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World's Most Evil Killers S01E04
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00:00In the summer of 1996, the whole of Belgium was in shock when two young girls, who'd been kidnapped, raped and tortured, were rescued from a makeshift dungeon below a house in Marcenel.
00:20As the weeks passed, the bodies of four other young girls were found buried at properties linked to the same man.
00:28Some of them starved to death, others were buried alive. These are some of the most horrendous crimes that any criminologist will ever come across.
00:37It was the beginning of a terrible nightmare for the entire nation.
00:41It was such a huge thing. No one could believe that such a person could exist in Belgium. It was unthinkable.
00:48With the help of his wife, Michelle Martin, convicted paedophile Mark Dutroux's unhealthy desire for young girls had turned deadly.
00:57The youngest victims who died in his homemade dungeon were just eight years old.
01:04It is unimaginable cruelty and something that sets Dutroux apart from some other serial killers.
01:15Mark Dutroux, the man dubbed the Monster of Marcenel, had earned his place as one of the world's most evil killers.
01:24It was a case that sent shockwaves across Europe. For a year during the mid-1990s,
01:31a Belgian killer had been abducting, torturing and raping young girls,
01:46keeping them chained inside his abandoned properties.
01:49It wasn't until the summer of 1996, when two of the young girls were found alive inside a basement in Marcenel,
01:53that the Belgian public discovered the heinous crimes committed by Mark Dutroux.
02:00Behind the façade of this perfectly ordinary-looking house lay a chamber of horrors.
02:07Down in that cellar, it's alleged that Dutroux built a cage to keep his victims.
02:12They were locked away like animals, raped repeatedly and mentally tortured.
02:19But this killer's story begins over 60 years ago.
02:24Born in Excel on the 6th of November 19th,
02:27on the 6th of November 19th,
02:29it was the case that it was the case that it was the case that it was the case that it was the case.
02:33But this killer's story begins over 60 years ago.
02:38Born in Excel on the 6th of November 1956,
02:43Mark Dutroux was the oldest of five children.
02:47His parents were teachers and, at one point, emigrated to the Belgian Congo,
02:54where they taught.
02:56But when the crisis erupted in that country,
02:59they brought Dutroux back to Belgium in 1960.
03:04His parents eventually separated in 1971,
03:08and 15-year-old Dutroux stayed with his mother.
03:12We know that his mother was incredibly dominant.
03:14His father was very aggressive.
03:16So I think it was quite a hostile environment to grow up in.
03:20And I think those attachments, or lack of attachments,
03:23with his parents in those early years
03:25did play quite a role in the person he became.
03:29Trained as an electrician but often unemployed,
03:33Dutroux soon began a long criminal history,
03:36including convictions for car theft, mugging and drug dealing.
03:41Dutroux had a lot of contact with the police.
03:46He stepped up from car theft into a rather grand form of car theft,
03:52which involved shipping quite expensive luxury cars,
03:56which he'd stolen in Belgium,
03:58out of the country into Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
04:02The profit from his crimes led to Dutroux owning seven properties
04:07in and around the city of Charlois, 45 miles south of Brussels.
04:12By 1983, 26-year-old Dutroux was married with two children,
04:17but he'd begun an affair with a school teacher called Michel Martin.
04:22The 23-year-old would eventually become Dutroux's partner in life
04:26and crime, with whom he also had three more children.
04:30The severity of Dutroux's crimes escalated from theft to sexual assault,
04:36and in 1989, he was found guilty of the abduction and rape
04:41of five young girls, one of whom was just 11 years old.
04:46Mark Dutroux was a predator who selected his prey very carefully.
04:50He wanted to choose people who were easy to target in the first place,
04:55easy to abduct, but also easy to manipulate
04:58once he had them under his control.
05:01So he would go for the most vulnerable victims that he could find
05:05that fulfilled his desires.
05:08Dutroux's now wife, Michel, was found to be complicit in the abductions
05:12and served two years of a five-year sentence.
