Mark Dutroux is probably the most hated man in Belgium. He is the small European country’s most notorious serial killer, having murdered at least eleven people during the 1990s. It isn’t the number of victims that makes Dutroux so hated, but the age of his victims and some of the details of his case. Many of his victims were preteen girls who he, along with his wife Michelle Martin, abducted, raped, and murdered. After torturing his victims for weeks on end, sometimes in one of his many homes, he would often bury them alive in his backyard.
The worst part is that the Belgian authorities had known about Dutroux since at least 1986.
In 1986, Dutroux was a thirty-year-old-man with plenty of money and properties, but no real legitimate income. He stole cars for a living, and when he wasn’t stealing cars, he was abducting and raping girls with Martin, who was his girlfriend at the time. The police eventually caught up with the pair and convicted Dutroux of five abduction-rapes, but Dutroux was only given a thirteen-year sentence and was released after serving just three years.
Many people believe that that was the first sign that Dutroux had deep connections in Belgian society.
When Dutroux was captured in 1996, his reign of terror finally came to an end. But a new—and even more bizarre—chapter in his case began. The police bungled evidence from Dutroux’s home, and it was revealed that they had known something about his activities since at least 1995. Then the case seemed to drag on for years.
And then one of Dutroux’s accomplices, Michael Lelievre, publicly claimed that they were part of a highly organized pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy.
Lelievre pointed the finger at a Brussels businessman named Jean Michel Nihoul, claiming he was one of the major facilitators of the conspiracy. In October of 1996, after all of this came to the surface, nearly three hundred thousand Belgians marched on the capital seeking answers.
They received few.
Although Dutroux and Martin received life sentences and will more than likely never be released from prison, reports about the conspiracy continue to surface. Women who claim to be survivors state that Dutroux was just a hired grunt who procured girls and drugs for well-connected politicians, businessmen, professors, judges, and even members of law enforcement. With that said, many in Belgium’s law enforcement community worked to uncover any potential conspiracy but were seemingly thwarted at every step.
The original judge of Dutroux’s case, Jean-Marc Connerotte, was fired for no apparent reason by a judge well past his prime who seemed more interested in collecting a paycheck than in finding the truth. But even more chilling were the deaths of all the witnesses connected to the case.
There were twenty unexplained deaths of witnesses involved with Dutroux’s case—some were inexplicable murders while others were labeled “accidents.” These deaths certainly add fuel to the conspiracy theories still circulating about the case.
It seems unlikely that Dutroux will ever tell the complete story about the murders. Well, maybe on his deathbed.