Killer Couples (20 page)

In the secret diary Sabine kept, days were marked with either a star or a cross. The star days were when Marc came to see her and just chatted, as if he were a friendly uncle or caring teacher. The cross days were the ones when he raped her. Occasionally the lines between abuser and saviour became very blurred, as when Dutroux would force her to perform oral sex and then offer her sweets ‘to take the taste away’, as if he’d just been giving her foul-tasting medicine for her own good.

The lonely, traumatised girl wrote endless letters to her mother, telling her about the ‘agony room’, as she’d renamed the dungeon, about how she wished they’d come for her. With heartbreaking poignancy, she’d ask after her friends, her sisters, as if by talking about normal things somehow she might be able to will herself back there, in the parallel universe she’d once inhabited, where children got up in the morning and went to school unmolested, and the worst thing they had to worry about was arguing with their parents over chores or homework.

When Dutroux would tell her that her mum had replied, instructing her to let him have sex with her, Sabine wondered
whether she was being punished, whether her mum doubted that she loved her.

‘If I didn’t love you, why would I go to the bakery for you and iron handkerchiefs?’ she wrote sadly.

And where was Michelle Martin while all this was going on? Did she ever look at her own children as they sat around the dinner table, tucking into a hot meal, and think of the young girl alone in the dungeon, eating cold tinned food in the dark, or the two others who’d wasted away because she was too nervous to feed them? And did she ever kiss the top of her son’s head, breathing in the smell of soap and freshly washed hair and wonder about those other mothers, the ones whose children went out one day and never came back?

Probably not, because by this stage Michelle had forgotten what it was like to feel empathy for someone else. She’d cohabited so long with brutality that it was the only master she knew. As always, she turned her narrow back, and did nothing.

Meanwhile, Sabine was desperately lonely in her underground prison.

‘Do you think one of my friends could come round and visit me?’ she asked her captor, still not really understanding what had happened to her.

Marc Dutroux’s response was to kidnap another girl. Not only would he have a new sexual plaything – another star for his sickening pornographic videos – it would also give Sabine yet another reason to feel grateful to him.

On 9 August 1996, 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez went swimming at a pool in her home town: Bertrix in the south-east of Belgium. As she walked home, a shabby white van pulled up alongside her. No one heard her scream.

‘I have a friend for you!’

Marc Dutroux pushed the terrified Laetitia ahead of him into the filthy dungeon, which Sabine now called home. The girls locked eyes in mutual helpless appeal. Now Sabine was torn between relief at having someone to talk to, and guilt that it was her fault Laetitia was there.

If Dutroux’s intention had been to add an extra layer of psychological torture for his poor captive, he couldn’t have planned it better. But this time he made one fateful error. While he and Lelièvre had been driving around Bertrix looking for potential victims they’d been spotted by a student who thought there was something odd about the battered van that was covered in stickers. When police trawled the area searching for witnesses, the young man was able to tell them the exact make of the van and even the first part of the number plate which had stuck in his mind because it had the same initials as his sister.

Jean-Marc Connerotte, the magistrate in charge of the Bertrix area, ordered Marc Dutroux’s arrest. He also had all his houses surrounded.

After two days of intense questioning, Dutroux finally cracked. ‘I’ll give you some girls,’ he told the incredulous police officers.

It was an apprehensive group who accompanied Dutroux to his house in Marcinelle on 15 August 1996. Smashing through
the concrete behind the filing cabinet, which now hid the door to the cellar, the men were horrified to find two emaciated young girls, who cowered and cried at their sudden appearance. Believing these were the bad guys who had sworn to kill them, the girls ran for comfort to the familiar figure of Dutroux.

‘Thank you,’ they sobbed, clinging to the man they believed, in spite of the rapes, the videotaping, the long nights spent chained to him by the foot, had protected them.

For magistrate Jean-Marc Connerotte this was the most heartrending sight of all.