05:17The psychiatrists suggest that Martine and Dutroux, husband and wife,
05:23are a classic example of folly-ader, that one egged the other on,
05:30and that, therefore, the sum of the two of them
05:33was even more dangerous than one alone.
05:37I think when we look at the relationship between Dutroux
05:39and his wife, who was implicated in many of his crimes,
05:44it is quite interesting.
05:46It's quite possible that some people see her
05:49as just another one of his victims,
05:51somebody else who was manipulated and coerced by him.
05:55And when we look at Mark Dutroux and his behavior,
05:58he is incredibly charming at times, and he can be very persuasive.
06:03So it wouldn't surprise me if he'd set out with the intention
06:08of recruiting somebody to help him in his crimes,
06:12and this is somebody who fell for his charms
06:14and went along with it.
06:17Dutroux was released on parole in 1992
06:21after serving three years of a 13-year sentence,
06:24having shown good behavior.
06:27I find that extraordinary.
06:29You can be convicted of the rape and abduction of five girls,
06:33the youngest of which is 11,
06:35and you can walk out of jail after three years
06:37of a 13-and-a-half-year sentence.
06:39George Weccano, a Belgian investigative journalist,
06:42has spent over ten years reporting on the Dutroux case.
06:47Dutroux is an expert manipulator.
06:51He made everyone cry.
06:53He made everybody believe that his family had abandoned him.
06:56As an exemplary prisoner, he came out very quickly.
06:58The prisons are overpopulated,
07:00and for authorities he was nothing more than a car thief.
07:03By the summer of 1995, Dutroux was a free man
07:08and living with his wife Michelle
07:10in one of his Charlois homes in the suburb of Marcinelle.
07:14On the 24th of June, two eight-year-old girls,
07:18Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo,
07:21went missing from the town of Grasse-Holange,
07:24just 55 miles east of Charlois.
07:27As there was no ransom request,
07:32no information about whether they had been kidnapped,
07:35probably they had been abducted by a predator,
07:38a paedophile, who has in most cases killed his victims
07:41to silence them.
07:46But who could imagine that a man was going to take away the girls
07:49to keep them alive, locked alive inside a cellar?
07:52Nobody.
07:53Dutroux, with the help of his wife Michelle,
07:57had abducted the two children
07:59and were keeping them prisoner inside a homemade dungeon.
08:04Dutroux constructed a cell beneath his house in Charlois,
08:08which was seven feet long, three feet wide,
08:11and approximately five feet high,
08:14hidden behind a very strong, elaborate door,
08:19which was then covered with concrete
08:21and was hidden in his basement.
08:25He put these two eight-year-old girls,
08:27Lejeune and Russo, into the cell
08:32and kept them there for the next three months.
08:36As Julie and Melissa remained locked up into Dutroux's dungeon,
08:40his sexual depravity was escalating,
08:42and just two months later,
08:44he would abduct two more girls,
08:46but this time it would lead to murder.
08:49On August the 23rd, over a hundred miles away on the Belgian coast,
08:58two more girls disappeared.
09:00Best friends, 17-year-old Anne Marchal and 19-year-old Effia Lambrex,
09:06had gone missing while on a camping trip.
09:09When the girls didn't return home,
09:11their friends instantly alerted Effia's father, Jean.
09:20We immediately had the feeling that something was wrong,
09:23because she was always open about things.
09:25She always said where she was going and who she had seen.
09:29She would never not tell anyone and just stay away.
09:32That was not what Effia would do.
09:35The last reported sighting of Anne and Effia was at midnight
09:37in the central train station of Ostend,
09:39a coastal town in northern Belgium.
09:41Initially, the local police had dismissed the parents' concerns.
09:45They did not draw up a report.
09:58They said they must have gone out.
09:59They'll return soon.
10:00But during those first days, nothing was done.
10:03And afterwards, their friends contacted us.
10:06And we went to see the police at Hasselt.
10:09They did respond.
10:10And at that stage, the police at the coast started investigating.
10:15The police then asked questions.
10:18If she was, um, you know,
10:20if perhaps she was addicted to drugs or something.
