Els Borst was former Minister of Health (D66).
Son
“It was in the evening, I was already in bed,” says Dirk Borst, one of Els Borst’s sons. “My brother called and he said ‘I think our mother has died, because there is a dead woman in her garage in Bilthoven’.” Although it wasn’t confirmed yet, they couldn’t imagine it was anyone else. “I couldn’t reach her by phone for two days, so that was part of it.”
“We may have realized that it was an unnatural death, but we only learned that she had been killed three days later.” Els Borst died on Saturday and was found on Monday afternoon. The family didn’t think it would have anything to do with her work. “We couldn’t actually imagine that someone would want to do something to my mother.”
Psychiatric problems
“She was a very amiable, kind and sweet person. She had also been retired for a long time. Why would someone kill her? We immediately thought: that must have been a confused person.” That turns out to be a correct hunch. The confused Bart van U. appears to have murdered Els Borst with 41 stab wounds. He has a complex psychiatric history and was serving a sentence for firearms possession at the time of the murder.
