WHY HAS THE KILLER OF THESE LITTLE GIRLS NEVER BEEN BROUGHT TO JUSTICE?
(You Magazine Mail on Sunday 25th August 2002)
When Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing earlier this month, it was not the first time that two little girls had disappeared from the streets in broad daylight. Seven years ago Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were abducted close to their homes in Belgium.
Fourteen months later, their bodies were found but no one has yet been tried. Journalist Olenka Frankiel set out to investigate the story for a TV documentary shown earlier this year. What she found will haunt her forever.
Holly and Jessica, Julie and Melissa. Even the names carry an uncanny echo. It was this month, six years ago, that the bodies of the eight-year-olds Julie and Melissa were found after 14 months of ineptitude from Belgium's police and justice system. The grim discovery left Belgium in a state of shock from which it has never recovered.
For me, as a documentary maker who has covered that bungled investigation, the apparent similarities in the cases are disturbing: "double abduction" are, fortunately, very rare. Having met the Belgian parents of the murdered girls, having got to know a little of their pain and their fight for justice, my heart went out to the parents of Holly and Jessica as they waited for news of their girls. I have never been able to understand how Marc Dutroux, the man suspected of Julie and Melissa's abduction and murder , has sat in jail all these years but has never come to trial. The evidence against Dutroux, who in 1996 led police to the bodies of four kidnapped girls, to the dungeon where he admitted incarcerating them before they died and where investigators found two girls drugged and dazed but still alive, has never been heard by a jury.
When I began work on the programme, I had no idea that it would not, in the end, be the paedophile murders that would disturb me most. Even more upsetting were the incredible failures of the Belgian justice system, and the efforts of some determined people to prevent this case ever coming to court. No fewer than 16 potential witnesses died in mysterious circumstances shortly before testifying. Two were victims of car crashes, one was hit by a train, one was shot in a lay-by, and yet another disappeared, only his foot later found in a canal.
Less than an hour from Brussels in the town of Charleroi, where unemployment is high and the only growth industry is crime. Here, in 1995, in the cellar of one of his five hoses, Marc Dutroux, a convicted paedophile, then 40, built a cage to hold young girls. Three of his contacts in the criminal underworld had informed police that Dutroux was planning to adduct children for money. Yet when two little girls aged eight disappeared from Grace-Hollogne near Liege in June that year, the police failed to act.
'Nothing makes any sense in this story' says Gino Russo, father of Melissa, one of the abducted girls. 'From beginning to end the whole thing is inexplicable. Seven years after Melissa disappeared we still have no answers. We have only questions.'
The first and most important unanswered question: wh7y did the police fail to save his daughter? When Melissa Russo and her friend Julie Lejeune were abducted in June 1995, Marc Dutroux was a prime suspect. The police were in possession of the informants' statements. They had his home under surveillance. Some time after the girls' disappearance, they searched the house and heard children's voices, but concluded they came from outside and failed to search the cellar. In the house, they found a speculum (a medical instrument used in vaginal examinations) but handed it back to Dutroux's wife without forensic analysis.
They found undeveloped film and videos, but they left the film unprocessed and they didn't examine the videos. If they had done so, they would have seen footage of Dutroux raping a girl, and building the ventilation shaft for the concealed cage in his cellar. If the police had carried out their investigations properly at that time, they could have saved the girls. Yet the dungeon was not discovered and Dutroux was not arrested until he abducted another girl, 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez, 14 months later. By that time the two eight-year-olds were dead, as were two teenagers, An Marchal and Efje Lambrecks, also abducted during the summer of 1995.
Dutroux might never have been arrested at all, were it not for the arrival on the scene of Judge Jean Marc Connerotte. He ordered the arrest of Dutroux and 13 other men believed to be members of a paedophile ring. Shortly after his arrest, Laetitia Delhez and another girl Sabrine Dardenne, aged 12, who had been missing for months were discovered drugged and terrified in his dungeon. Later they both told police Dutroux had raped them repeatedly, though their memories were hazy. Dutroux had used Rohypnol, the date-rape drug, to keep them almost permanently comatose.
By why, if police already had Dutroux's house under surveillance and had even searched it, did they not find Melissa and Julie? The police officer who found the speculum, and gave it back, Rene Michaux, now holds a senior position in Belgium's anti-Mafia squad. None of the police involved in this catastrophic failure has ever been disciplined. Why was their incompetence hardly noted? 'People make mistakes' is all you will get.
