Marc Dutroux has been dubbed the “monster of Charleroi” by the Belgian press, but psychiatrists believe he is less a paedophile than a cold-hearted sexual predator who wants to control his victims.
Dutroux, 47, was today convicted over a string of abductions, rapes and murders that horrified Belgium and the world when they came to light in 1996.
Four of the girls, including two as young as eight, were found dead. Two others were rescued from a makeshift dungeon in the cellar of a house belonging to the jobless electrician near the southern town of Charleroi.
The public’s shock turned to fury when it emerged that not only had the police missed a string of clues that could have led to Dutroux being apprehended earlier, but that he had been released from jail in 1992 after serving just three years of a 13-year sentence for the abduction and rape of five girls.
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That Dutroux was a sexual predator is not in doubt. But whether he was acting on behalf of a broader paedophile network, as he has claimed in the media and in court, remains the burning question for many Belgians.
According to a report issued by a panel of psychiatrists who analysed him after his arrest, Dutroux does not fit the classic profile of a paedophile.
Two of his alleged female victims, whose bodies were unearthed a fortnight after his arrest, were aged 17 and 19 when they disappeared in 1995.
“The age of the victims did not seem to arouse in him any given effect or to play a particular role, beyond allowing him to kidnap them, to manipulate them, to confine them,” the experts wrote.
Sabine Dardenne, who was 12 when she was rescued from the Charleroi cellar, described how Dutroux managed to persuade her that he was protecting her from some greater harm.
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But if she disobeyed him, Ms Dardenne said, Dutroux threatened to “hand me over to some gang or other that he knew, and that the person he’d give me to would torture me and kill me after making me suffer”.
Dutroux was born on November 6, 1956, in central Brussels. He is the eldest of five children, whose parents were both teachers who, he claims, frequently beat him. There is no suggestion that he was sexually abused however.
After his parents split up in 1971, Dutroux left home and became a drifter. According to press reports, he became a homosexual prostitute at the age of 18. But in the same year, Dutroux married for the first time.
That woman, along with a string of mistresses that Dutroux picked up, described him as a charmer but also a manipulator with a propensity to control weak-willed people.
One of his mistresses was Michelle Martin, who went on to become his second wife. She is among three co-defendants who have been on trial with Dutroux since March 1.
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In 1979, Dutroux received the first of a series of convictions for theft, violent muggings, drug-dealing and trading in stolen cars – a lucrative activity that is said to have helped him amass at least seven houses.
In 1986 Dutroux and Michelle Martin were arrested for the abduction and rape of five girls, which led to the lengthy jail term he received in 1989. But he was released in 1992 under a government scheme that was supposed to keep a close eye on sexual offenders in the community.
Dutroux did not come to the attention of the authorities again until four years later. By that time, four girls and an accomplice were dead, and another two girls had suffered an ordeal that will scar them for life.