In the eight long years following the arrest of Marc Dutroux and Michelle Martin, Belgium tore its public heart out over the man who became known as The Beast of Belgium. Why hadn’t Dutroux been stopped earlier? And why had the police investigation been so inept? Then, again and again, the question of the day: were Dutroux and Martin and Lelièvre acting alone?

From the start, Marc Dutroux insisted he’d kidnapped the girls to order for an international paedophile ring which boasted members from the very highest levels of Belgian society, including police officers, government officials, even members of the Royal Family. One of the men who would later stand trial with him was Michel Nihoul, a fraudster rumoured to organise sex and drugs parties for Belgium’s elite. Dutroux accused Nihoul of being his link to an organised crime ring that stole girls to order and then sold them into prostitution in other parts of Europe.

Certainly, there was a lot of evidence to support his claim. Despite numerous warning signs, police had been suspiciously slow to react, and subsequently, calamitously inept. Following his arrest, crucial evidence, such as analysis of hair samples taken from the dungeon, was dismissed or discarded. Connerotte, who’d cracked open the case and who many Belgians believed to be one of the few totally independent authority figures, was removed from the investigation. The official reason given was that he had attended a fund-raising event in October 1996 at which some of the families of Dutroux’ victims were present, and had so compromised his impartiality. Witnesses who came forward to testify to the existence of a highly organised paedophile ring, in which children were tortured and in some cases even murdered at parties, were discredited. Several other witnesses died unexpectedly before they could give evidence, yet still Dutroux mouldered in jail, and still there was no trial, no closure.

Finally, in June 2004, a court at Arlon in eastern Belgium tried Dutroux for rape, kidnap and murder. His wife, Nihoul and Lelièvre were also in the dock as accomplices. Like the rest of Belgium, the families of the victims were divided – some came to the court to see justice done, others stayed away, convinced the real perpetrators were still at large and protected.

By this stage Michelle Martin was divorced from her controlling former husband. In the dock, she seemed to shrink away from him, as insubstantial in the flesh as she was in spirit. She was a hollow woman whose blind self-interest
had allowed two children to die and a sadist to live out his fantasies unchallenged.

But Michelle attempted to somehow justify herself. She had been terrified of her husband and she was frightened of the girls in the cellar.

‘I thought the little creatures would attack me,’ she told the hushed court.

Of course she should have let them out, should have protected Sabine and Laetitia, but she didn’t.

‘I want to express my regrets,’ she said lamely, facing the two survivors of the dungeon across the courtroom. For them it was too little, far, far too late.

Her husband too made a half-hearted attempt at a remorse hardly anyone believed him capable of.

‘I realise the wrong that I have done,’ he said. ‘I offer my apologies.’

They were not accepted.

After a trial which half of Belgium believed to be an official whitewash, Marc Dutroux was imprisoned for life for the murder of Eefje, An and Bernard Weinstein. Michelle Martin received thirty years for allowing two little girls to starve to death in a cellar. Lelièvre, who’d accompanied Dutroux on his kidnapping expeditions, was jailed for twenty-five years, while Nihoul, widely rumoured to have been the lynchpin in an international crime ring dealing in abduction, pornography and human trafficking, got off with a five-year sentence for drug dealing and fraud.

The trial and sentences did little to heal the broken heart of Belgium, where even today, question marks still hang heavy over the narrow focus of the investigation and the staggering ineptitude of the police. Claims of sex parties, in which the ruling elite got drunk on watching children being tortured, seem as incredible now as they did when they were first mooted and yet, can anything really be beyond belief in a world where 8-year-olds can be snatched from the street and starved to death in underground dungeons?

Whether he worked alone, or as he claims as a ‘lowly cog in a sex slave ring’, the fact remains that Marc Dutroux was a sadist and a psychopath, chilling in his brutality, more chilling still in his attempts to befriend his victims, to extract gratitude instead of fear. Michelle Martin was a weak woman who literally stood by her man, even when he was raping children, who became so much of a moral void that she allowed two 8-year-olds to die with the same lack of conscience as if they were a couple of rabid dogs she feared would attack her if she approached.

Marc Dutroux’s mother told authorities that her son was born with a ‘twisted soul’. The pity is how easily he managed to twist his wife’s soul to match his own, and with such devastating results.

