Hellevoetsluis man convicted of beheading his mother; To be held at psych facility
The court convicted Jesse R. (32) from Hellevoetsluis of beheading his mother during a psychotic episode on April 16 last year. The judge sentenced the man to institutionalization and mandatory psychiatric treatment, called a TBS measure in the Dutch legal system, RTL Nieuws reports.
R. was declared completely mentally incompetent and will not go to prison. He will instead undergo treatment at a psychiatric institution. The TBS measure only ends when the patient no longer poses a danger to society.
“It is unimaginable how frightened and horrified the victim must have been in her final moments of life,” the judge said. “Family members and friends must live on knowing that their loved one was killed in a very gruesome manner.”
During the trial, R. did not deny the fact that he was unwell or that he killed his mother. “I am ill. That proved fatal for my mother. I will never be able to recover from that,” he told the courtroom. He suffered from multiple delusions at the time, including that Princess Beatrix trained him to kill people when he was a child, and that the Royal Family would save him if he murdered his mother.
R. knew that he suffered from psychosis and had been on medication, but he stopped taking his medicines a few months before the murder. He said the medication made him feel slow, fat, and sluggish, and he could not tolerate other medications well.
Experts from the Pieter Baan Center who examined and treated R. estimate that the risk of recurrence and escalation is high if R. does not take his medicines correctly. They therefore recommended TBS with compulsory treatment. The Public Prosecution Service (OM) made the same recommendation.
