Killer Couples (19 page)

When Marc Dutroux and his accomplice Bernard Weinstein brought the girls home to Marcinelle they were taken aback at how young they were. In their haste to kidnap two girls – according to Michelle Martin to order for others in their shady
network – they hadn’t properly sized up their age. Nevertheless, they were bundled into the hidden dungeon behind the cellar wall, a narrow cell, barely 9 by 3ft, with bare light bulbs and a rancid mattress, and a ventilation system of which Dutroux was immensely proud, completely undetectable from the outside.

The terrified children were then shackled to the wall and closed in, their sobs unheeded behind the heavy concrete barrier.

No one knows exactly what happened to Julie and Melissa over the long days, weeks and months that followed. Certainly they were sexually abused, forced to witness and endure things no 8-year-old should ever know existed, even in nightmares. Certainly they cried in the night for the families they’d left behind, dreaming of waking up safe in their own beds again, of playing in sun-dappled streets where children’s screams were signs of over-excitement, not terror or rape. Was the abuse carried out by Marc Dutroux alone, or did others join in his sadistic pleasure? Who bought and distributed the videotapes he almost certainly made of his brutal, sordid attacks? Did Julie and Melissa stay in their underground hell the whole time, or were they loaned out to be playthings in a wider paedophile network? No one knows for sure. The walls can’t talk, and the people who can are either discredited, or dead.

Though he had his two child prisoners in the cellar, Marc Dutroux was not satisfied. He hadn’t intended to snatch such young girls; he needed to find other sex slaves – older, more womanly… After all, he wasn’t a paedophile, or rather he wasn’t
exclusively
a paedophile – he was just a man who got sexual kicks from power and complete domination.

Eefje Lambrecks, 19, and An Marchal, 17, were holidaying with a group of friends near Ostend on the Belgian coast when they decided to take a trip to the nearby town of Blankenberge to see a hypnotism show. But the show finished much later than expected and the tram they took home dropped them off a long way from their holiday bungalow in Westende.

‘Don’t hitchhike,’ the tram driver warned them, worried about two young, attractive girls walking alone in the dark. ‘Take a taxi!’

In the end, as always, it was all about timing. A moment or two earlier or later, and Eefje and An would have trudged off into the night and arrived breathlessly back at their bungalow, bursting with funny stories to share with their friends about what had happened in the show. If only they’d left before the end and caught an earlier tram, they’d have finished off their holiday and returned home to their families, ready to start the next adventure of their lives – An to return to school, Eefje to take up her place on a journalism degree course. Instead, they came across Marc Dutroux.

Marc was with another of his accomplices, Michel Lelièvre, when they kidnapped Eefje and An on 22 August 1995. Lelièvre was a pornographer and a junkie, willing to do anything for another fix. Together the two men overpowered the girls with chloroform and forced them into their van.

Drugged and helpless, they were transported back to
Dutroux’ home in Marcinelle, where they were taken to a room above the same cellar dungeon in which the two traumatised
8-year
-olds still huddled together, whispering in the long damp nights. Stripped naked, they were tied to the bed there in that room of nightmares. And again started the rapes, the videotaping and the systematic, soul-destroying abuse accompanied by the gradual realisation that no one was coming to save them, that this was their reality.

Under Marc’s orders, Michel Lelièvre stood outside the room where the girls were held captive, talking loudly about a gang who wanted to kill them because their parents refused to pay a ransom. Then Dutroux himself came in to assuage their fears, promising to protect them, playing the role of saviour, wanting them to be grateful to him, to think well of him…

Marc Dutroux was an arrogant man, a bully, convinced of his own superiority. He didn’t see that what he was doing as wrong, in fact he told himself that, in Eefje’s case at least, it was a relationship, rather than an assault.

‘Eefje was consenting,’ he would tell a shocked courtroom, years later. ‘But probably because she was trying to soften me up to get something. She was a nice girl.’

Despite his imagined closeness with his captive, Dutroux knew that the two teenagers would have to go. With the dungeon still occupied by Julie and Melissa, it was only a question of time before the other girls either escaped or were rescued. Eefje had already made one attempt to flee, opening a bathroom window and shouting for help. He couldn’t risk them being spotted.