S
itting at the table in her home in Bream in the peaceful Forest of Dean, nestling amid the rolling Gloucestershire countryside, Amanda Baggus chewed the end of her biro as she considered where to start. The diary was open in front of her, page after page of lined, spiral-bound paper, filled with her neat round, child-like writing. She’d already written the date at the top of the blank page: 5-08-06, just as she’d learned to do while doing homework at school. After a few moments of thought, she took the pen out of her mouth and began to write.

But Amanda wasn’t writing about what had happened to her that day, nor was she keeping a note of her son’s milestone achievements, or even jotting down her hopes and dreams for the future. No, the 25-year-old’s diary was altogether far more disturbing. In childish writing littered with misspellings that
made the contrast to the blood-chilling content even more stark, Amanda was chronicling the systematic abuse and torture of the man she and her boyfriend were keeping prisoner in their garden shed, the man they simply called ‘prick’.

‘He was playing up late nite banging in the shed,’ she wrote, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly, as she concentrated on the task in hand. ‘So later that nite both Scott and Dave hit Prick until quite late cause Prick made a load of shouting. Hoovered three times.’

According to her diary, Amanda did a lot of hoovering: hoovering to clean away the evidence of their systematic brutality, hoovering to cover the sound of a man howling with pain and pleading for his life… But there are some stains that no amount of cleaning will ever expunge, some sounds that linger on long after the event.

And there are some diaries that should never be written.

‘You idiot! What did you go and do that for? Now look what’s happened!’

Amanda Baggus was fuming, her face puce with anger as she surveyed the damage to her Reliant Robin, which lay on its side in the road.

‘I’m sorry, Amanda. I didn’t mean to, honest.’

Always inclined to trip over his words, Kevin Davies’ nerves now made him almost incoherent.

He hadn’t a clue that the little three-wheeler car might topple over if he opened his door while it was still moving, and to be
completely honest he wasn’t even sure it was definitely his fault, but one look at Amanda’s face told him he was in big trouble.

‘You’re going to pay for this,’ she spat, her face, distorted with rage, pressed up close to his.

As a dismayed Kevin cast an eye over the beaten-up old car that day in May 2006, trying desperately to work out how much it would cost to put right, he had no idea that the price he’d end up paying for his ‘mistake’ would be his life.

Later that day, Amanda was still seething when she recounted the incident to her boyfriend of ten years, David Lehane.

‘It’s the last straw, Dave,’ she ranted. ‘If that prick thinks he can wreck my car and just walk away scot-free, he’s got another thing coming!’

David listened, his close-set green eyes glinting in his hard, narrow face. The 35-year-old had known Kevin Davies since school days and had even let him help him out with one or other of his business ventures from time to time, but recently he’d become a real pain. Since his epilepsy had got too bad for him to work, Kevin had taken to just hanging around the couple and he was getting on their nerves. Sometimes they let him stick around in return for him buying them drinks and things such as takeaway meals, but now look what had happened.

‘You’re right, he’s got some serious damage to put right,’ he mused. ‘Shame he’s got no money.’

‘No, but he’s got his benefit,’ Amanda reminded him.

A plan was slowly beginning to form in her mind.

Bream, in the Forest of Dean, is one of those places that perfectly epitomises William Blake’s ‘England’s green and promised land’. A large self-contained village with plenty of green spaces for children to play and surrounded on all sides by rolling hills and woodland, Bream is the kind of place where young parents dream of bringing up their families and pensioners grow old without fear.

The neat semi-detached house in which David Lehane and Amanda Baggus lived was situated at one end of a quiet cul-
de-sac
with a well-kept garden to the back and side. Even though it was a housing association property, it was the envy of many of their friends, and the couple looked after it well. It was a shame really that their son was being looked after by relatives rather than living with them – this would have made a perfect family home.

