Serial Killer Marc Dutroux - "The Mad Monster Of Belgium"

  • 8 years ago
Serial Killer Marc Dutroux - "The Mad Monster Of Belgium" ---
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In June 1995, two 8-year-old girls, Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune were kidnapped while they played near their homes in Charleroi, Belgium. They were the latest victims of a sexual psychopath who, because of unexcusable police mishandling of the case, would go on to murder at least four women and girls, including Melissa and Julie.

The young girls were taken to the home of Marc Dutroux, a convicted sex offender who had previously served a 12-year sentence for sexually assaulting another child. Prior to his release from prison, the warden had described him as an incorrigible psychopath.

In the course of their investigation Belgian police, hampered by infighting between the Flemish-speaking and French-speaking authorities, were told by an informer tha Dutroux had been digging in his basement, creating a dungeon where he was planning to warehouse his victims before, according to the police source, he sold them abroad. No formal report of the tip was ever made.

Incredibly, the gendarmerie searched Dutroux’s home and failed find the girls imprisoned in the basement. They also failed to investigate the cries of the girls that they heard, accepting Dutroux’s claim that the noise was coming from children playing in the street.

Despite finding handcuffs, chloroform, vaginal cream and a speculum (an instrument used in gynecological exams), the police did not detain Dutroux and left his home.

Two months after the children disappeared, Dutroux kidnapped 19-year-old An Marchal and 17-year-old Eefje Lambrecks while they were hitchhiking near Ostend, in Dutch-speaking Flanders. They were forced to swallow a sedative and raped. Their emaciated bodies, their mouths gagged, were later discovered at another of Dutroux’s properties.

In the late fall of 1995, Dutroux was arrested and jailed for an unrelated crime.

Back at his home, in their basement prison, Melisaa and Julie drew on the dank walls as they starved to death in cages, while he was serving a prison sentence for theft.

Dutroux’s wife at the time, Michelle Martin, a mother of three, allegedly fed her husband’s German shepherd dogs but not the girls, who were later buried in bin bags in the back garden. Martin fed the dogs guarding the dungeon but claimed that she was too frightened to go into the secret cellar in the Charleroi slums, fearing that the “little beasts” would attack her.

A similar scenario would play out a year later when 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne was kidnapped while bicycling to school and imprisoned in the dungeon. She would spend 79 days chained to a bed. Dutroux told Dardenne her parents were refusing to pay a ransom to free her. In August 1996, 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez joined her in the dungeon.

The two terrified girls, believing Dutroux’s story that he was protecting them from someone called the “bad boss”, were rescued from a concealed underground cell in his “house of horrors” at Marcinelle, near Charleroi, two days before his arrest in August 1996.

Furious Belgians, enraged at the bungling of the case, protested in what became known known as the Marche Blanche in 1996, when 350,000 people took to the streets of Brussels.

In 1998, still awaiting trial Dutroux escaped briefly, and in 2003, the public learned that he had been allowed to correspond with a 15-year-old girl for two years.

Finally, in 2004, after a continuing series of goofs that almost resulted in freedom for Dutroux, he was brought to trial.

Dubbed the “perfect psychopath” by one expert witness, he seemed to lack any of the normal guilt reflexes.

“He is intelligent, secretive, without scruple, with an extraordinary power of manipulation,” concluded a team of psychologists. Dutroux dismissed them all as “utter mediocrities”.

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