Gerrit Ulrich and Robbie Van Der Plancken

The Zandvoort Discovery

In the mid-1990s, a private investigator named Marcel Vervloesem was investigating the disappearance of Manuel Schadwald for an NGO called the Morkhoven Workgroup when he came across Lothar Glandorf's name in a 1992 police report detailing a raid on an underage sex party in the Dutch town of Wallre. The report stated Glandorf had been arrested at the party in the company of a teenager named Robbie Van Der Plancken. Vervloesem managed to track this teenager down in Amsterdam sometime in June 1998 and ambushed him with questions about Manuel Schadwald during a TV interview filmed by journalists from the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF. During this interview, Vervloesem's associates noticed an interested onlooker nearby and followed him to the Dutch seaside resort town of Zandvoort. This turned out to be a German associate of Van Der Plancken named Gerrit-Jan Ulrich, a forty-nine-year-old computer technician who owned a computer store called Cube Hardware.

Under circumstances not entirely clear, Ulrich invited Vervloesem to meet with him at his apartment. Inside were numerous computers dialed up to five phone lines, and the place was filled with digital storage disks and networking equipment. Ulrich revealed himself to be the administrator of a child pornography website called Apollo Bulletin Board Service, and handed Vervloesem a collection of encoded disks containing thousands of images and videos of violent child abuse, along with information on their producers and lists of those who paid to access them from around the world. According to Vervloesem, Ulrich feared for his life and sought some kind of life insurance against a network of child pornographers who produced the materials he distributed online. One of Ulrich's neighbors would later say he had heart disease and not long to live.

Murder and the Apollo Disks

A few days after this meeting, Ulrich fled the Netherlands and called Vervloesem from Italy. He said he was frightened and had not long to live, and told Vervloesem about a cache of digital disks hidden beneath a floorboard of his apartment which contained information on his network of associates. A few days after he made this phone call, Ulrich's body was discovered in an Italian forest on June 20, 1998. He had been shot multiple times, and Italian police arrested Robbie Van Der Plancken as a suspect in his murder.

When Dutch police were notified of Ulrich's death, they inspected his apartment and noticed obvious signs of a child pornography operation. A surveillance team was assigned to monitor the apartment, and within a few days Vervloesem was caught breaking in to retrieve the disks Ulrich had told him were hidden beneath a floorboard. These, along with hundreds of others in Ulrich's apartment, were found to contain tens of thousands of images and videos showing extremely violent sexual abuse of children, and even infants. A child psychiatrist who inspected the materials stated he had never seen anything like it, describing pictures that showed very disgusting things, sexual abuse, violence, and the tying up of young children, including children aged four to five, eight to nine, and one child about eighteen months. Some films were described as almost killing, very special, very aggressive, very hard, mechanically brutal.

The disks found beneath Ulrich's floorboard had been hidden along with bags of child-sized clothing. These contained information on seemingly a network of suppliers involved in producing and selling these films and images. Two of those identified by Dutch authorities were Warwick Spinks and Lothar Glandorf. Warwick Spinks' name was also found in an address book belonging to Robbie Van Der Plancken.

The Death of Gina Pardaens-Bernaer

What police had not seized were the Apollo Disks Ulrich handed Vervloesem when the pair met in person. Vervloesem had not trusted Dutch authorities, so he passed them on to a colleague in the Morkhoven Workgroup, who made copies before they were given to police. This was done by a woman named Gina Pardaens-Bernaer, a computer specialist who had worked closely with Vervloesem on the Manuel Schadwald case. On November 15, 1998, a few months after she took possession of the Apollo Disks, her body was found inside the wreckage of her car, which had crashed into the concrete pillar of a bridge at full speed. Pardaens-Bernaer had previously identified a perpetrator linked to the Marc Dutroux network in materials from the Apollo disks. Her death was officially ruled a suicide.¹