10:23My response was that Effia,
10:25she said,
10:27did not approve of those things.
10:31She was against it.
10:33I did not believe anything like that.
10:35But anyway, you start doubting.
10:38Or sometimes you start wondering,
10:40did I miss something?
10:47And Marshall's father, Paul,
10:49went to visit investigative journalist Douglas de Coninck
10:53to see if he could help.
10:56I remember very well that Paul Marshall came into the office.
11:00He pleads,
11:01please, please,
11:02put a picture of my daughter on your front page.
11:05And I think we were laughing at him.
11:08He said, oh God, this poor man,
11:11his daughter is sure somewhere partying with some friends
11:15and she will show up in a few days.
11:17But Anne and Effia were not out partying.
11:20In fact, Mark Dutroux,
11:22with the help of a man called Michel Lilievre,
11:25had abducted, raped and murdered the two young women.
11:29They were inveigled into the van that Dutroux used for the abductions.
11:38Because the dungeon beneath the house was full of the two eight-year-olds,
11:47they chained these two girls to a bed in the rest of the house.
11:52When exactly Marshall and Lembrick died, and precisely how,
11:58has always been a little mysterious.
12:00What is not in doubt is that they were tortured and raped
12:05and eventually strangled.
12:07In December 1995, Dutroux was arrested in relation to a car theft.
12:13He was convicted and served almost four months in prison.
12:17During this time, the police searched his Marcinelle home.
12:21They were agonizingly close to finding out Dutroux's darkest secret.
12:28Twice in December 1995, on the 13th and the 19th,
12:32police searched the house in Shalwa.
12:37One of the most poignant and tragic parts of that search,
12:45which included the search of the basement,
12:48was that the police failed to identify the dungeon.
12:54Even more horrifying,
12:57the two policemen who searched the house
13:00were accompanied by a locksmith who would help them.
13:05The locksmith told the policeman that he heard screams.
13:10The policeman said,
13:12oh, it must be from outside,
13:15and disregarded him.
13:18The terrible truth is that it was from the two eight-year-olds,
13:22hidden in this cell, this dungeon.
13:25At Dutroux's house, officers had also found several VHS cassette tapes,
13:31but investigators didn't watch them until much later.
13:35It was a video, a home video made by Marc Dutroux,
13:38where he was filming the developments in the works in his child cage.
13:44This was essential proof that they were on the right track.
13:49But for some strange reason, they did this house search,
13:53and they didn't exploit the information they got from it.
13:57The police mistakes came at a fatal cost.
14:01By the time Dutroux arrived back home after his release from prison in March 1996,
14:07Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were dead.
14:13His wife, Michelle, had allowed the two eight-year-old children
14:17to starve to death in the makeshift dungeon.
14:20Dutroux had told her to feed their large German shepherd dog.
14:24Look after him.
14:26He neglected to tell Michelle, apparently,
14:31to feed the two eight-year-olds in the dungeon.
14:33Some say, in defense of Dutroux's wife,
14:39that she was so terrified of the whole idea of the dungeon
14:43and the fact that they might do something
14:47or she wouldn't be able to control them,
14:49meant that she couldn't go in,
14:50and so she therefore allowed them to starve to death.
14:53I've always regarded that as an over-benevolent description
14:58of what probably happened.
15:00But what I do believe is that, between them,
15:04they allowed these children, eight-year-old girls,
15:10to suffer dreadfully, and there is no excuse in my mind for that.
15:14Dutroux didn't wait long to find a replacement for the two girls.
15:19On the 28th of May 1996, he kidnapped 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne
15:25on her way to school and locked her in his dungeon.
15:28For the next three months, Dutroux emotionally tortured Sabine
15:32by making her think she was in contact with her mother and father.
15:36She wrote letters to her parents, but obviously he didn't send the letters.
15:41He read them, he used what was in the letters to manipulate her,
15:44yet she resisted.
15:45Despite everything, she did not create that attachment with him.
15:49Dutroux was still on the hunt for more girls.
