Original subtitles

-In the summer of 1996,

the whole of Belgium was in shock

when two young girls who'd been kidnapped,

raped and tortured were rescued from a makeshift dungeon

below a house in Marcinelle.

As the weeks passed, the bodies of four other young girls

were found buried at properties linked to the same man.

-Some of them starved to death.

Others were buried alive.

These are some of the most horrendous crimes

that any criminologist will ever come across.

-It was the beginning of a terrible nightmare

for the entire nation.

-It was such a huge thing.

No one could believe that such a person could exist in Belgium.

It was unthinkable.

-With the help of his wife, Michelle Martin,

convicted pedophile Marc Dutroux's unhealthy desire

for young girls had turned deadly.

The youngest victims who died in his homemade dungeon

were just 8 years old.

-It is unimaginable cruelty and something that sets

Dutroux apart from some other serial killers.

-Marc Dutroux, the man dubbed the Monster of Marcinelle,

had earned his place as one of the world's most evil killers.

[ Theme music playing ]

♪

♪

-It was a case that sent shockwaves across Europe.

For a year during the mid-1990s,

a Belgian killer had been abducting,

torturing, and raping young girls,

keeping them chained inside his abandoned properties.

It wasn't until the summer of 1996,

when two of the young girls were found alive

inside a basement in Marcinelle,

that the Belgian public discovered the heinous crimes

committed by Marc Dutroux.

-Behind the facade of this perfectly ordinary-looking house

lay a chamber of horrors.

Down in that cellar, it's alleged that Dutroux built

a cage to keep his victims.

They were locked away like animals,

raped repeatedly and mentally tortured.

-But this killer's story begins over 60 years ago.

Born in Ixelles on the 6th of November, 1956,

Marc Dutroux was the oldest of five children.

-His parents were teachers and, at one point,

emigrated to the Belgian Congo where they taught,

but when the crisis erupted in that country,

they brought Dutroux back to Belgium in 1960.

-His parents eventually separated in 1971,

and 15-year-old Dutroux stayed with his mother.

-We know that his mother was incredibly dominant.

His father was very aggressive.

So I think it was quite a hostile environment

to grow up in,

and I think those attachments or lack of attachments

with his parents in those early years

did play quite a role in the person he became.

-Trained as an electrician but often unemployed,

Dutroux soon began a long criminal history,

including convictions for car theft,

mugging, and drug dealing.

-Dutroux had a lot of contact with the police.

He stepped up from car theft

into a rather grand form of car theft,

which involved shipping quite expensive luxury cars,

which he'd stolen in Belgium,

out of the country into Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

-The profit from his crimes led to Dutroux

owning seven properties

in and around the city of Charleroi,

45 miles south of Brussels.

By 1983, 26-year-old Dutroux was married with two children,

but he'd begun an affair with a schoolteacher

called Michelle Martin.

The 23-year-old would eventually become Dutroux's partner in life

and crime, with whom he also had three more children.

The severity of Dutroux's crimes escalated from theft

to sexual assault,

and in 1989, he was found guilty of the abduction

and rape of five young girls,

one of whom was just 11 years old.

-Marc Dutroux was a predator

who selected his prey very carefully.

He wanted to choose people who were easy to target

in the first place, easy to abduct

but also easy to manipulate once he had them under his control,

so he would go for the most vulnerable victims

that he could find that fulfilled his desires.

-Dutroux's now-wife, Michelle,

was found to be complicit in the abductions

and served two years of a five-year sentence.

-The psychiatrists suggest

that Martin and Dutroux, husband and wife,

are a classic example of folie a deux --

that one egged the other on

and that, therefore, the sum of the two of them

was even more dangerous than one alone.

-I think when we look at the relationship

between Dutroux and his wife,

who was implicated in many of his crimes,

it is quite interesting.

It is quite possible that some people see her

as just another one of his victims,

somebody else who was manipulated and coerced by him,

and when we look at Marc Dutroux and his behavior,

he is incredibly charming at times,

and he can be very persuasive.

So it wouldn't surprise me if he'd set out with the intention

of recruiting somebody to help him in his crimes,

and this is somebody who fell for his charms

and went along with it.

-Dutroux was released on parole in 1992

after serving three years of a 13-year sentence,

having showed good behavior.

-I find that extraordinary.

You can be convicted of the rape and abduction of five girls,

the youngest of which is 11, and you can walk out of jail

after three years of a 13-1/2-year sentence.

-Georges Huercano,

a Belgian investigative journalist,

has spent over 10 years reporting on the Dutroux case.

[ Speaking French ]

-Dutroux is an expert manipulator.

He made everyone cry.

He made everybody believe that his family had abandoned him.

As an exemplary prisoner, he came out very quickly.

The prisons are overpopulated, and, for authorities,

he was nothing more than a car thief.

-By the summer of 1995, Dutroux was a free man

and living with his wife, Michelle,

in one of his Charleroi homes in the suburb of Marcinelle.

