PART I THE PEDOPHOCRACY
“From our comfortable seat in life…we never could have imagined that thousands of well-off adults, integrated and even cultured, find pleasure in seeing children tortured and killed.” —From a front-page editorial in Italy’s Corriere della Sera (reprinted in The Irish Times, September 29, 2000)
Chapter 1 From Brussels…
“The case of abduction and murder against Belgium’s infamous paedophile Marc Dutroux remains unresolved. He has not beenbrought to book for these heinous crimes. There appears to be a steel veil drawn over the facts at the highest level and no one is prepared to expose those involved in this blatant cover-up…The official answer is that a series of hysterical conspiracy theories forced investigators to search for paedophile networks, which didn’t exist. But for observers of this debacle, that’s exactly what didn’t happen. Far from being investigated, leads pointing to a network seem to have been blocked or buried.” —Olenka Frenkiel for the BBC, May 2, 2002
To the vast majority of Americans, the name Marc Dutroux does not mean much.
Drop that name in Belgium though and you are likely to elicit some very visceral reactions. Dutroux—convicted along with his wife in 1989 for the rape and violent abuse of five young girls, the youngest of whom was just eleven—now stands accused of being a key player in an international child prostitution and pornography ring whose practices included kidnapping, rape, sadistic torture, and murder.
Dutroux was sentenced in 1989 to thirteen years for his crimes, but was freed after having served just three. This was in spite of the fact that, as prison governor Yvan Stuaert would later tell a parliamentary commission: “A medical report described him as a perverse psychopath, an explosive mix. He was an evident danger to society.” The man who turned Dutroux loose on society, Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet, was rewarded with a prestigious appointment to serve as a judge at the European Court of Justice at The Hague.
Shortly after Dutroux’s release, young girls began to disappear in the vicinity of some of his homes. Though technically unemployed and drawing welfare from the state, he nevertheless owned at least six houses and lived quite lavishly. His rather lucrative income appears to have been derived from trading in child sex-slaves, child prostitution, and child pornography. Many of his houses appeared to stand vacant, though at least some of them were in fact used as torture and imprisonment centers where kidnapped girls were taken and held in underground dungeons. Some of Dutroux’s homes were used in this way for several years following his early release, with a growing body of evidence to indicate that fact to the police.
Authorities nevertheless failed to act on the information, or acted on it in ways that implied either complete incompetence (according to most press reports), or police complicity in the operation (according to any sort of logic).
Officials seem to have routinely ignored tips that later proved accurate, including a report from Dutroux’s own mother that her son was holding girls prisoner in one of his houses. In addition, key facts were withheld from investigators working on the disappearances and lines of communication were unaccountably broken, inexcusably hindering the investigation. Police did search one of Dutroux’s homes on no less than three separate occasions over the course of the investigation. On at least two of those occasions, two of the missing girls were being held in heinous conditions, imprisoned in a custom-built dungeon in the basement. Nevertheless, according to the Guardian, the police searches came up empty—even though the investigating officers reported “hearing children’s voices on one occasion.”