15:52On August the 9th, he abducted 14-year-old Letitia Delay
15:57as she walked home from her local swimming pool,
16:00before taking her back to his Marcinelle home
16:03to join Sabine Dardenne in the underground dungeon.
16:06But Letitia's kidnapping would be the first step
16:09in the dramatic downfall of Marc Dutroux.
16:13By accident, it was an eyewitness
16:17who saw her being bundled into a van on that day
16:22and got part of the number plate.
16:24The man had seen a suspicious white van driving away
16:27from the swimming pool where Letitia was last seen.
16:31A white Renault traffic with a license plate
16:34beginning with the letters FFR.
16:37Prosecutor Michel Boulet began to investigate.
16:41I had the beginning of a license plate
16:47and a make-of-car to work with.
16:49There were 20 names that matched
16:51and the police officer said,
16:53ah, among these 20 names there is a certain.
16:56And he said that with a Flemish accent
16:58because he was Flemish.
17:00Dutroux, Dutroux.
17:01This name sounds familiar.
17:03So I asked, who is this Dutroux?
17:05He's a man who lives in Charlois
17:07who owns a white van with a license plate
17:09beginning with the letters FFR
17:12who was sentenced in 1989 on multiple abductions
17:15and rape charges to 13 years in prison.
17:18So he is a high-profile suspect.
17:21One of the police officers working with Michel
17:25had been involved in a separate investigation
17:28called Operation Othello, led by authorities in Charlois,
17:32looking into Dutroux's movements.
17:35He provides us with all the information
17:39from that dossier,
17:41which he had been collecting since July 1995.
17:44We are currently in August 1996.
17:48Investigator Michel and his partner Jean-Marc Conorot
17:57found even more damning information in the Othello file,
18:00the testimony of a man who'd been approached by Dutroux
18:03to help him kidnap girls.
18:05He had asked a certain Claude Thirot,
18:08from the Charlois region,
18:10who is also a fugitive who needed money.
18:12He said to him,
18:14I'll pay you to help me abduct girls.
18:16But this guy was a police informant,
18:18so he went and told the gendarmerie.
18:20There's a guy named Marc Dutroux, who lives there.
18:23He offered me money to kidnap children.
18:28With such strong evidence,
18:30obviously, Mr Conorot and I decided immediately
18:33to take major action concerning Marc Dutroux.
18:37Michel and his team were planning a synchronised raid
18:41on all seven of Marc Dutroux's Charlois homes.
18:44If they could fight him,
18:46it may lead them to missing 14-year-old Leticia Del Rey.
18:50And there was a good chance that she may still be alive.
18:54But they needed to act fast.
18:58On the 13th of August,
18:59over 40 special ops police officers
19:02took part in a synchronised raid
19:04on all seven of Dutroux's properties in Charlois.
19:12At about one in the afternoon,
19:14I was at the headquarters of the gendarmerie of Charlois
19:17at the very moment
19:18when Mr Conorot received the news
19:20that in one of the properties in Salle Le Brousier,
19:23Dutroux was found with his wife and the vehicle.
19:28This was the time to act,
19:29as it seemed that Dutroux was about to change
19:32the licence plate on the van.
19:34Dutroux, his wife, Michelle Martin,
19:36and an accomplice, Michelle Lalièvre,
19:37were taken in for questioning.
19:38Over several hours of interrogations,
19:39all three maintained their innocence.
19:40He was consistent in his lies,
19:43following each lie by telling another lie.
19:45It was a manipulative behaviour.
19:47But otherwise, he stayed very, very calm.
19:49Belgian authorities had no choice but to eventually release Lalièvre,
20:02who denied being with Dutroux on the day Leticia was kidnapped.
20:17But moments after he left the police station in Charlois,
20:20a startling witness account came through.
20:25The neighbours of his property in Marcenay saw Mark Dutroux and Lalièvre
20:31return on Friday evening carrying a child covered by a blanket
20:36as they returned to his house, to Dutroux's house.
20:40Lalièvre was immediately re-arrested and taken back into custody.
20:49As his accomplice's alibi began to crumble,
20:52Dutroux's interrogation took a drastic turn.