‘You’re going home,’ he told the incredulous girls one day. ‘I’m going to give you sleeping pills for the journey so that you can’t describe where you’ve been.’ Hardly daring to believe it, the two teenaged friends took the tablets he gave them – they were Rhohypnol, known as the date rape drug because it leaves the user in a waking trance, able to be manipulated, but not to move independently or remember what has happened. But instead of taking them home, Dutroux and Weinstein took the girls to one of his other houses outside Charleroi. There, the still breathing girls were dumped in shallow graves in the garden, which were then covered with concrete. One was still conscious.

‘She was awake,’ he later told Michelle, tears shining in his normally emotionless brown eyes. ‘She knew she was going to die.’

But he buried the girls anyway. Later, Weinstein would also share the same fate, buried alive at the hand of Dutroux. He’d first been tortured by having a metal wire tightened around his testicles, probably over the whereabouts of a stash of money.

‘I have good news and bad news,’ Marc Dutroux told his wife afterwards. ‘The good news is that I’ve bought you a mobile home. The bad news is that I had to suppress Bernard – he knew too much.’

By this stage nothing Michelle Martin’s husband did shocked her any more. He inhabited a netherworld outside the rules of ordinary people, where nothing was unthinkable, and everything was for sale. And she lived right down there alongside him, enabling him in his atrocities, even joining in with him. A mother, a former teacher, she’d now become a
woman who sat by and did nothing while children suffered and cried to go home.

To Michelle Martin, Marc Dutroux was a kind of toxic Svengali figure – a man who’d taken a weak, pliable young woman and bound her to him, moulding her into a sex criminal with a moral vacuum instead of a heart. It seemed to her that he could get away with anything, even murder. In this she was not far wrong, because since 1993, Marc Dutroux had owed his continued freedom to what was either a series of monumental bureaucratic mistakes or, as many people would come to believe, a systematic official cover-up.

Back in 1993, Claude Thirault, a police informant, told the authorities how he’d been offered £3,500 to kidnap a child – and the man who made the offer? Marc Dutroux. Thirault further told police how Dutroux was building underground cells in his houses to hold children before selling them on abroad. Police actually searched three of Dutroux’ homes, where they found evidence of substantial alterations to the basement of one, but still nothing was done.

The following year, a man arrested in Holland on a charge of sexually abusing three children, poured his heart out to police, telling them of a paedophile ring based in Charleroi in Belgium. Again, no charges were made.

In 1995, Dutroux’s mother Jeanine once again became sufficiently troubled by reports of her oldest son to write a letter to the police. Neighbours at one of his houses reported seeing two teenage girls outside in the back garden, she wrote. But these girls
were only ever seen at night. He’d been having work done on his cellar, there were comings and goings all through the night… She was very much afraid he was keeping young girls captive.

Again police were slow to act, but that wasn’t the only context in which Dutroux’s name was mentioned to the authorities in 1995. He was also coming up in investigations into large-scale car theft and fraud. A police investigation, codenamed Operation Othello, was launched. It was while the police supposedly had Marc Dutroux under surveillance that he managed to abduct Eefje and An. They were still watching him when Eefje made her brave, but futile attempt to escape, and again when he took the girls to another of his houses to be buried.

And the police noticed nothing.

At the beginning of December 1995, Marc Dutroux was brought before a Belgian court of law, not for kidnapping or murder, but car theft. He was convicted of the charge and received a prison sentence. Before it began, he had an urgent message for his wife, Michelle.

‘Make sure you feed the girls,’ he told her. ‘And the dogs.’

Just a week later, the police made that search of Dutroux’s house in Marcinelle, hearing children’s voices in the cellar but failing to link them to the newly finished wall at one end, or to wonder why a basement that should have been rectangular was now shaped like an ‘L’. Neither did they think to question the unsavoury items they found there – vaginal cream, handcuffs and a speculum of the kind used in gynaecological examinations. Nor did they watch any of the videotapes stored
there, which would later be found to contain footage of Dutroux constructing his dungeon and raping young girls. Instead they walked away, their footsteps fading into nothing. And Julie and Melissa were left alone.

