Sabine Dardenne

Sabine Dardenne, aged twelve, was abducted on May 27, 1996, on her way to school, and was freed on August 15, 1996.¹² The investigation cell set up for her disappearance at Tournai was staffed by the gendarmerie. Information on Marc Dutroux held by the missing-persons unit reached it only after a fax of June 20, 1996, from the General Police Support Service (SGAP); the missing-persons unit told a coordination meeting on June 26 that Dutroux was the subject of an investigation, including surveillance, by the Charleroi criminal investigation brigade that had so far been negative. Assuming that Charleroi was following Dutroux closely, the investigating judge and the cell did not contact the Charleroi gendarmerie, and did not learn that the surveillance had long since ended. The commission found the investigation "essentially passive" and limited to its own district.²

After a witness at Bertrix gave three digits of a license plate following the abduction of Laetitia Delhez on August 9, Dutroux, his wife Michelle Martin and Michel Lelievre were arrested at about five in the afternoon on August 12, 1996. A search of the house on August 13 with tracker dogs found nothing; on August 15 Dutroux confessed, and on his directions Sabine and Laetitia were found alive in the concealed cell in the cellar of his house at Marcinelle.²

On June 17, 2004, the jury at Arlon convicted Dutroux of her abduction, sequestration and rape, and Lelièvre, who did not deny it, of her abduction and sequestration; Martin was convicted of her sequestration. Jean-Michel Nihoul was acquitted of the charges relating to the abductions.³⁴

The Abduction and the Cellar

The cell in which she was held was the one in which Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo had been held. The writer S. Dovey wrote that Lelièvre blocked her path on her bicycle near a factory while Dutroux seized her and forced her into a van, using chloroform; that the cell had been built in 1993 with the labor of Claude Thirault and hidden behind shelving; that Dutroux conditioned her with drugs and hypnosis into dependence on him, told her she was being held for ransom, and was embraced by her when they were found; that more than twenty calls passed between Dutroux and Nihoul around the abductions; and that at the trial she testified to the manipulation she had undergone and to the roles of Martin and Lelièvre.¹