20:58Dutroux knows that we had proof that Leticia was in the car,
21:02so he says, yes, I was in Patrice, which he denied at the start.
21:06I met a young girl, I talked with her,
21:09and then she told me she was tired of her parents.
21:12Stories, because there were parts against him
21:15and he changes the stories to suit his narrative on the spot.
21:19Then, at the same time, Lalièvre said she was with Dutroux.
21:22And finally, on Thursday, he ends up telling us,
21:26now that all of these parts of the story contradict each other,
21:29I will give you the two girls.
21:32Dutroux pointed to a poster inside the interrogation room
21:42of another missing girl, Sabine Dardenne.
21:4512-year-old Sabine had been kidnapped by him in May.
21:49Two days after his arrest, Dutroux confessed and took the police
21:58to the basement where Sabine and Leticia were found alive.
22:04On the 15th of August, 1996, Dutroux led the investigators
22:09to his property in Marcinelle,
22:11where, hidden behind a false wall in the basement,
22:14was the dungeon where he'd been keeping Sabine Dardenne
22:17and Leticia Delhaix locked up.
22:20He pulled down the wardrobe and inside the cage behind
22:23were Sabine and Leticia.
22:25And then we got this, yeah, at that moment, incredible news
22:29that two kidnapped girls had been found alive in the cage
22:32of a person who had been convicted before for this kind of crimes.
22:37It was such a huge thing.
22:39All the journalists were on the scene at the time.
22:42The news, magazines were there.
22:44It is as if there had been a terrorist attack.
22:47No-one could believe that such a person could exist in Belgium.
22:51It was unthinkable.
23:06Douglas de Coninck was one of the few journalists
23:09who was allowed to enter Dutroux's basement.
23:12We had seen pictures, we had been seen images,
23:14but being there is difficult to describe
23:18because it's like constructed to...
23:22You wouldn't even put a dog in such a small place.
23:27This was really the kind of cage they made
23:31to hide guns from the police.
23:34As Belgium awoke in shock to the news
23:37that a man from Marcinelle had abducted, raped and tortured
23:40two girls over several months, the families of Sabine Dardenne
23:44and Leticia Delhaix rejoiced that their daughters
23:47had been found alive.
23:49There are rare occasions when we find the relatives
23:55and a policeman or a magistrate has the opportunity
23:58to return a child who had been kidnapped in such circumstances alive.
24:03It's fantastic, obviously.
24:06It is a joy that can be shared with the parents.
24:12Over the next 48 hours, investigators continued
24:16to relentlessly question Dutroux.
24:18They were desperate to find the two eight-year-old girls,
24:21Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo,
24:24who'd been missing for more than a year.
24:26Dutroux was playing a game with his investigators.
24:31He knew that he never would get out of prison anymore.
24:35He knew that he would be presented as the most famous criminal
24:39we've ever had in Belgium.
24:41And he wanted to exploit that situation.
24:45He had to be flattered.
24:47They had to make him believe that they believed his pitiful story,
24:50make him believe that things were not that bad for him.
24:53It's true that you were ingenious on this one.
24:56You were not caught and you fooled the police and here and there.
25:00At that point, his ego, his ego had been flattered
25:03and little by little he let information slip.
25:06That's his attitude.
25:08After 48 hours of this cat and mouse game,
25:11Mark Dutroux finally revealed to investigators
25:14that he had abducted the two eight-year-old girls.
25:17Officer Jean-Pierre Adam was in the interrogation room.
25:21As he did not say he had killed them,
25:26we hoped they would be alive.
25:28We had to go fast.
25:30It could have been a matter of life or death for them.
25:33They could very well have been left there without food or drink.
25:39But there was no happy ending this time.
25:42In the back garden of Dutroux's house in Marcinelle,
25:45police found the bodies of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo.
25:50I remember all my life the moment that I learned
25:55that we had found the bodies of Julie and Melissa.
25:59It was disappointing because we always hoped to find them alive.
26:03It was a great moment of solitude.
26:05Yeah, I put myself in the place of the parents.
