Eefje Lambrecks

Eefje Lambrecks, aged nineteen, of Hasselt, disappeared with her friend An Marchal on the Belgian coast on August 22, 1995, on their way back from a hypnosis show at Ostend.²³ Their friends reported them missing to the police at Westende at five in the afternoon of August 23; the officer, Plyson, did not treat the report as serious, made no record of it and did not notify the prosecutor's office, and the national criminal intelligence bureau issued a non-urgent notice on August 24. The police at Hasselt acted at once on the report of An's parents and Eefje's mother. The Bruges prosecutor gave the investigation to the judicial police alone, under the investigating judge Buyse. The parliamentary commission called the failure to take the report seriously "inadmissible"; a disciplinary inquiry in October and November 1996 ended with a recommendation, accepted by the burgomaster of Middelkerke, that no sanction be imposed.²

Their bodies were found on September 3, 1996, in a pit under a shed at Jumet.³ At the trial Marc Dutroux said the abduction had been carried out "for Nihoul's network" to make up for the loss of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, that the two had been drugged, taken to his house at Marcinelle and chained to bunk beds on the first floor for fifteen days, and that Bernard Weinstein and Michel Lelievre later came to take them away; he now said that two policemen had also been present. The pathologists found that both had died of advanced malnutrition.³ On June 17, 2004, the jury convicted Dutroux of their murders; Lelièvre, who admitted abducting the two but denied raping or killing them, was convicted of the abduction of An and of sequestration, with the aggravating circumstance for An and Eefje of torture causing death; Jean-Michel Nihoul was acquitted of the abduction charges.⁴⁵

The Hypnosis Show and the Captivity

The commission's chronology records that on the evening of August 22, 1995, at Blankenberge, the two attended a show by the hypnotist Rasti Rostelli and then took the tram toward Ostend.² The writer S. Dovey wrote that the show was at the casino, that Eefje was brought on stage and both were left disoriented afterward, and that Rostelli was later subpoenaed to the trial; that while held upstairs the two were kept out of sight of the Operation Othello surveillance under Rene Michaux; that vans registered to Nihoul's company ASCO carried victims; and that Lelièvre described the girls being made to clean tiles. The removal of Judge Jean-Marc Connerotte in October 1996 was followed by the White March; Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet had approved Dutroux's early release in 1992. An's father, Paul Marchal, pursued the hypnosis link.¹