Because the dungeon already had two little girls inside, the teenagers were held upstairs and chained to a bed and raped. https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/he-can-take-his-excuses-to-the-grave-26220068.html 40.https://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/two-dutroux-victims-were-buried-alive-26010713.html Although he was a convicted paedophile on parole and a suspect in the disappearance of Julie and Melissa, police did not search Dutroux's house for five months after their abduction. When they did, they failed to find the girls after choosing not to investigate the cries they heard.

Dutroux, she said yesterday, had pretended to be her friend. "He tried to pass himself off as a kind person who had saved my life," she said. Dit boek geef ik liever geen sterren, dat vind ik onnodig en dit verhaal lees je niet omdat het zo een mooi geschreven boek is of omdat het zulke leuke personages heeft. Dit boek lees je vanwege het vreselijke aangrijpende verhaal van Sabine Dardenne. In deze review wil er extra zeker van zijn dat alles wat ik zeg, respectvol is en klopt, vandaar dat deze review iets minder ingaat op details. Sabine Dardenne was bundled into a van while cycling to school in May 1996. Laetitia Delhez, then 14, was kidnapped on August 9. Dutroux told Sabine her parents were refusing to pay a ransom to free her. The doctors and the psychiatrists she rejected outright. "The psychiatrist was the worst," she says. "I didn't want to go, my mother made me, and I only went once. This woman showed me splotches of ink, asked me what they were. I said, splotches of ink. She showed me a picture of a little girl with flowers, asked me what it was. I said, a little girl with flowers. She said, is that all? I said, of course it is! That's the day I understood that if I wasn't careful I really would go mad - not with what had happened, but with all the whys and the wherefores afterwards."But Martin and Lelievre crumbled under questioning and confessed to detectives their roles in the girls’ kidnappings. I'm all right for the moment, I am very calm," she said as her mother was taken ill and had to be carried to an ambulance. A massive protest march of 300,000 people on the Belgian capital Brussels demanded reforms of the country’s justice system.

Dutroux, the child of teachers who worked in the Belgian Congo, trained as an electrician and began his criminal career stealing cars, dealing drugs and robbing people in violent muggings. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/marc-dutroux-to-stand-trial-7-years-after-arrest-1.345789 45. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/dutroux-gets-5-years-in-prison-1.283813 At his main residence in Marcinelle, an old mining suburb in the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, he built a secret cellar hole one metre wide, 1.6m tall and just over 2m long. But I wasn't expecting the braveness of Sabine and the horror I knew became even more terrible. It was written with easy words, some repetition and some parts of the letters were left out. For me, the feeling of "not well written" makes this book more raw, like a secret somebody tell you. https://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/i-am-just-a-scapegoat-dutroux-tells-court-25910171.htmlDutroux told police several self-serving stories, including that he was protecting girls from a sinister and powerful child sex ring organised by a Brussels businessman. Dutroux mounted a bid for release on the grounds that he had been held for too long without trial and in inhumane conditions. Psychologists describe him as a having a strong sense of his own victimhood. Worse still, police searched the house where Julie and Melissa were hidden but failed to find them. Once they heard cries for help but accepted Dutroux's claim that the noise was coming from children in the street. No listening devices, heat sensors or other equipment was used, but police found handcuffs, chloroform, vaginal cream and a gynaecological mirror. Speechless as if paralysed by the force of the speech from the person whom he kidnapped, tortured, raped and deceived for three months while she was only a child, Dutroux received more punches in one hour than he had taken since the beginning of the trial," wrote La Libre Belgique. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-surreal-horror-of-a-town-called-arlon-63155.html?r=49392

After Dutroux's arrest it transpired not only that he had been under surveillance, but also that he had served six years of a 12-year jail term for child rape. The prison governor described him as a psychopath. The Charleroi gendarmerie were told by an informer that he was deepening his cellars to conceal children before selling them abroad. But no report was ever filed. I have one thing to ask of Marc Dutroux, even though I know I think I know the answer. “Why didn’t he just liquidate me, since he was always complaining about my pig-headed stubbornness?” she said, alluding to the fate of four other girls found dead on his property.

The Age

In October 1996, the examining magistrate, Jean-Marc Connerotte, was dismissed from the case after he attended a fundraising event for the victims' families. Connerotte had been viewed as a national hero after he arrested Dutroux and liberated his final two victims and his dismissal aroused enormous public anger. It has never been fully explained why Belgian police didn’t go straight to Dutroux and arrest him when little girls across the country began to go missing. It was an electric moment. Standing feet away from her former torturer in his plate-glass box - the man who swore to her that her parents had abandoned her and refused to pay a ransom; the man who, when she was haemorrhaging from his assaults, gave her a pile of old Pampers to wear - she said: "I would like to know, coming from the man who has said I was pigheaded, why he didn't liquidate me."

Dardenne's ordeal in the basement of Dutroux's house lasted 80 days, and Delhez spent six days in the basement before both were rescued by authorities. [7] Earlier victims included eight-year-olds Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, both of whom died of starvation while Dutroux was in prison for car theft, [5] and seventeen-year-old An Marchal and nineteen-year-old Eefje Lambrechts, both of whom were buried alive [8] under a shed on Dutroux's property. A fifth body, that of his French accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, was found. Dutroux admitted to having drugged Weinstein and burying him alive. [5] Trial [ edit ]

Two months later, with Michel Lelievre in the white van, Dutroux kidnapped Sabine Dardenne and imprisoned her in the Marcinelle dungeon.