26:08For them, it is 100,000 times worse.
26:11But even for me and my colleagues,
26:13who are looking for the right information,
26:15well, we are extremely disappointed.
26:18I can only imagine what the parents of Lejeune and Russo must have felt.
26:26I mean, not only have their daughters disappeared,
26:28but they're allowed to starve to death
26:32and are then unceremoniously shoved in a bin bag and buried in the garden.
26:37It is unimaginable cruelty and something that sets Dutroux apart
26:44from some other serial killers.
26:48Despite the bodies of both girls being found buried
26:51in the garden of his house,
26:53Dutroux denied both abducting and killing them.
26:56Well, it's not me who took them away.
26:58It's not my fault if they died.
27:00I was in prison.
27:01Yes, that's what he said to me.
27:02It's Martin who should have fed them,
27:04who did not come to feed them.
27:06The police also found the body of a French man named Bernard Weinstein
27:12buried in Dutroux's garden.
27:14It's believed that he helped Dutroux kidnap Julie and Melissa in June 1995.
27:20Back in the police station,
27:22the paedophile soon confessed to abducting another two girls.
27:28In the meantime, we also had a fairly rapid confession
27:31about the abduction of Anne in Effia on the Belgian coast.
27:35It was the news that Effia's father, Jean, had been dreading.
27:41To begin with, we were not told anything.
27:45Then the police started asking questions.
27:47If we had any more people, children,
27:50if he'd been involved with more children.
27:53Finally, Dutroux also admitted that he had Anne and Effia.
27:57Dutroux pointed investigators to a property in the Jume district of Charlois,
28:09owned by Bernard Weinstein, the accomplice whose body had just been found
28:13in Dutroux's back garden in Marcinelle.
28:17On September 3, 1996, near a shack not far away from the house,
28:23police exhumed the bodies of Anne Marchelle and Effia Lambrex.
28:28They had been missing for over a year.
28:31Post-mortem results revealed the pair had been buried alive.
28:35At that time, it was only then that people began to make more or less
28:39the connection between everything.
28:41No-one had made the link.
28:43The nation was completely stunned.
28:47Between 1995 and 1996, Marc Dutroux, a convicted child abuser,
28:54had abducted and raped six young girls aged between eight and 19 years old.
29:01Four of them were now dead.
29:07For him, his fantasy was to take young girls.
29:10He soon realized that Julia and Melissa were sexually too young for him.
29:14So he took ones that were a little older.
29:16That was Anne and Effia.
29:18But he found that they were too difficult to manage
29:21because they were older, stronger, more intelligent.
29:24There was one that escaped several times.
29:26He had to catch her again and it became unmanageable for him.
29:30So he killed them as well.
29:33In his crazy and depraved mind, the first ones were too young.
29:37The others were too old.
29:39He chose in between.
29:40So he first took Sabine and then Leticia.
29:45These are some of the most horrendous crimes
29:47that any criminologist will ever come across.
29:50But this is somebody who just wouldn't have felt bad about his victims at all.
29:55He has no sense of connection to them or empathy with them.
29:59Due to the size of the ongoing investigation, it would take seven and a half years before Dutroux, Martin and their accomplice, Michel Lalivre, were finally taken to trial.
30:10During those years, the sheer gruesomeness of Dutroux's crimes, coupled with the major shortcomings of police investigations, led to widespread protests across the country.
30:21It's as if something falls on your head and you say to yourself, but how did we not see it? How did we not see it happen? Those events deeply shook society. You wondered what we're going to build tomorrow on.
30:34Dutroux's case had grabbed the headlines of every news outlet in Belgium and had become an international story.
30:44Belgian society was on the verge of breaking point.
30:50The trial against Mark Dutroux, his wife, Michel, and an accomplice, Michel Lalivre, was due to begin on the 1st of March, 2004, nearly eight years after the bodies of four girls had been found in two properties linked to Dutroux.
31:06By the time the trial arrived, the story had become one of the biggest controversies in Belgian history.
31:13Belgian society still remains deeply divided over whether they've got the right people in the dock and just how thoroughly the case has been investigated.
