A year after his wife's disappearance, a Dutch crime writer named Richard Klinkhamer wrote a suspicious book about seven ways to kill your spouse. He became famous and spent the next decade hinting in print and on TV that he had murdered her. Finally, it turned out that he really had.
The Crime Writer Who Confessed in Fiction for a Decade
In 1991, Dutch crime writer Richard Klinkhamer reported his wife Hannelore missing. He told police he'd found her bicycle at a train station. Without a body, investigators had nothing to work with. The case went cold.
Then Klinkhamer did something audacious. Just one year after Hannelore vanished, he showed up at his publisher's office with a manuscript titled Woensdag Gehaktdag—literally "Wednesday, Mince Day." The book outlined seven detailed methods for murdering his wife.
One scenario involved grinding her body through a meat grinder and feeding the remains to pigeons. His publisher, Willem Donker, rejected it as "too gruesome" and suggested he work on a different project instead. Klinkhamer took the advice and published a novel about an art heist called Ransom.
The Decade of Hints
But Klinkhamer didn't let his murder manual die quietly. He spent the next nine years building a cult following in Amsterdam's literary scene. He gave television interviews. He made cryptic comments to journalists. Aspiring crime writers treated him like a darkly fascinating mentor.
All the while, he dropped hints that he knew exactly what happened to Hannelore. The subtext was clear to anyone paying attention: I did it, and you can't prove it. He even had his wife legally declared dead in 1997 so he could sell their house and collect a widower's pension.
Concrete Evidence
In 2000, Klinkhamer's macabre game ended abruptly. New homeowners decided to renovate the garden at the old house in Ganzedijk. Workers breaking up the concrete floor beneath the garden shed made a grim discovery: a human skull buried in clay.
It was Hannelore. She'd been there the entire time, less than fifty feet from where Klinkhamer had sat writing his "hypothetical" murder scenarios.
Confronted with physical evidence, Klinkhamer confessed. He'd beaten his wife to death with a wrench on January 31, 1991, during an argument. He buried her under the shed and used compost to mask the smell of decomposition. Then he reported her missing and started writing.
Justice, Delayed
Despite confessing to murder, Klinkhamer was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to just seven years. He served only two before being released in 2003 for good behavior. The man who spent a decade publicly taunting authorities about getting away with murder walked free after 24 months.
He lived another thirteen years. In 2016, at age 78, Richard Klinkhamer took his own life. His case remains one of the most brazenly arrogant cover-ups in Dutch criminal history—a writer who couldn't resist turning his real crime into literary material, even when it made him the obvious suspect.