Michel Lelievre

Michel Lelièvre was arrested with Marc Dutroux and Michelle Martin at about five in the afternoon on August 12, 1996, three days after the abduction of Laetitia Delhez at Bertrix, when a witness had remembered three digits of a license plate.² At the trial in Arlon he admitted abducting An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks in August 1995 but denied raping or killing them.⁴ Dutroux told the court that Lelièvre and Bernard Weinstein had come to take the two young women from his house after fifteen days, and he attributed the abduction of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo to Lelièvre and one Pierre Rochow, a defense the jury rejected.³⁵

On June 17, 2004, the jury convicted Lelièvre of taking part in a criminal association engaged in abducting children and in one engaged in selling drugs and trafficking human beings, and of the abduction of An, Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia, which he did not deny. It also convicted him of the sequestration of the young victims, rejecting his lawyer Slusny's argument that he had never met some of them at Dutroux's house in Marcinelle, and found for An and Eefje the aggravating circumstance of torture causing death.⁵ He was sentenced to 25 years. The Brussels sentence-enforcement court granted him conditional release at the end of September 2019 over the unfavorable opinion of the Brussels prosecutor's office, with about a dozen conditions including training or work and compensation of the civil parties, and he left prison on December 2, 2019.⁶

Statements Attributed to Him

The writer S. Dovey wrote that he was born in 1967, met Dutroux in 1995 through a mutual acquaintance, was an unemployed man with a minor record, and was paid in drugs; that he blocked Sabine's path near her school while Dutroux seized her and waited in the vehicle during Laetitia's abduction; and that he told investigators of Dutroux's drugging and hypnosis of victims, of seeing An and Eefje naked and made to clean tiles, of a man in a Mercedes who came to the house demanding money after seeing them, of girls ordered by Jean-Michel Nihoul from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, and of Dutroux's boast of raping and abandoning a girl near Trenčín.¹