Regina Louf

Regina Louf, born in Ghent in 1969, was the witness known as X1 in the investigation opened at Neufchâteau after the arrest of Marc Dutroux in August 1996. The investigating judge Jean-Marc Connerotte had set up a free telephone line for information on child abuse; a Dutch-speaking caller, Tania, a friend of Louf's, reached the gendarme Patrick De Baets, who was in Connerotte's office at the time, and after some days Louf herself contacted him. A special cell of the Brussels BSR under De Baets questioned her, with every interview videotaped and summarized in French for Neufchâteau, while senior gendarmerie officers and magistrates watched from behind glass. Her statements opened a series of "related files," the X-Dossier.¹

Her Account

She was questioned at length thirteen times under the code name X1. She summarized her family background in two sentences: "My mother was abused by her father, a police commissioner in Knokke. I was rented out by my mother, with my father's knowledge."⁵ Louf said that from early childhood she had been prostituted by her grandmother, Cecile Beernaert, at a villa in Knokke-Heist near the Royal Zoute Golf Club, that at about twelve she was handed to a pimp, Tony Van den Bogaert, who took her to parties in Brussels attended by Jean-Michel Nihoul, and that the parties moved from sex to torture and murder. Among those she named as clients or participants were the former prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants and members of the Lippens family, Count Leopold Lippens and Count Maurice Auguste Lippens. She said she had witnessed the 1984 murder of Christine Van Hees in the abandoned mushroom farm at Auderghem, naming Dutroux, Nihoul, Bernard Weinstein and the lawyer Michel Vander Elst, and the 1983 death of Carine Dellaert after childbirth. She described a factory site that investigators connected to ASCO Industries NV, a villa at Faulx-les-Tombes and parties on the Avenue Louise.² She published her account as Zwijgen is voor daders in 1998.²

The Investigation of Her Testimony

Her account of Van Hees led the Brussels gendarme Aimé Bille to the unsolved file, and he found that the earlier investigation under the investigating judge Jean-Claude Van Espen had "multiple gaps." Her statements led to the reopening of the murders of Van Hees, Dellaert, Veronique Dubrulle, Katrien de Cuyper and Hanim Ayse Mazibas. A psychiatric report on her by Professor Igodt of the Catholic University of Leuven was read so differently by others that its author publicly urged "extreme caution" about the concrete details of her testimony while calling them "useful data" for further investigation.¹

After Connerotte was removed from the Dutroux case in October 1996 and replaced by Judge Jacques Langlois, the cell came under a Mr. Duterme, who from April 1997 had De Baets's colleagues reread the interviews and report on her credibility and on possible manipulation by De Baets's team; the first report, very negative for De Baets, "totally lacked credibility," and a second was ordered. In the summer of 1997 Langlois ordered a complete rereading of all the related files and removed De Baets and Bille from the investigation. A criminal investigation of the two gendarmes by Judge Pignolet was dropped and a gendarmerie disciplinary inquiry acquitted them completely; they then filed more than eighty complaints alleging that reports in the rereading had been falsified.¹

In January 1998 Louf gave up her anonymity, in part to protest the stalling of the inquiry, amid a press campaign against her fed by leaks from police and judicial circles. On April 23, 1998, the day Dutroux briefly escaped, the prosecutors-general of Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels decided that "no proof could be found that Regina Louf could make any contribution whatsoever to these investigations" and closed the related files. The same day, in a confrontation with Louf, the man described as her "so-called protector" admitted that he had had sex with her when she was twelve, with her parents' knowledge, and had once lent her to others; the admission was not pursued, the acts being time-barred.¹ Her parents had told police that a family friend in his forties, Tony Van den Bogaert, had a key to their home and unlimited access to their twelve-year-old daughter, and he admitted his relationship with her to police; the RTBF program Au Nom de la Loi presented the parents as victims of a fantasist without mentioning either admission.⁴ The Van Hees case was closed unsolved in 2014 under the statute of limitations.³