Evert Bieshaar (88) stabbed to death by his wife in their home on Eisingastraat

Evert Bieshaar (88) and his wife Antonia M. had known each other for 68 years and been married for 63 of them. The couple lived a withdrawn life in their home on Eisingastraat in Amsterdam-Oost. Bieshaar's health was poor: he could barely walk, was incontinent and entirely dependent on his wife's care — care which, the court found, she was not able to provide. For a meticulous housewife his decline was a source of irritation. He barely washed any more and in her view drank too much jenever; she still changed her own bed, but no longer his. On the evening of Saturday 10 January 2015, at around half past ten, Antonia M. called the emergency services herself. Officers found her husband dead in the hallway of the flat with a stab wound to his chest. The wound had reached his lung, and because he was on blood thinners and had a blood alcohol level of 1.8, he bled to death quickly. According to prosecutors she had also punched and kicked him in the period before. The knife was back in the knife block in the kitchen. She had washed it, but police still found her husband's blood on it, along with fibres from his jumper. Antonia M. denied it through to the hearing. She maintained that she had been stirring soup when she heard a thud and saw that her husband had fallen; she had nothing to do with his death. The court did not find that account credible. Prosecutors demanded four years in prison, saying they would have considered eight appropriate had she not been so old. The Amsterdam court followed that demand and sentenced her, by then 89, to four years for manslaughter rather than murder. It weighed her advanced age and the fact that she had no previous convictions. On 26 October 2017 the Amsterdam court of appeal confirmed that outcome: it too found manslaughter, treated her advanced age as a mitigating factor and again imposed four years' unconditional imprisonment.