The only thing that slightly let the house down was the makeshift shed in the back garden. This was a ramshackle structure, tucked away round one side of the house, between the wall of the back extension and the red brick wall that separated the house from its neighbours. Whoever had built the shed had obviously done so in rather a hurry. A wooden door with frosted glass panels, of the type you normally find on a back kitchen, had been carelessly joined onto a basic four-walled cube of corrugated iron, finished off on the roof with four lengths of plastic drain pipe, cut in halves and placed upside down. Two large metal bolts had been firmly hammered onto the outside of the door. Inside, off-cuts of laminated wood panels had been laid randomly down on the floor and a few tiles stuck to the wall. Measuring around 6 by 4ft, this was the sort of structure that an
enthusiastic teenager, just experimenting with carpentry, might just cobble together to impress his indulgent mother.

It was to be Kevin Davies’ home for the last four agonising months of his life.

At first it had just been a business proposition: they’d keep Kevin prisoner in the shed, cashing in his benefits, until they reckoned he’d repaid his debt for the damage to the car. If they made him hand back the keys to his housing association flat, they could pretend he was living with them and claim rent too.

It wasn’t as if they really needed the money either. David Lehane had claimed benefits ever since an attack of psoriasis some years before, but that hadn’t stopped him from running a car repairs business and a landscape gardening service on the side. The money wasn’t really the point, though. Amanda Baggus, small-minded and vindictive, wanted to see Kevin Davies punished for what he’d done to her car. And, with the sadistic mentality that had made her the class bully at school, she thought it would be fun to see the weak, placid man squirm a bit and to remind him who was boss around there.

‘Come on, let’s do it,’ she urged Lehane.

He didn’t need much encouragement.

Kevin Davies, a severe epileptic for the past fifteen years, had always had a problem forming close friendships. Softly spoken and passive by nature, he was well liked around the close-knit community where he grew up, but preferred to eschew group situations in favour of his own company.

He was close to his mother and family, but when the council had re-housed him to Bream, a few miles away, he’d become even more solitary in his habits. In recent years he’d started drinking a fair bit, but he was never an aggressive drunk as so many seemed to be. Sometimes he’d get drunk alone, and other times with one of his few local friends, like David Lehane.

Amanda Baggus knew it would be a while before he was missed. In the meantime, they could have some fun.

As soon as the Robin Reliant was damaged, Kevin had worried about what David Lehane’s reaction might be, but even so it didn’t occur to him that he was in any real danger. True, David had a reputation for violence. On more than a few occasions, Kevin had been on the receiving end of Lehane’s fist and had had to hand over money to him and his girlfriend from time to time. But still 29-year-old Kevin didn’t think he’d ever really hurt him. After all, he’d known David for years.

‘I’m really sorry about the car,’ Kevin repeated for the hundredth time. ‘I’ll pay you back. Really.’

‘Too right you will!’ Lehane was leading Kevin round the side of the house to the dark patch of muddy grass that housed the DIY shed.

‘Say hello to your new home.’

Alone in the shed, Kevin listened uncomprehendingly to the noise of the bolts being drawn across the door from the outside. He didn’t understand. Why was he here? What was going on?

‘David,’ he called tentatively. ‘Amanda…’

No one answered.

‘Did you see his face?’ David was laughing. ‘He didn’t have a clue what was going on.’

In truth it had been so easy. And now they had a man imprisoned in their garden shed, completely at their mercy. It was an empowering idea.

The violence started soon after Kevin was first incarcerated. Amanda just couldn’t bear the noises he was making – shouting and banging things on the side of the shed.

‘He’s got to be taught a lesson,’ she decided. ‘He’s got to learn to shut up.’

The girl who’d terrorised classmates at school was an old hand at teaching people to keep quiet. Kevin’s ‘lesson’ involved being hit over the head with a wooden bar.

Kevin Davies, crouching alone and terrified in a corner of the shed clutched his bleeding head and whimpered softly to himself. What was happening to him didn’t seem possible. They were bound to release him in a day or two, he tried to reassure himself; they’d warn him not to tell anyone and send him home, he thought.