31:22On espere qu'on va trouver un peu la vérité et on espere certainement que c'est possible.
31:29We lived and went to sleep with this trial. It was like an addiction. There were so many pages in the newspaper, so many hours on television.
31:40The prosecution had brought over 200 charges against Dutroux and his accomplices.
31:46There was the kidnapping, the abduction, rape and murder of young girls, so if you multiply that by four or five, there were roughly 235, 255 charges attributable to him.
31:59The trial began on March 1st, 2004, at the Arlon Assis Court in south-east Belgium.
32:08Dutroux pleaded guilty to the murder of his French accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, but denied kidnapping eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo,
32:18and killing camping friends Anne Marshall and Efe Lambrex.
32:24He continued to deny kidnapping Julie and Melissa and he also denied the fact that he had killed Anne and Efe.
32:31But the most important thing, with regards to the kidnapping of Julie and Melissa, he said, the death of Julie and Melissa is not my fault. I was in prison.
32:44He said one was already deceased and the other practically dead. He tried, he said, that's what he said, to save her, but he could not do it. He could not do it. So he buried them.
32:54As the prosecution began to make its case, the most gruesome details of Dutroux's crimes were laid bare in front of the eyes of the jury and of the families of the girls.
33:11They asked about the photos, how they had been found, photos had been taken, and I left the courthouse. I did not look at those photos. They were too horrible.
33:23I did not look at those photos.
33:27Through that, it's very traumatic to be there because we have to see again everything that was not so easy to see and to accept.
33:41The testimony of kidnapped 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne, now age 20, described how Dutroux had repeatedly raped her during the 80 days she was held prisoner inside Dutroux's dungeon.
33:54For 14 weeks, the self-obsessed psychopath used the courtroom as his stage, communicating with his captive audience from behind the glass cage.
34:12where he was made to sit for his own protection.
34:14I started to understand him better just by hearing him talking in direct. For example, one of the moments I never forget was the air code didn't work anymore. It was just terribly hot.
34:26In that courtroom and there were some people saying we cannot go through this. We should stop today and wait until the plumber has arrived.
34:32And then suddenly, Mark Dutroux knocked on his glass and said, I can fix it. And he started a whole explanation about what was wrong with the system and how to fix it.
34:46And he just had to be released from his box and do it.
35:03Mark Dutroux is a textbook psychopath, in my opinion. And when we look at psychopathy, these are people who are not as emotionally complex as the rest of us.
35:13They don't have that same depth of feeling. They lack a conscience. They operate pretty much like robots.
35:21So they are able to kind of live in the present, to just simply follow their own wants and desires.
35:28But I think one important thing to remember about psychopaths is they're not mentally ill. They are rational. They're aware of what they're doing. Their actions are the result of choice.
35:39What many found so disturbing was the role of Dutroux's wife, Michelle, who became a silent witness and at times accomplice to his heinous crimes.
35:49This Michelle Martin, she's a total riddle because she's different. She's not like Dutroux.
35:57I think if she had not met Dutroux, she might not have done what she did. And here she also tried to explain. She regretted it.
36:05But it's so strange that as an explanation, she was going to feed the dog. And in the house, the kids were downstairs, yet she did not go to them.
36:15How can people live with themselves? It's not them who created the horror, but the fact that they can live alongside it.
36:21Dutroux's defense lawyers argued that he was part of a Europe-wide pedophile network.
36:30It was very weird because Marc Dutroux had changed his lawyers on several occasions. And now he showed up with four lawyers, with each a different defense line.
36:42There was one saying, he's a psychopath. Don't listen to all these stories about networks, criminal organization behind him. No, it's him alone.
36:50And there was his other lawyer saying, he's part of a big network. He's just the guy who kidnaps girls, brings them to sex parties and cleans up the mess.
37:02But the jury ruled out the involvement of others, and on June the 17th, 2004, they found Marc Dutroux guilty.
37:11To all the charges that I brought against Dutroux, the jury answered positively.
37:16Question number 9. Oui.
