Nestled in the crook of his famous father’s arm, Brandon Boere is only months old here, chubby-cheeked and beaming, his eyes fixed on the man holding him. His mother Ann is tucked alongside, the three of them settled together on the sofa. It is the picture of a contented young family at home – Jeroen, the towering Dutch striker who once led the line for West Ham United, with his wife and their adored little boy.
But Brandon would grow up without any emotional connection to his father. For he was too young to have formed any memories when Jeroen took his own life two years later, haunted to the end by the night a gangster ended his football career by driving an ice pick into his eye.
When his nursery class sat down to make Father’s Day cards, Brandon was the only child without a dad to give one to, so he made one for his grandad instead. Years later, starting secondary school, he taught himself to knot a tie from a YouTube video, because there was no one at home to show him.
As he got older, he would watch the grainy YouTube montages of his father’s goals and listen to the endless stories with the detached, almost academic curiosity of someone researching a stranger who happened to share his surname.
Why his father’s life had ended the way it did was a question Brandon learned, early on, not to ask. He had tried as a small boy. Then he stopped. ‘I noticed you were quite upset about answering them,’ he tells his mother, sitting beside her in the kitchen of the family home in Epping. ‘Especially when nan and grandad were around. I just kind of thought – it’s not that important. So I didn’t ask.’
Ann admits she has never spoken to Brandon about his father’s death. He probably knows what happened, she says. For nineteen years the silence ran both ways: a mother who could not find the words, and a son who learned to stop reaching for them.
Sitting together with the Daily Mail, they are now having that conversation for the very first time.
As they talk, Ann cannot help keeping up a running commentary on which parts of her son belong to his father. He has Jeroen’s nose, she says. His short fuse. His competitiveness – though Brandon is having none of it. ‘I don’t know if I agree,’ he protests, when she suggests he’s quick-tempered. ‘Yes you do,’ she fires back. ‘You flare your nostrils and bite your lips when you get annoyed. Just like your dad.’ He was a sore loser too, Brandon concedes. ‘I see that in myself,’ he says. ‘Especially playing football.’
Former West Ham striker Jeroen Boere pictured with his wife Ann and baby son Brandon in 2004
Jeroen joined Billy Bonds’ West Ham in 1993 for £250,000. He spent two seasons at the club before moving to Crystal Palace
Brandon, now 21, outside Dutch side De Graafschap’s stadium, which has a mural of his father painted on a stand
Jeroen Willem Johannes Boere was born in Arnhem on November 18, 1967. By his family’s account he was a handful from the start – a born prankster who once, as a boy, fashioned a homemade grenade out of a tennis ball and a firecracker. Nobody could ever quite say where the mischief came from. His parents Ed and Nina insisted they had no idea, though Brandon – who has heard enough stories about his grandfather’s youth – suspects the apple did not fall far from the tree.
He was not the only footballer in the house. His domineering older brother Remco, six years his senior, had made it as a professional in his own right – twice finishing as top scorer in the Dutch second division. As a boy, Jeroen looked up to him. But the younger Boere would go on to eclipse the elder by winning caps for the Netherlands under-21s before swapping Dutch football entirely for the Premier League, feats that sat uncomfortably with a man as prideful as Remco.
The abiding memory his grandparents would later pass down to Brandon was of how loving his father had been, and how early his passion for football took hold. He was a bright boy, too, from a clever family. Ed could read, write and speak seven languages, and Jeroen would become fluent in five.
He made his debut for Excelsior Rotterdam at 17 and turned out for four Dutch clubs before West Ham came calling. Billy Bonds signed him for £250,000 in 1993, one of just two foreign players in the squad after the Hammers won promotion to the newly formed Premier League.
‘He was a fun lad,’ said Tony Cottee, his strike partner at Upton Park. ‘He liked a drink, like a lot of us back in the day. He had a confident aura about him – there was always that with the Dutch lads, very sure of themselves. As soon as he arrived he wasn’t shy with anything. The biggest compliment I can pay him is that he fitted into the dressing room really well.
‘He’s a bit of a forgotten player, really. He was a proper old-school target man, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing alongside him. If the ball got up to him, he wasn’t afraid to head it. He wanted to get stuck in, he was aggressive.’
He demonstrated as much on his debut,coming on as a substitute against Newcastle and lasting just 22 minutes before flattening two of their players within seconds of each other – becoming the first in Premier League history to be shown a red card on his first appearance.
Off the pitch, that boyhood mischievous streak soon endeared him to his new teammates. He smuggled friends from Holland onto the players’ minibus before the 1994 Christmas party and they set the seats alight, after which Harry Redknapp banned the squad from going out at all. Asked to translate for new signing Marco Boogers, who spoke no English, Jeroen told Redknapp the winger thought his hair looked ‘shit’. A Dutch television presenter who came to his house for an interview woke the next morning with one eyebrow.
