Ben Saunders, the singer who won the first season of ‘The Voice of Holland’, was found dead in a lake near Arnhem in the Netherlands on Tuesday, 15 September 2026. He was 43.
His family confirmed the death, and police recovered a body from the Rijkerswoerdse Plassen at 13:20 local time (14:20 SAST) after a bystander reported seeing a man walk into the water and fail to resurface, as reported by NL Times.
What police said after Ben Saunders was found dead
Police ruled out foul play, and no cause of death was released. The Rijkerswoerdse Plassen is a recreational lake just south of Arnhem, the kind of spot locals use for swimming and walking rather than anywhere remote or hard to reach.
His brother Dean Saunders posted about the death on Instagram, and did not dress any of it up. The words were raw and unedited, the kind that arrive when a family is still in the first day of the worst news.
Dean Saunders wrote:
“My dear little brother has passed away. I have never experienced pain like this before.”
He continued in the same post, asking for the days ahead to be handled carefully by everyone watching from the outside, and making plain how heavily the loss had landed on the people closest to his brother.
“What a terrible day for all of us. We have to learn to live with this, and I hope it is treated with respect.”
Dean finished on Ben’s family and on his own place in it, and the last lines read less like a caption than something said out loud to a quiet room. It was signed off with nothing else.
“Ben had a beautiful family and relatives who love him dearly. I, too, will always love him. Ben is in my heart, and he will stay there forever.”
How Ben Saunders won The Voice of Holland
Saunders arrived on the first season of The Voice of Holland in 2011 and turned his audition into the clip everybody replayed, singing Kings of Leon’s Use Somebody.
He won the series outright, which made him the first name the format ever produced.
The win did what a win is supposed to do. His single Kill for a Broken Heart reached number four on the Dutch Top 40, and his debut album, You Thought You Knew Me By Now, went straight to the top of the charts in 2011.
A second album, Heart & Soul, followed in 2012. Saunders grew up in Hoorn in Noord-Holland before moving to Arnhem, where he later opened a tattoo parlour and built a life some distance from the television studio that made his name.
What happens next in the Ben Saunders case
Police still have to establish a cause of death, and until that is finished the official account stops at a recovery from the water and a ruling that nobody else was involved.
Dean’s request that it be treated with respect stands as the only thing the family has asked of anyone.
