Julie Lejeune

Julie Lejeune, aged eight, was abducted with her friend Melissa Russo on Saturday, June 24, 1995, between five and seven in the evening, while the two were playing in the fields beside the Russo family's house at Grâce-Hollogne, near Liège; the gendarmerie brigade at Grâce-Hollogne opened the case that day. A witness saw the children get into a car.²³ Her mother was Louisa Lejeune.⁴

The Investigation of 1995

The gendarmerie of Charleroi had passed information on Marc Dutroux as a suspect to the gendarmerie of Liège from July 7, 1995. A confidential report sent to the Charleroi gendarmerie command on August 10, 1995, and passed to the national criminal intelligence bureau (BCR), recorded two informants who did not know each other. The first said Dutroux had offered him work at Sars-la-Buissière and asked him to take part in abducting children in the Mechelen area. The second, adding to what he had reported in 1993, said Dutroux had told him of young girls, "c'est frais, ça se vend bien et rapporte beaucoup" ("they're fresh, they sell well and bring in a lot"), that the price was between 100,000 and 150,000 francs, and that in about October 1993 Dutroux had explained that the work in his cellars at Marchienne-Docherie was to make hiding places for abducted children; at the end of June 1995 Dutroux had asked him to keep watch during a job. The witness at Grâce-Hollogne recognized the type of car described by the informants.² The surveillance of Dutroux under the name Operation Othello, led by the gendarme Rene Michaux, did not find the girls.¹²

Lejeune and Russo were held in a concealed cell in the cellar of Dutroux's house at Marcinelle. Dutroux was arrested on December 13, 1995, on a warrant from the Charleroi investigating judge Lorent for violent theft and illegal detention in a separate matter; his accomplice Bernard Weinstein was listed as on the run. The gendarmerie obtained warrants to search his houses and reported that work was indeed being done in the cellars, "but without any connection with the content of the information in our possession, namely the fitting out of transit cells for the abduction of children." Lorent released Dutroux on March 20, 1996, and the prosecutor's office did not appeal. During his imprisonment the two girls starved to death in the cell; his wife, Michelle Martin, testified that she had been too afraid to go downstairs to feed them.²⁴

After the arrest of Dutroux, Martin and Michel Lelievre on August 12, 1996, and the rescue of Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez on August 15, the bodies of Julie and Melissa were found at Sars-la-Buissière on Saturday, August 17, 1996.²

The Trial

At the assize court in Arlon, the jury on June 17, 2004, convicted Dutroux of the abduction of Julie and Melissa, rejecting his defense that Lelièvre, one Pierre Rochow or members of "the Courcelles gang" were responsible. Martin was convicted of their sequestration, with the aggravating circumstance that it was accompanied by torture causing death. Jean-Michel Nihoul was acquitted of the abduction charges: only seven jurors voted to convict, one short of the majority of eight, and the professional judges then sided with the minority; a second deliberation on complicity also acquitted him. The verdict adopted the view of the investigating judge Jacques Langlois that Dutroux was an isolated predator, and set aside the "network" thesis argued by the prosecution and the families' lawyers. Louisa Lejeune said: "This has confirmed what I thought: They worked together."⁴⁵

The Cellar and Nihoul

The parliamentary commission recorded that during the search of 128 rue de Philippeville in December 1995 Rene Michaux, alone in the cellar, heard children's voices, which fell silent when he called for quiet, and that he put them down to children in the street, as the locksmith suggested; cassettes seized in the searches were sent to Brussels, and the question of who had viewed them was never answered.² The writer S. Dovey wrote that Lejeune and Russo were lured into a white van driven by Dutroux and Lelièvre, who had been scouting victims on the instructions of Nihoul; that the cell was built in 1993 with the help of a handyman, Claude Thirault, who reported Dutroux's plans to kidnap girls for profit; that Dutroux, on his release, found the girls dead and buried them at Sars-la-Buissière beside Weinstein, whom he had killed in November 1995; that the autopsies showed malnutrition, restraint and sexual trauma; that phone records showed more than twenty calls between Dutroux and Nihoul in early August 1996 and investigators of Nihoul's company Achats Services Commerces (ASCO) found vehicles matching witness descriptions; and that a letter to Lejeune's father described the abduction as ordered for a "snuff orgy." Nihoul, the lawyer Annie Bouty and Marleen De Cokere were charged as accomplices in the Delhez abduction. The X-Dossier, compiled under the prosecutor Michel Bourlet and the investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte, linked the case to the murder of Christine Van Hees; Regina Louf (X1) described abductions for blackmail parties at venues linked to Baron Benoit de Bonvoisin and Count Leopold Lippens; and the Morkhoven Workgroup reported possible matches of Lejeune in pornography connected to John Stamford's Spartacus Network and Gerrit-Jan Ulrich's Zandvoort files, and to Apollo Disks. Connerotte's removal in October 1996 was followed by the White March; Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet had approved Dutroux's early release in 1992.¹