Jeroen was sent off on his Premier League debut in September 1993 for elbowing Newcastle’s Kevin Scott. (Pictured: Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan remonstrating with Billy Bonds and Harry Redknapp as Jeroen leaves the pitch)
Jeroen started his career at Excelsior Rotterdam in the Netherlands and played for four other Dutch sides before moving to the Premier League
Jeroen, Ann and Brandon pictured in Marbella. The family moved to Spain in early 2003
Ann met Jeroen at the Thatched House pub in Epping. She followed him to Japan and Spain where they had Brandon
Ann was working for Epping Council when she first encountered him. The Thatched House, just across the street from her office, was where she and her colleagues would go for a Friday pub lunch. ‘He’d see me in there,’ she says, ‘and then his friend said to me that he liked me. We just started seeing each other from there on.’
He was, from the start, utterly besotted with her. Whenever he went out with his teammates, he would insist she come too. Once, during his time at Crystal Palace, she paid a visit to the team hotel – only for the club to find out she was there and leave him out of the side as punishment. They let her on the team bus home regardless. ‘Jeroen said I was one of the boys,’ she says, pausing to smile. ‘I think that was a compliment.’
She soon discovered that the boozing, brawling centre forward on her arm was not quite what he seemed. He was, she found, a deeply intelligent man who could be serious when it mattered – a devoted father who wept for days each time his two sons from a previous marriage flew home to the Netherlands after the school holidays, and who drove to Holland every free weekend to see them. And he had a gift for making everyone around him feel that the room was better for their being in it. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered if you were a bin man or a director of a bank,’ she says. ‘He’d treat you the same.’
After two seasons at Upton Park – including a brace at Elland Road that supporters of a certain vintage still recall fondly – he moved to Crystal Palace, followed by stints at Portsmouth, West Bromwich Albion and Southend, never quite settling in England. In the summer of 1998, an old ally offered a way out.
Pim Verbeek, a Dutch coach who had managed him earlier in his career, was now in charge of Omiya Ardija, a second-tier side based in a commuter suburb twenty miles north of Tokyo. Jeroen and Ann – along with their German Shepherd, Charlie – followed him there.
He was 31, newly married, and happier than he had been in years. He took to Japan immediately, nine goals in eleven games making him the league’s top scorer and drawing the attention of bigger clubs. Life off the pitch suited him just as well.
Ann smiles at the memories of accompanying her 6ft 4in husband and Charlie to get coffee each morning, watching them clear a path through the gawking rush-hour commuters like Moses parting the Red Sea. In the evenings, they would go dancing in Roppongi, the city’s bustling expat quarter.
It felt like the beginning of something. It was, in fact, the end.
Jeroen pictured at Japanese side Omiya Ardija’s training ground, alongside Ann and their German Shepherd Charlie
Jeroen (pictured with fans outside the training ground) joined Omiya Ardija, a second-tier Japanese side based in a commuter suburb twenty miles north of Tokyo, in 1998
He made the move to Japan when Pim Verbeek (pictured left), a Dutch coach who had managed him earlier in his career, took charge of Omiya Ardija. Dutch defender Jan Veenhof (pictured right) also joined in 1998
Jeroen took to Japan immediately and scored nine goals in eleven games to make him the league’s top scorer
Jeroen and Ann had been out for dinner in Roppongi on the night of May 21, 1999, before moving on to the Hideout, one of the district’s livelier late-night bars. They were a few drinks in when an argument broke out over the queue for the men’s toilet. Two men took exception and lunged for him. Punches were thrown before it was broken up, and the night moved on. It seemed, like so many late-night scuffles in so many bars, to be over as soon as it had begun.
By 4am, Jeroen was making his way to the door with Ann when one of the men – the Israeli drug smuggler Shimon Ben Hamo – appeared at the entrance, hand outstretched, appearing to apologise. Jeroen reached out to shake it.
The image of what happened next never left Ann. She has replayed the moment a thousand times since, wondering what would have become of them all had they simply left earlier that night.
‘Shimon pulled him forward and stuck an ice pick in his eye,’ she says quietly. ‘Then he stabbed him twice and ran. It was terrifying.’
The next moments were a blur. An off-duty nurse told Ann to put pressure on the eye. She remembers pulling off her jacket and pressing it against his face.
In hospital, he asked his wife how it looked. ‘I told him it was fine,’ she says. ‘But I could see his eye was split in half.’ Surgeons phoned for her permission to remove it. She refused, giving in only when they told her there was nothing left to save.
