MARC DUTROUX faces a lifetime in prison after being convicted yesterday of three charges of murder, and of kidnapping, raping and imprisoning six girls aged 8 to 19.
His conviction will provide some comfort for the families of the victims who have waited up to nine years for justice. It may also erase some of the horror and anger the nation felt at the barbarity of the crimes and the incompetence of the Belgian police and legal system in bringing him to justice.
After a 105-day trial at which almost 500 witnesses testified, the jury threw out Dutroux’s claim that he had kidnapped the girls for a wider paedophile network. The 47-year-old former electrician, dubbed the Monster of Marcinelle, argued that he had been ordered by his fellow defendant, Michel Nihoul, to procure his young victims for a sex ring widely believed to involve members of the country’s establishment.
Nihoul, a businessman, consistently denied being the lynchpin of a paedophile gang. After spending four days in army barracks isolated from the outside world, the jury initially split 7-5 on whether he was involved in the abductions. Under Belgian law eight votes are required to establish guilt. The presiding judge, Stéphane Goux, asked the jury to retire again and reconsider their verdict. Hours later they returned and cleared him.
By contrast, the jurors had no hesitation in finding Dutroux, already a convicted paedophile, guilty of virtually all the charges against him. Dutroux, who was not in court for the verdict, had admitted kidnapping four of the girls but consistently denied any involvement in seizing the two 8-year-old friends, Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, who disappeared from near their homes on June 24, 1995.
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While Dutroux was in prison later that year for an unrelated crime, they died of thirst and starvation in the underground prison he had made at his house. Their bodies were eventually dug up in the garden of one of Dutroux’s other properties in August 1996.
The jury pronounced Dutroux guilty of personally kidnapping all six of his victims, of repeatedly raping them and of holding them against their will.
In addition to the 8-year-old girls, he was found guilty of murdering An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19, two Flemish friends he had seized in August 1995 after they had attended a magic show on the Belgian coast.
When their remains were uncovered a year later in the grounds of a property owned by Bernard Weinstein, Dutroux’s accomplice, they were found to have been raped, drugged and buried alive. Dutroux was also convicted of murdering Weinstein.
Pol Marchal, An’s mother, said after the trial: “I’m relieved. It’s very important that it has been said, that the jury has said, ‘It’s Dutroux that murdered your daughter’.”
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Dutroux’s spree of sordid crimes came to an end in August 1996 after an bystander memorised the number plate of the van he had used to kidnap 14-year old Laetitia Delhez four days earlier.
When the police eventually freed Laetitia from her tiny prison in Dutroux’s cellar, they were surprised to find another distraught girl in the same cell: Sabine Dardenne, 12, who had been seized on her way to school that May and held for 81 days.
It was the riveting and incontrovertible testimony of the two young women that destroyed Dutroux’s defence that he had kept the girls in his cellar to protect them from the paedophile ring.
Their dignified and courageous evidence was the emotional high point of a trial that Belgians hope will consign to history one of the more shameful periods in the country’s life.
The crimes were compounded by the authorities’ bungled attempts over more than a year to catch Dutroux. But for that incompetence, and the petty rivalries between the different police forces and judicial authorities, the four victims might have been rescued.
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In December 1995, the gendarmerie searched five properties owned by Dutroux. In one they heard childrens’ voices but did not investigate because they were unaware of the kidnappings.
The affair rocked Belgium. There was a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the families, which culminated in 300,000 people taking to the streets in October 1996 to protest at the authorities’ failure to prevent such crimes.
During the trial in the southern town of Arlon, thousands of motorists have tied white ribbons to their cars to rekindle that spirit and demonstrate solidarity with the families.
Successive governments have introduced overhauls of the police and judicial systems. They have also ended some high-profile careers. After Dutroux briefly escaped from custody in 1998 while consulting documents in a nearby courtroom, the interior and justice ministers and chief of police all had to resign.
Dutroux faces life sentences, while his accomplice Michel Lelièvre and his ex-wife Michelle Martin could be sentenced to up to 30 years for their roles in kidnapping and holding the girls prisoner.
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Nihoul has been found guilty of the unrelated crimes of drug-dealing and human trafficking. Sentencing is expected next week.
DUTROUX’S CATALOGUE OF CRIME