The mistakes stopped once Judge Connerotte had taken charge of the case. Dutroux led police to the graves of Julie and Melissa, and then to those of An and Efje. But he denied kidnapping and killing the girls. Dutroux claimed his only crime was to imprison them. 'To this day,' says Gino Russo, 'we don't know who kidnapped, who raped and who murdered our daughter.' The Russos have their doubts that it was Dutroux. Like many in Belgium, they believe that others must have been involved, that a wider network of paedophiles involving some prominent Belgians is being protected.
While the girls were in his dungeon, Dutroux was arrested on car theft charges and spent four months in jail. He retur4ned home in March 1996, and claims he found Julie and Melissa starving and barely conscious, but still alive. He maintains he tried to save them, but that Melissa died in his arms. He blames it on his wife, who, he says, had been supposed to feed them while he was in jail. Michele, a blond child-like woman and the mother of Dutroux's three children, confirmed the story to police. She was living in another house but went to Charleroi to feed the dogs. She knew the girls were in the cellar without food or water but claims she was too frightened to go into the cage, so she left cartons of frozen soup outside the grille, sadly beyond their reach.
Dutroux has often changed his story. At times he has claimed he acted alone. Today he says he was working for a paid network. The Russos insist the evidence shows he could not have acted alone. 'The girls could not have survived four months in that cage alone, without food, water or human contact' says Carinne Russo, Melissa's mother. 'These were little girls. They weren't superhuman. Either they died earlier, or someone else was keeping them alive.'
Most of the press, subsidised as it is by the Belgian government, toes the line that Marc Dutroux was a lone paedophile kidnapping girls for his own purposes. According to the Belgian authorities, there was no paedophile network behind him. The parents of his victims who have continued searching for the truth, the Rossos and Pol Marchal, father of An Marchal, have been targeted with negative publicity. I was told by a government official that the Russos were obsessive conspiracy theorists, deranged with grief. And yet I have rarely met such a dignified couple. When I first went to see them I was received cautiously into their small house near Liege. Carinne Russo, now in her 40s, elegant and slim, begins by telling me about the kidnap. When Melissa and her friend Julie Lejeune disappeared in June 1995 the police assured her that children run away all the time and that they'd soon come home. The police insisted it wasn't necessary to search for the girls. 'When we told them we thought they must have been kidnapped they laughed and told us we watched too much Miami Vice.' Carinne is understandably bitter.
Gino Russo takes over: 'Ten days after Melissa and Julie disappeared, Dutroux who had kidnapped girls in the past was the police's main suspect. But still they did nothing. Fourteen months later, Judge Connerotte finally arrested Dutroux and the bodies were found. Immediately afterwards, Judge Connerotte was sacked and replaced by a man who has never done the job before. This was Belgium's biggest crime of the century and they appointed a rookie judge. Can you imagine it?'
Judge Connerotte was accused of compromising his impartiality by attending a fundraising dinner for victims of abuse in October 1996. His sacking brought 400,000 Belgians on to the streets in protest. But the protests faded away and most of those he arrested all except Dutroux, his wife and a drug addict who worked for Dutroux are now free.
Bizarrely, the Russos were not allowed to identify their daughter's body. Carinne went with her lawyer to plead for the right to see Melissa one last time. 'We begged, we cried but they said it was impossible. It was the law. Dutroux had identified her. That was enough. The answer was no.'
Carinne explains that according to the autopsy report Melissa's body bore evidence of violent injury to her lower abdomen of sustained rape and abuse over a prolonged period. Dutroux claims he never raped her. Besides, he'd been in jail for four months during Melissa's captivity. So if it wasn't Dutroux, who raped Melissa?
Investigators might have found the answer to that question if they'd analysed the 5,000 hairs found by police in the dungeon where the girls had been imprisoned. But Judge Connerotte's replacement, Jacques Langlois, the new investigating judge in charge of the case refused to send the hairs for forensic analysis. The reason he gave was always the same. His boss, Anne Thily, prosecutor general in Liege, repeats the same mantra. 'Dutroux was acting alone. There was no one else in the cage apart from the girls, so there was no need to get the hairs analysed.'
Surely DNA tests would have revealed if Dutroux or someone else raped Melissa? 'When the bodies were discovered they took samples for DNA tests' says Carinne. 'But where are the results of those tests? There aren't any. It isn't even mentioned in the summary of evidence. I keep asking but no one seems to know.'
