Melissa Russo

Melissa Russo, aged eight, was abducted with her friend Julie Lejeune on Saturday, June 24, 1995, between five and seven in the evening, from the fields beside her family's house at Grâce-Hollogne, near Liège.²³ The gendarmerie had passed information on Marc Dutroux as a suspect between its Charleroi and Liège units from July 7, 1995, and a confidential report of August 10, 1995, recorded an informant's account that Dutroux sold girls for 100,000 to 150,000 francs and had described the work in his cellars as hiding places for abducted children. The surveillance of Dutroux, Operation Othello, led by the gendarme Rene Michaux, did not find the girls.¹²

The two were held in a concealed cell in the cellar of Dutroux's house at Marcinelle. When Dutroux was arrested on December 13, 1995, in a separate matter, the gendarmerie searched his houses and reported that the cellar work had no connection with "the fitting out of transit cells for the abduction of children." He was released on March 20, 1996. The girls starved to death during his imprisonment; his wife, Michelle Martin, testified that she had been too afraid to go downstairs to feed them.²⁴ Their bodies were found at Sars-la-Buissière on August 17, 1996, five days after the arrest of Dutroux, Martin and Michel Lelievre and two days after the rescue of Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez.²

On June 17, 2004, the jury at Arlon convicted Dutroux of the abduction of Julie and Melissa and Martin of their sequestration with torture causing death, and acquitted Jean-Michel Nihoul of the abduction charges, adopting the investigating judge Jacques Langlois's view that Dutroux had acted as an isolated predator.⁴⁵

The Cellar and the Searches

The parliamentary commission found that during the December 1995 search of the Marcinelle house Rene Michaux, alone in the cellar, heard children's voices that stopped when he called for silence, and attributed them, as the locksmith suggested, to children in the street. It also found that he had taken chloroform, a speculum and vaginal cream from the house, that these items were missing from the investigating judge's inventory, and that he told the commission he had later handed them to the lawyer of Dutroux's wife.² The writer S. Dovey wrote that the cellar was built in 1993 with the help of Claude Thirault under the guise of drainage work, with soundproofed cells behind shelving; that the Othello team eliminated Dutroux as a suspect in January 1996 and missed the abduction of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks on August 22, 1995, while he was under surveillance; that white vans registered to Nihoul's company ASCO carried victims, that more than twenty calls passed between Nihoul and Dutroux around the Delhez abduction, and that payments reached accounts of Dutroux in several European countries; and that a letter from Dutroux to Julie's father said the abduction served an organized "snuff orgy." The removal of Judge Jean-Marc Connerotte in October 1996 was followed by the White March; Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet had approved Dutroux's release in 1992.¹