Rene Michaux

Rene Michaux was a Chief Guard (Adjudant) in the Belgian gendarmerie attached to the Charleroi brigade. In 1995 he ran Operation Othello, the observation of Marc Dutroux requested by Commandant Legros on August 25, 1995, after a confidential report of August 10 recorded informants' accounts that Dutroux was preparing hiding places for abducted children; he declared the operation negative in a fax of January 9, 1996.³

The Failed December 1995 Search

On December 13, 1995, following tips including information from Dutroux's own mother, Michaux carried out a search of Dutroux's house at Marcinelle. During the search, sounds consistent with children's voices were detected. Michaux concluded they were coming from outside the building and did not pursue the investigation further. The dungeon beneath the house, where Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were still alive at that point, was not found.¹

The two girls died of starvation in early 1996, while Dutroux was serving a brief prison term for car theft. Had Michaux's search produced a warrant and resulted in the discovery of the dungeon, investigators concluded, Julie and Melissa would have been rescued alive.²

When questioned later by Belgium's Permanent Control Committee of the Police Forces, Michaux stated that if he had known Dutroux was a suspect in child abductions, rather than merely a subject of general surveillance, he would have had grounds to request a formal search warrant. The explanation indicated that the compartmentalization of the Othello operation had prevented Michaux from understanding the full profile of the target.¹

Parliamentary Inquiry

The commission found that Michaux had received very important information on Bernard Weinstein up to three times in a month, culminating in a POSA observation report of August 30, 1995, that showed Dutroux and Weinstein in Weinstein's blue Ford Fiesta receiving a visit from a man accompanied by a little girl, and that he had limited himself to identifying the car's owner, "contrary to the most elementary police logic." It asked why he had faxed on January 9, 1996, that Othello was negative, when the examination of the videocassettes seized in the December searches was not yet complete, and noted that on his request, relayed by De Windt, Michelle Martin had collected boxes of audio cassettes from the Charleroi police.³

Belgium's parliamentary inquiry into the Dutroux affair cited the December 13, 1995, search as one of the most damaging examples of investigative failure in the entire case. The inquiry found that the coordination between the gendarmerie's surveillance unit and the judicial investigation was so poor that Michaux had been conducting surveillance without actionable intelligence about the dungeon's existence. His failure was not characterized as intentional obstruction but as the product of fragmented institutional response to the disappearances.²