I put this question to Anne Thily, one of the most senior figures in Belgium's judiciary. She claims it's obvious the girls were raped by Dutroux. As for the DNA tests, she shrugs and tells me they were inconclusive. 'The bodies,' she says, 'were too decomposed.' While researching my film, I learned (from an unofficial source) that the autopsy report reveals quite the opposite: the bodies were hardly decomposed at all.
Why would the Belgian authorities lie? Why would anyone want to prevent a thorough investigation? The country is divided between those who believe there has been a cover-up and those who don't want to hear any more about Dutroux.
Before he was sacked, Judge Connerotte had been concentrating his investigations on a man he suspected was the mastermind behind Dutroux's abductions. Businessman Jean Michel Nihoul was well-known in the 70s, when orgies became a part of the Brussels nightclub scene. Nihoul mixed with politicians and judges and today claims he has enough information on important people to destroy Belgium. The day after Dutroux's last abduction Nihoul gave £10,000-worth of ecstasy tablets to Michel Lelievre, the drug-addict lackey of Dutroux. Connerotte suspected this was a form of payment for the latest kidnapped girls and he arrested Nihoul. Nihoul denied that he and Dutroux had ever met before June 1995.
Then a new witness came forward. Regina Louf, now aged 33, was, as a child, the victim of a paedophile ring. Nihoul, she claimed, had been on of the bosses, and Dutroux was also involved. She witnessed many sadomasochistic sessions involving children and top politicians, judges and businessmen. She told the investigator she had witnessed the murder of a 15-year-old girl at the hands of Nihoul, Dutroux and six others. She named prominent people, most of whom are still alive today and all of whom, apart from Dutroux, are free.
Her confidential testimony was taken by a team of police. When her story was checked, key elements of it were found to be true. As soon as they reported their progress and began to ask for search warrants, the team was suddenly and inexplicably ordered to terminate the investigation.
Then a new team was brought in to rewrite Regina Louf's testimony. A television programme for RTBF, the government-owned French-language station, presented her as a demented liar and her parents as innocent victims of a malicious daughter. What the programme-makers new but never made public was that her parents had already told police they themselves had given their daughter to a middle-aged man at the age of 12; the abuser himself, who has never been prosecuted or identified in the press, also admitted his culpability to police. Yet the programme never corrected the false impression it gave viewers that Regina Louf was a crazy fantasist determined to destroy Belgium and all its institutions. 'If you are a witness in the Dutroux affair' Regina told me 'you must either be mad, or dead.'
Today Regina Louf lives with her husband and four children outside Ghent in Belgium. 'I did my best. I didn't seek publicity. I simply told them what I knew. I couldn't do any more.' Those who have stood by her, the policemen who took her original testimony, those others who checked it and found it credible have been either sacked or sidelined and are forbidden to speak about the case.
Could such a thing happen here in Britain? Not quite in the same way. No one in Britain would be allowed to sit in jail without trial for seven years (the Belgian authorities now say Dutroux and his wife will come to trial some time next year). No TV programme in Britain could destroy the reputation of a potential witness before a case has come to trial, or exonerate a defendant charged with a crime which has yet to be heard in a court. Public officials cannot generally lie without consequence.
And if the justice system fails in Britain, the press is more likely to take up the cause. A Sunday tabloid would surely have named and shamed Tony van den Bogaerts by now, the man who has admitted a 'relationship' with Regina Louf when she was just 12. He now lives in Antwerp unmolested by the law or a single press photographer despite his admission to police of his prolonged sexual abuse of Regina Louf.
Yet there are paedophile rings in Britain and we know they too have gone undetected for years in schools, children's homes and on housing estates. The constant flow of pictures uploaded on to the internet every day testifies to a growing market for child pornography, much of it in Britain. And we are becoming increasingly aware of the potential danger of internet chatrooms. We must never be complacent.
Olenka Frenkiel
Additional reporting by Marine-Jeanne Vanheeswyck, journalist and co-author of a book investigating the Dutroux affair
(published only in Belgium).
From the BBC: Belgium's X-Files - An Olenka Frenkiel Investigation
From the BBC: Dutroux to face jury trial - so the Belgium authorities say
" No date was set but the trial is expected to take place later this year or early next year."
