Christine Van Hees

Christine Van Hees was killed in February 1984 and found bound and partly burned in the disused mushroom farm (champignonnière) at Auderghem, on the outskirts of Brussels. The murder was not solved, and the file stayed with the Brussels investigating judge Jean-Claude Van Espen.²⁴ She was sixteen.⁵

The X1 Testimony

In 1996 the witness X1, Regina Louf, told the Neufchâteau investigators of the murder of a girl she knew as "Chrissie." "It was a sort of bondage," she later said, "so her legs and her hands and her throat were connected with the same rope, and so when she moved she strangled herself." She said that Jean-Michel Nihoul took part in the killing and that Marc Dutroux watched; Nihoul denied it.³ She also named Bernard Weinstein and the lawyer Michel Vander Elst.¹ The farm had since been demolished, but she described its wallpaper, sinks, hooks in the ceiling and a network of stairs and adjoining rooms. She also mentioned details that had never been made public, among them a metal pin in the dead girl's wrist.⁵ Rudi Hoskens, one of the officers assigned to re-examine the case, said: "She gave us some details that made us think it's impossible to give without having been there at that place." The son of the farm's former owner said: "I have never met Regina Louf. All I know is that she could not have described the house as well as she did unless she'd been there. It was two houses joined together in a strange way." The Prosecutor General of Liège, Anne Thily, told a reporter in 2002 that Louf was a fantasist who had invented everything.³

Louf's account led the gendarme Aimé Bille to the old file, and he found that the earlier investigation under Van Espen had "multiple gaps."⁴ Van Hees had swum weekly at a pool above the premises of Radio Activité, where Nihoul was active, and skated at Poseidon in Woluwe, which Dutroux also frequented.¹

The Investigating Judge

The reopened file was returned to Van Espen at the end of January 1997. The Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry recorded its astonishment at his "violent reaction" to contacts between its councillor-investigator and the Neufchâteau investigators, and his order of June 22, 1997, suspending all investigative acts by the team; it concluded that he had given "particular, in fact disproportionate, attention" to those contacts.² In 2002 it was reported that a Belgian journalist had revealed his "close relationship" with Nihoul and his then wife: that as a lawyer he had represented Nihoul's wife, that his sister was godmother of Nihoul's child, and that he had resigned from the case in early 1998.³

On April 23, 1998, the prosecutors-general of Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels found that "no proof could be found that Regina Louf could make any contribution whatsoever to these investigations" and closed the related files, among them the reopened inquiries into the murders of Van Hees, Carine Dellaert, Veronique Dubrulle, Katrien de Cuyper and Hanim Ayse Mazibas.⁴