Thirty-five years earlier, a girl named Mina Rhebergen lived in Aalten. She had a job for which she earned a fixed weekly wage. She kept part of that money at home in a little pot standing in what was known as the “glass cabinet”. One day she discovered, to her great shock and disappointment, that the money had disappeared. There seemed little doubt that it had been stolen.
The police were informed and searched diligently, but the thief was never found. As time passed, people increasingly thought it possible that the money had somehow simply gone missing. In any event, Mina Rhebergen had lost 15 guilders and never got it back.
Life moved on and the incident was soon forgotten. Mina Rhebergen later married and became Mrs Breukelaar, living in Varsseveld.
No one thought about the stolen money again until, one day, Mrs Breukelaar received 35 guilders: the original 15 guilders plus interest.
What had happened? A relative of Mrs Breukelaar living in Aalten had received a registered letter from a widow in a large town in the west of the Netherlands. The widow wrote that more than thirty years earlier her husband had taken 15 guilders from the little pot in the glass cabinet in Aalten because he had been in serious financial difficulty at the time.
On his sickbed, the man had told his wife that he had once taken someone else’s money. He asked her to put matters right because he did not want to face eternity without first making amends for what he had done.
The unsigned letter contained 35 guilders. The man no longer knew the address of the girl he had robbed, but remembered one of her relatives.