Now Michelle Martin was faced with a nightmare. She’d promised to give food and water to the girls imprisoned in the cellar, but the thought of going near it revolted her. Only once did she manage to control her fears enough to go down the stairs to where the clammy air felt moist with decay and desolation. With shaking hands, she manoeuvred open the door to the hole, normally hidden by shelving and sacks of coal. Cramming bags of food and bottles of water inside as quickly as she could, she immediately slammed it shut again, her heart pounding in her narrow ribcage, half-expecting the creatures to come flying out at her through the concrete.

Even after she’d locked up and returned home it took her hours to stop trembling. Never again, she told herself. From then on she came to the house only to feed the dogs, trying hard to bury the thought of the two small girls entombed without food or water in the darkness below.

It wasn’t until late March 1996 that Marc Dutroux was released from prison. One of the first things he did was to head straight for his house in Marcinelle. What went through his mind as he made his way down to the basement he’d ‘renovated’ so proudly? Did he listen through the wall for the sound of children’s voices and take a deep breath before he prised the door open, already half-afraid of what he was going to find?

All we can be certain of is that when Marc Dutroux crawled inside the concealed dungeon he’d made, he found inside the emaciated bodies of two little girls, each weighing little over two stone. Both were dead.

‘I told you to feed them!’ he yelled at Michelle, more furious that his orders had been disobeyed than that his helpless prisoners had lost their lives. In a rage, he wrapped the frail bodies in plastic bin liners and carried them to the big deep freeze. They were so light, lifting them inside took no more effort than sticking in a couple of frozen chickens.

Once the freezer door was safely shut, he set about cleaning up the house. The dogs had been there, more or less alone for four months, and the place was full of dog excrement and the foul stench caught on your nostrils as soon as you walked in. Damn Michelle, he thought angrily. The only things she’d had to do and she’d completely messed up!

It was another week before the bodies of Julie and Melissa were taken out of the freezer and buried in the garden of another of his houses, alongside Weinstein in their plastic
bin-liner
shrouds. Now Dutroux was restless. He’d thought about the children all the time he was in prison, and now they were dead, the dungeon lying empty and unused. He needed to go out and procure some more girls.

On 28 May 1996, Sabine Dardenne strapped her satchel to her back and set off for school as normal on her bike from her home in the town of Kain, waving to her father as she rode off.
This would be the last time that he would see his daughter for two and a half months. And when she did return again, the
12-year-old
, with her curly blonde hair and clumsy unguarded grin, would be someone different, someone who rarely smiled, and who shrank from her own father’s touch.

Just moments after setting off, a beaten-up old camper van pulled up alongside Sabine. The sliding door opened and she was pulled from her bike into the moving vehicle. With a blanket over her head, Sabine couldn’t see what was happening, or who had taken her, but she knew enough to be terrified for her life. After being drugged and trussed up inside an old rusty trunk, she was taken to the secret dungeon, where just months before, two little girls had slowly starved to death.

Sabine would spend seventy-nine harrowing days there, naked and chained by the neck, used and abused by Marc Dutroux, forced to take part in pornographic films made for men willing to pay big money to see children crying in pain, pleading for help from the very adults brutalising them.

Quite apart from the sexual torture, Marc Dutroux took perverse pleasure in playing sick psychological games with the traumatised girl. He told her that her parents knew exactly where she was, but that they didn’t want to pay for her release. As with Eefje and An, Sabine was assured there were bad people out there who would kill her if they got hold of her, but that he, Marc, was trying to protect her.

‘They’re constantly watching the house,’ he warned her. ‘If you try to escape, they’ll kill you instantly.’

Michelle Martin, the former teacher and now a mother of three, was nowhere to be seen. After a few days of captivity, Sabine was told her parents considered her as good as dead and had already packed her things up in boxes. In the absence of an adult in whom to confide, Sabine was forced to turn for help and comfort to the very man who had introduced her to this living hell: Marc Dutroux.