While Jeroen lay recovering – he would be on the ward for a month – word reached Ann that Ben Hamo had placed a bounty on both of their heads. A Tokyo policeman called Detective Ono arrived to put her mind at rest. He was, Ann recalls, ‘about four feet tall’, and brandished his revolver in an attempt to reassure her. It did not. ‘There’s no crime in Japan,’ he told her. ‘People simply disappear.’
With the police closing in, Ben Hamo fled to Thailand. Within weeks he was dead – found in a suitcase in a Bangkok river, shot three times in the head over a cocaine deal gone wrong. His connections in the region were deep enough that Ann is wary of travelling there even now.
Jeroen, at least publicly, always tried to appear resilient. Reflecting on the attack two years on, he told a Dutch magazine he had no regrets and bore no grudges. He was still alive, he said, and had enjoyed a decent career. ‘I know damn well that I’m someone who tempts fate,’ he added.
Cottee, who helped organise a fundraising dinner for the family after Jeroen’s death, believes the depression that would eventually consume him can be traced directly to that night in Tokyo.
‘I find it a really sad story,’ he said. ‘I think any player would struggle to deal with that. You’re still playing, you’re still scoring goals – and then suddenly your career is taken away from you like that.
Jeroen and Brandon in Puerto Banus in Marbella in December 2004
Jeroen, Ann and Brandon in Marbella in October 2005 at a friends wedding
‘You can’t replace the buzz of scoring goals in front of 30,000 people. That’s something you go in search of when you retire. Some people find it in drugs, some in drinking or gambling. There are many vices out there.’
‘The attack changed him,’ Ann says. ‘He was playing in front of thousands one day, and the next, nothing. All that energy he used training and playing – he had to put it somewhere.’
After recuperating in the Netherlands, they moved back to Epping to be closer to Ann’s family. As he looked for something to fill the gap football had left, Jeroen found himself drawn to the Half Moon – an old-school pub whose regulars included Rod Stewart, Bradley Walsh, and enough local troublemakers that a panic alarm was fitted behind the bar. He was drinking there one evening when the owners offered to sell him a stake, and he didn’t hesitate.
It was, for a while, exactly what he needed. He threw himself into playing landlord, delighting the locals by taking the glass eye out and dropping it into unsuspecting punters’ pints, or flipping it upside down and waiting for someone to notice.
Ann laughs as she remembers a ‘proper Essex girl’ at the bar asking him why he had one. He didn’t miss a beat. ‘So I can see through it,’ he told her. The girl pondered this carefully. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I wonder why you’d want to.’
What Ann could not tolerate was anyone but Jeroen making jokes about the eye. When a friend of her sister’s suggested putting his name above the door in Braille, she threw her out on the spot. She knew, better than most, what lay behind his gags. ‘I think that was a slight bit of insecurity,’ she says. ‘When you joke about yourself before anyone else can.’
The panic alarm behind the bar would eventually prove its worth. On New Year’s Eve 2002, Jeroen waded into a brawl between two customers and had a glass bottle smashed across his face, leaving him with twenty stitches. Ann had had enough. ‘It really was horrendous,’ she says. ‘After that I just did not want to be there anymore.’
They moved to Marbella in early 2003 in search of yet another fresh start. A contact from Jeroen’s former financial adviser offered him work at an estate agency selling homes to the expats washing up on the Costa del Sol – easy work for a born performer who spoke five languages. His new employer, a man named Peter Angell, admitted afterwards that he had not been sure about Jeroen at first. Then Jeroen bit him on the head, and he liked him immediately.
Brandon arrived not long after, and Jeroen relished full-time fatherhood – carrying the boy down to the office, standing there beaming while the girls fussed over him. ‘He’d get a massive smile on his face,’ Ann says. ‘Brandon was a chubby baby, and I think they like that in Spain.’
Later, when his older sons Jerry and Brian flew out for the summer holidays, Jeroen would take them and Brandon to the beach while Ann watched from a distance, trying not to worry. With the sun on his back and his boys clamouring around him in the shallows, he looked, at last, like a man at ease with himself.
Jeroen, Ann and Brandon in Marbella in 2004. They moved there after Jeroen’s former financial adviser offered him work at an estate agency
Jeroen made 25 Premier League appearances for West Ham and later turned out for Portsmouth, West Brom and Crystal Palace
Toyko’s rush hour commuters stared in shock when they walked past the 6ft 4 Jeroen and his German Shepherd Charlie
But as ever with Jeroen, trouble was never far behind. His drinking increased and that effortless charm was now being spent on the chancers who propped up the bars of Puerto Banus night after night. ‘He had to go out with clients, but in the last few weeks he was partying harder,’ Ann says. ‘He’d come home, get a couple of hours’ sleep, shower, go to work, then go out again. He met people he wouldn’t normally have met. People he’d never have known if he was still playing football.’ She was at home with a toddler and she didn’t know her husband’s new crowd. All she knew was that they were not her kind of company.
