfriend on her last night. She wants to leave him because he beats her, she tells Freddy. And so that night the bartender gives her a ride to Breda in his Lada. On the way, the drunken Marita becomes groping, Freddy explains to the police after his arrest: "She put her hand on my leg. I didn't want that, I had a girlfriend and she knew it."
On the Snijdersweg in the outskirts of Chaam, halfway down the road from Turnout to Breda, Freddy pulled her out of the car. "She hit me with her purse and she tried to kick me. At one point she grabbed my Adam's apple. That's when my fuses blew."
Freddy squeezes Marita's throat until she no longer moves. He puts her back in the car and drives to the remote Kloosterstraat, where he drags the still-living woman into a cornfield. During a reconstruction, Freddy later shows Belgian police how he then slits Marita's throat with two strokes: "Only when I was standing back at the car with a bloody knife in my hand did I realize what I had done."
After the murder, Freddy drives back to Rijen, presumably to the house of his new friend José van E., where the police will later find the knife. Marita's body is found the next day by two boys. Since the police believe she was murdered in Belgium, the investigation is launched there. Again, it is lies that kill Freddy when the Belgians hear him as a witness. In September, he is arrested. No value should be attached to the very detailed confession he then makes, according to his lawyer Serge Weening: "He confessed because he wanted to be extradited to the Netherlands."
In custody, Freddy weaves one lie to another. After first accusing a bar-goer, he later tries to pin the murder on the "known drug criminal John J. It seems no coincidence that this is the name of the former leader of the notorious Juliet gang. Unfortunately for Freddy, this John J. has been in prison for years. Not surprisingly, it seems that neither the police nor Freddy's lawyer have so far succeeded in tracking down this other John J..
Although Freddy claimed that this "John" killed Marita in the cornfield, police found only traces of Freddy's Nikes there. His claim that John has little credibility. Incriminating, moreover, is that Freddy took his old Lada to the demolition yard in Oosterhout the day after the murder. Now that police have found the knife with Marita's DNA traces in his ex's bedroom, the curtain seems to be finally falling for Freddy. That he is entangled in a self-woven net of lies he seems to realize at a good time himself. Thus he ergs to the police, "I understand that because of my lies no one wants to believe me anymore."
