Monument for murdered journalist Peter R. de Vries planned for Amsterdam’s Leidseplein

A monument memorializing Peter R. de Vries will be constructed on the Leidseplein in Amsterdam’s city center, the municipality announced on Wednesday. Leidseplein was chosen because it is the site of the former RTL Boulevard broadcast studio, near the location where the crime reporter was shot one year ago, his daughter Kelly de Vries told RTL Boulevard. The journalist died less than two weeks after the shooting.

During the broadcast on RTL 4 honoring De Vries, Mayor Femke Halsema said that she thinks it is important that the monument not only be about the person, “but about the ideas, his uniqueness, his stubbornness, his sense of justice.”

The municipality wants people to contribute ideas about the monument. People have until July 17 to submit their thoughts about De Vries’s death via the municipality’s website. Five artists were asked to share their vision of the monument with the words submitted as inspiration. It is not yet known when the monument will be erected.

It was also announced on Wednesday that the Gouden Tip foundation will rebrand itself as the Peter R. de Vries Foundation. The name change was made “as a tribute to the most extraordinary crime reporter our country has known and to continue his legacy”, the foundation writes on its website.

De Vries founded the organization just before his death to raise money as a reward for any new information that could lead to a breakthrough in the unsolved disappearance of Tanja Groen, who went missing in 1993. Although more than a million euros was raised, the case is still unresolved.

This year, the Peter R. de Vries Foundation will work to close three other unsolved cases.