It was in Marbella, too, that his already tense relationship with Remco finally fractured beyond repair. Jeroen had lent his brother a significant sum of money in the aftermath of the Tokyo attack and had never pushed for it back. When he finally asked, Remco bluntly told him to ask Peter for a raise, triggering a blazing row that ended with Remco threatening to have him ‘done’. It was the last conversation they ever had.
What Ann is sure of is that he understood the toll his hedonistic lifestyle was taking. Moving countries to outrun his demons was a familiar strategy by now, and Mauritius, where his agent had bought a plot of land and wanted Jeroen to run a luxury property venture, offered somewhere quiet and family-oriented. ‘I actually can’t wait to move away from here,’ he told her just weeks before they were due to leave. ‘It’s too much of a playground for me.’
It was a lifeline he would never get to grasp. A fortnight later, Ann woke to find him dead in their flat. He was 39.
She remembers screaming – loud enough to carry through the whole building – before her mind went blank. Later, when she was finally able to steady her trembling hands for long enough to call the police, the shock was so intense she could not recall where she lived when the operator asked for an address.
It was Brandon who snapped her out of it. The commotion had woken the two-year-old, and he came toddling out to see what was wrong. Ann reached him first, sweeping him up and rushing him out of the front door before he could catch sight of his father’s body. Neither of them would ever set foot inside again.
Peter took Ann and Brandon into his villa for a month while her sister and friends flew out to pack up the flat. Even getting home was a struggle: Brandon had no passport, and Charlie needed injections before he could travel. ‘There was so much going on, you didn’t really have time to process it,’ she says.
Hardest of all was what to tell a bewildered two-year-old. ‘Brandon kept saying, “I want Daddy to come home now,”‘ she says. ‘I told him Daddy had gone to heaven and couldn’t come back. That was the first time he properly cried.’ She pauses. ‘Then one morning he woke up and said, “Mummy, I heard Daddy in my ear. He said I love you, I miss you. And then he said goodbye.”’
Ann does not dwell on it, or on the version of their life that never happened. ‘It would have been nice, the three of us,’ she says. ‘But me and him – we’ve been a pretty good team.’ She says it plainly, without self-pity, the way she says most things. She was not, she points out, the first widow to be left alone with a small child, nor the last. ‘You just deal with it.’
As a teenager Brandon would beg her to ease off; she couldn’t. She would stop worrying about him, she told him, when she was dead. Even now, with him 21 and studying computer science at the University of East Anglia, she makes him call the moment he arrives anywhere.
It would be easy to read Ann’s watchfulness as simple fussing, and Brandon, as a teenager, often did. But the worrying did not come from nowhere. By the time she was fifteen she had lost both her parents. Then she lost Jeroen. Less than two years later, her sister Michelle, who had always struggled with depression, took her own life. On the night of her funeral, Michelle’s partner took his too.
Jeroen played for Southend United between 2006 and 2008. In the aftermath of his death a supporters’ club chairman said: ‘It is true that he had a love-hate relationship with our fans, but I think most of us respected him because he gave as good as he got’
‘There was a lot,’ she says quietly. And then she moves on, the way she always does.
Brandon, for his part, had made his own peace with not having a father. ‘I don’t think I’ve particularly struggled about not having a dad,’ he says. ‘It would have been cool if he was still around. ‘But it’s not bad that he’s not – because I always grew up without it anyway.’
By 2023, the baby once pictured gazing up at his father as though nobody else existed was finally old enough to travel alone to Holland to visit his half-brothers.
Jerry – Jeroen’s eldest – had suggested they drive to Stadion De Vijverberg in Doetinchem, home of De Graafschap, the club where their father first made his name.
It was not, Brandon says, intended as a pilgrimage. ‘They just thought it would be something nice to see. So we kind of just went.’
And so Jeroen’s boys made their way to the back of the Roodbergen stand, where a mural of the club’s legendary players, their late father among them, stretches across the exterior wall.
Standing there, Brandon was caught off guard by an unexplained rush of emotion.
‘It was overwhelming,’ he says. ‘It was very cool seeing that, and knowing he’s remembered. He had his faults but he treated people right. I’m proud of him.’
Brandon Boere stared up at his father’s face one more time, just as he had all those years ago.
And then, without quite knowing what had come over him, he started to cry.
