Ijje Wijkstra

Diagnoses

Passions

Vocation

Dutch homicide; the killer of four policemen. IJje Wijkstra was an anarchist, poacher, mason and Nietzsche reader who lived in the small village named Doezum. He was single, but fell in love with Aaltje Wobbes-van der Tuin, the spouse of his friend Hendrik Wobbes and the mother of six children. When she felt in distress, he tried to protect her. After Aaltje’s husband had been imprisoned for theft, she felt desperate, took all her assets with her and moved in with IJje Wijkstra. Aaltje expected that her five under-aged children would be cared for by the local community, which was also the case, but for the law she had committed a crime. In the early morning of 18 January 1929, four policemen (Mient van der Molen, Herman Hendrik Hoving, Aldert Meijer and Jan Werkman) tried to arrest Aaltje Wobbes-van der Tuin for leaving her children behind. Within the hour of their arrival the policemen lay dead in the snow with their throats slit. Wijkstra set his house on fire and fled the scene but was arrested later that day in the Heerestraat of Groningen. Upon being asked why he did it, he replied "they provoked me". His biographer Libbe Henstra wrote: "Eventually IJje Wijkstra would grow into a folk legend as a tragic hero, an avenger in this rural drama where he was brought down by a degenerate mother. Lots have been written and said about this drama. It was featured in novels, plays and in a motion picture." Aaltje was sentenced to a year prison. She died in 1961 in Amsterdam. Wijkstra was sentenced to life long imprisonment in Groningen (April 1929), later to 20 years by the higher court in Leeuwarden. In 1941, Wijkstra who was inprisoned in Leeuwarden, was transported to the state mental hospital in Woensel after a failed suicide attempt. Here he died of tbc. The murder caused a lot of commotion and was seen as a clash between a civilian and the authorities. The history of Wijkstra inspired several authors, including the Frisian writer Rink van der Velde who wrote the Frisian novel "De houn sil om jim bylje". In 1980, Pieter Verhoeff made a film titled "Het teken van het beest" (the sign of the beast) about this social tragedy. The place of verdict is marked by a stone that quotes the Lebanese-American poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931): "Wanneer je geest gaat zwerven met de wind, doe je, alleen en onbewaakt, anderen en dus ook jezelf kwaad". It is an excerpt from The Prophet: "Then one of the judges of the city stood forth and said, "Speak to us about Crime and Punishment." It is when your spirit goes wandering upon the wind, That you, alone and unguarded, commit a wrong unto others and therefore unto yourself." It ends with: "You cannot separate the just from the un-just and the good from the wicked;" Link to Dutch Wikipedia