Dutch journalist shone light on crime
Fearless in efforts to expose underworld
Peter de Vries, who has died aged 64 after being shot in Amsterdam, was a Dutch crime reporter known for his investigations into drug barons, police corruption, unsolved murders and sex trafficking; in the process he acquired both enemies and friends in the Dutch underworld, many of whom wanted him silenced.
De Vries claimed that his television show, Peter R de Vries, Crime Reporter, played a decisive role in solving more than a dozen murder cases. In November 2006 he used it to accuse Joran van der Sloot, then a teenager, of being responsible for the disappearance of the 18-year-old American student Natalee Holloway on the Dutch-caribbean island of Aruba the previous year.
Fourteen months later he challenged van der Sloot in person during another television show. Once it was over, van der Sloot threw a glass of red wine in his face.
Weeks later de Vries broadcast undercover video apparently showing van der Sloot smoking marijuana and admitting to being present during Holloway's death.
It was watched by seven million Dutch viewers, a record for a non-sports program in the Netherlands, but the evidence was deemed insufficient to warrant rearresting van der Sloot, who has since been convicted of another murder.
De Vries won an Emmy award for his reporting on the case, which he accepted at a ceremony in New York in 2008 accompanied by Beth Holloway, Natalee's mother. In another program he accused van der Sloot of making US$13,000 a head by selling Thai women into prostitution in the Netherlands.
De Vries had come to prominence in 1983 with the first of two books about the kidnapping that year of the Dutch brewing tycoon Freddy Heineken, a story he was covering for the newspaper De Telegraaf.
His second book, published in 1987 as a novel told from the perspective of Cor van Hout, the plot's mastermind, was adapted as the film Kidnapping Freddy Heineken (2015) starring Anthony Hopkins.
De Vries's wife Jacqueline survives him with their two children, one of whom, Royce, is a lawyer who worked on his father's investigations.