37:19Question number 11. Oui.
37:22Question number 13. Oui.
37:24Well, there was not much suspense because you could feel how, no matter how the jury was critical towards the official story, it was clear that they would condemn Marc Dutroux for every, every accusation.
37:41On the 22nd of June, 2004, Marc Dutroux was given the maximum life sentence. His wife, Michelle Martin, received 30 years in prison, and Michelle Lelievre 25 years for his part in the crimes.
37:57Despite the four-month trial, there are still many questions left unanswered in the Dutroux case.
38:04For example, the exact locations, as well as Julie and Melissa, as Anne and Evie, their parents, until today, they don't know where it happened.
38:14And it's crucial because if you want to determine responsibilities, to know what exactly happened, that's what his parents is promised, what they absolutely want.
38:26It's just a convincing explanation of what happened. They never got that.
38:31I was hoping for more justice, so that we'd know who we were dealing with. And also, what happened to Evie? How was she murdered? And that we still don't know. We do not know the details, so we have never found out how she died.
38:53We have never found out how she died.
38:59Dutroux's wife, Michelle, was controversially released from prison on August 28, 2012. She now lives in hiding under protection from the Belgian authorities.
39:10Dutroux's wife, Michelle.
39:12Dutroux asked to be released on the grounds that he'd seen in the light that he was no danger to anybody anymore, that, after all, they released his wife. Why couldn't they release him?
39:27The request was refused, and he is in solitary confinement.
39:30Mark Dutroux has continued to deny killing the four girls, and despite pleas from the families and the survivors, has never given an explanation for his actions.
39:43Many people believe his crime spread further and wider, and that there were other accomplices involved, leaving some with a feeling that justice had not been served.
39:54We did not get any answers, and we started our own investigation. We examined dossiers ourselves. We found out some things, but much more is still unclear.
40:12The fact that this was a case of child abduction, this was a case where the violence used against children was so evident, so uncommon, that it was hard to believe that this guy not only was released from prison after only a few years, but managed to find a way to start immediately again with kidnapping girls,
40:41buying houses, buying houses, and he was like, everything that could be worse, was worse.
40:52Dutroux's crimes not only affected the families of his victims, the entire country was seconded by this deadly psychopath.
41:02Unfortunately, Dutroux's crimes, unfortunately, Dutroux is the one thing that Belgium would not want to be remembered for.
41:08In the years between 1996 and 1998, one third of the Belgian people whose name was Dutroux asked to change their name.
41:17It is a commentary on how deeply affected the country was by this lone wolf.
41:24Well, some of the things that Mark Dutroux did were incredibly depraved, and he didn't seem to have any bad feelings about that.
41:36He completely lacked any empathy for his victims. He treated his victims essentially as commodities, as items to use and discard when he was fed up with them.
41:49He is depraved. There are no physical signs. He's a man who, if you meet on the street, you'll meet him. He doesn't stand out.
41:56But when you analyse his personality, it's that of a depraved man, that's all. An intelligent man who knows what he wants, but is depraved.
42:05He's a psychopath. He's a psychopath, someone who has no feelings for people. He thinks he can reconstruct his fantasies.
42:12He believes that he is going to kidnap two girls away, and that they will become attached to him, and that they will love him.
42:18He will grow old with them. One must be seriously disturbed to think that.
42:22Mark Dutroux's hideous crimes left many families in mourning and a whole nation stunned. By manipulating those around him, he was able to satisfy his depraved sexual urges.
42:38We may never know the truth about how far and wide Dutroux's network of crimes spread, or how many children may have suffered in his homemade dungeon.
42:49But we can be sure that Mark Dutroux will never be free to cause harm to anyone ever again.
42:56You can see that Mark Dutroux's unexplained from Arbor sustenity in the past.
43:14Mark Dutroux won't be free to commit to anyone with your own problems in mourning and a whole nation.
43:19Mark Dutroux won't be free to commit to anyone without a doubt for him.
43:21Mark Dutroux won't be free to commit to any new newysz to many new rangers.
43:26You
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