Laetitia Delhez

Laetitia Delhez, aged fourteen, was abducted at Bertrix, in the province of Luxembourg, on Friday, August 9, 1996. On Monday, August 12, a witness at Bertrix gave investigators three digits of a license plate; a door-to-door inquiry began at two in the afternoon, and at about five Marc Dutroux, his wife Michelle Martin and Michel Lelievre were arrested at Charleroi. On August 13 police and gendarmes searched Dutroux's house at 128 rue de Philippeville in Marcinelle with tracker dogs and found nothing. On Thursday, August 15, Dutroux confessed, and on his directions Laetitia and Sabine Dardenne were found alive in the house.² The commission of inquiry observed that "Laetitia was found through the memorization of a license plate number."²

On June 17, 2004, the jury at Arlon convicted Dutroux of her abduction, sequestration and rape, Lelièvre of her abduction and sequestration, and Martin of her sequestration. It found that Jean-Michel Nihoul had no involvement in the abduction and sequestration of Laetitia, rejecting the "network" thesis argued by the prosecution, the Marchal family and Laetitia's own lawyers.³⁴

The Abduction and the Captivity

The writer S. Dovey wrote that she was taken while waiting at a bus stop after visiting a local festival, by Dutroux with Lelièvre's help, and subdued with chloroform in a white van; that the witness saw the van circle twice and noted the plate as PBX 688, a vehicle linked to Nihoul's company ASCO; that she and Sabine had been conditioned with drugs and hypnosis to regard Dutroux as a protector and kissed him when they came out of the cellar; that the cellar had been built in 1993 with the help of Claude Thirault; that more than twenty calls passed between Dutroux and Nihoul around her abduction; and that at the trial she testified to the roles of Martin and Lelièvre, while Lelièvre spoke of orders from Nihoul and of Dutroux's boasts of obtaining girls in Slovakia.¹ The cellar was the one in which Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo had been held.