But the couple weren’t about to stop there. That initial beating had given them a thrill way beyond the original intent of teaching their prisoner a lesson. They discovered they liked administering punishment; they enjoyed the way fear flared up in Kevin’s wide, trusting green eyes. It was similar to when they’d picked on younger, weaker kids at school, only this time
there was no teacher to tell them to pack it in, no angry parent waiting at the school gates. There really were no limits.

‘He’s been at it again,’ Amanda would tell her boyfriend, her round face lit up with anticipation. ‘You’d better do something.’

Then Dave would go to the shed and use his fists, or the wooden bar. Amanda would either go to watch, or listen to the muffled cries coming through the door.

‘Good job she’s so deaf,’ she said, when David reappeared, gesturing towards the neighbouring house, where 84-year-old Esme Palmer pottered in her kitchen, blissfully unaware of what was happening just yards away.

The couple started to bring Kevin into the house – except that now he’d become their prisoner, and therefore in their eyes something less than human, so they no longer called him by his name. Instead they referred to him as ‘Prick’. In the relative privacy of their living room, they could pile more abuse onto their helpless captive, secure that his screams wouldn’t be overheard.

‘I can’t find an ashtray, come over here, Kevin,’ Amanda would say, stubbing her cigarette out on her former friend’s bare skin.

‘He kept me awake again last night,’ she’d complain to her boyfriend. ‘You’d better do something.’

And she’d watch, grinning, as Kevin was beaten, kicked and stamped on. Or else she’d join in with the abuse. They liked to make him strip, enjoying his shame and humiliation.

‘Oh, sorry, did that get on you?’ one or other would leer as they poured scalding water over his exposed genitals and thighs.

Every week Kevin’s benefit cheque would go straight into the
couple’s pockets, helping to keep them in expensive clothes, CDs and alcohol, which they drank throughout the day. Keeping Kevin had become both a financial investment and a blood sport.

Even when Amanda and David took in a new lodger – a friend of theirs called Scott Andrews – the abuse didn’t stop. In fact, with a third fit, strong adult around to help out, the beatings intensified. Knowing his ‘friends’ and landlords believed Kevin to be less than human, Andrews, taking his cue from them, came to regard the man in the shed as little more than a useless dog in need of discipline.

During the daytime, Kevin was put to work in the house: vacuuming, washing up and cleaning up after his captors. At night he shivered in the unheated shed, trying to muffle his sobs so he wouldn’t get punished the next day for keeping his captors awake. Fed only on potato peelings and scraps of leftovers his 6ft 2 frame gradually wasted away to skeletal proportions.

Of course his family, to whom he was close, were concerned when he stopped coming to see them. But his captors made sure they didn’t come round to check on him by forcing Kevin to phone his mum, Elizabeth James, to say he was OK.

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ he said stiltedly, knowing he’d get the beating of his life if he let slip anything about what was really going on. ‘I’ve given up my flat, but I’m living with friends.’

But his voice sounded flat and thin. Elizabeth instinctively felt something was not quite right. Was he taking his epilepsy medicine? Was he eating properly? She called 1471 trying to trace the number, but there was no record.

‘He’s 29, you know. He’s a grown up,’ friends told her, when she said she was worried. She supposed they were right.

Meanwhile, Kevin’s existence was getting more miserable every day. His three tormentors, largely bored and
under-occupied
, amused themselves by coming up with ever more extreme and imaginative ways to make his life hell.

One day they marched him barefoot into the house and ordered him to get down on the floor. He sat with his back to the wall, hugging his emaciated arms around his hollow chest, trying to stop himself from shaking. His head had been shaved and the contours of his skull showed clearly through his painfully stretched scalp. His thin T-shirt looked baggy and enormous in contrast to his scrawny neck and emaciated frame. Without any fat to protect them, his protruding bones hurt where they came into contact with the floor.

Kevin’s eyes, huge in his skull-like face, gazed up at his captors with a wary apprehension. What were they planning now? Why were they getting out that video camera? All too soon, their intention became clear. Inspired by the grainy hostage videos they saw coming out of Iraq on the nightly news, Amanda, David and Scott had decided to make one of their own.