On the 24th of June, two eight-year-old girls,

Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo,

went missing from the town of Grace-Hollogne

just 55 miles east of Charleroi.

♪

-As there was no ransom request,

no information about whether they had been kidnapped,

probably they had been abducted by a predator,

a pedophile who has in most cases killed his victims

to silence them...

But who could imagine that a man was going to take away the girls

to keep them alive, locked alive, inside a cellar?

Nobody.

-Dutroux, with the help of his wife, Michelle,

had abducted the two children

and were keeping them prisoner inside a homemade dungeon.

-Dutroux constructed a cell beneath his house in Charleroi,

which was seven feet long, three feet wide,

and approximately five feet high,

hidden behind a very strong elaborate door,

which was then covered with concrete

and was hidden in his basement.

He put these two eight-year-old girls, Lejeune and Russo,

into the cell

and kept them there for the next three months.

-As Julie and Melissa remain locked up in Dutroux's dungeon,

his sexual depravity was escalating,

and just two months later, he would abduct two more girls,

but this time, it would lead to murder.

On August 23, over 100 miles away on the Belgian coast,

two more girls disappeared.

Best friends 17-year-old An Marchal

and 19-year-old Eefje Lambrecks

had gone missing while on a camping trip.

When the girls didn't return home,

their friends instantly alerted Eefje's father, Jean.

-We immediately had the feeling that something was wrong

because she was always open about things.

She always said where she was going and who had seen.

She would never not tell anyone and just stay away.

That was not what Eefje would do.

-The last reported sighting of An and Eefje

was at midnight in the central train station of Oostende,

a coastal town in northern Belgium.

Initially, the local police had dismissed the parents' concerns.

-They did not draw up a report.

They said, "They must have gone out.

They'll return soon,"

but during those first days, nothing was done,

and afterwards, their friends contacted us,

and we went to see the police at Hasselt.

They did respond, and at that stage,

the police at the coast started investigating.

The police then asked questions, if she was...

You know, if perhaps she was addicted to drugs or something.

My response was that Eefje did not approve of those things.

She was against it.

I did not believe anything like that,

but anyway, you start doubting, or sometimes,

you start wondering, "Did I miss something?"

-An Marchal's father, Paul,

went to visit investigative journalist

Douglas De Coninck to see if he could help.

-I remember very well that

Paul Marchal came into the office.

He pleaded, "Please, please, please put a picture

of my daughter on your front page,"

and I think while we were laughing at him and said,

"Oh, God. This poor man,

his daughter is sure somewhere partying with some friends,

and she will show up in a few days."

-But An and Eefje were not out partying.

In fact, Marc Dutroux,

with the help of a man called Michel Lelievre,

had abducted, raped and murdered the two young women.

-They were inveigled into the van

that Dutroux used for the abductions.

Because this is a dungeon beneath the house

was full of the two eight-year-olds,

they chained these two girls to a bed in the rest of the house.

When exactly Marchal and Lambreck died,

and precisely how, has always been a little mysterious.

What is not in doubt is that they were tortured and raped

and eventually strangled.

-In December 1995,

Dutroux was arrested in relation to a car theft.

He was convicted and served almost four months in prison.

During this time, the police searched his Marcinelle home.

They were agonizingly close to finding out

Dutroux's darkest secret.

-Twice in December 1995, on the 13th and the 19th,

police searched the house in Charleroi.

One of the most poignant

and tragic parts of that search,

which included a search of the basement,

was that the police failed to identify the dungeon.

Even more horrifying,

the two policemen who searched the house

were accompanied by a locksmith

who had helped them.

The locksmith told the policemen

that he heard screams.

The policemen said, "Oh, it must be from outside,"

and disregarded him.

The terrible truth is it was from the two eight-year-olds

hidden in this cell, this dungeon.

-At Dutroux's house, officers had also found

several VHS cassette tapes,

but investigators didn't watch them until much later.

-There was a video, a home video there made by Marc Dutroux

where he was filming the developments

in the works in his child cage.

This was essential proof that they were on the right track,

but for some strange reason, they did this house search,

and they didn't exploit

the information they got from it.

-The police mistakes came at a fatal cost.

By the time Dutroux arrived back home after his release

from prison in March 1996,

Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were dead.

His wife, Michelle, had allowed the two eight-year-old children

to starve to death in the makeshift dungeon.

-Dutroux had told her to feed their large German shepherd dog,

look after him.

He neglected to tell Michelle, apparently,

to feed the two eight-year-olds in the dungeon.

Some say, in defense of Dutroux's wife,

that she was so terrified of the whole idea of the dungeon

and the fact that they might do something

or she wouldn't be able to to control them

meant that she couldn't go in,

and so she therefore allowed them to starve to death.

I've always regarded that

as an over-benevolent description

of what probably happened,

but what I do believe is that,

between them,

they allowed these children, eight-year-old girls,

to suffer dreadfully,

and there is no excuse in my mind for that.

-Dutroux didn't wait long

to find a replacement for the two girls.

On the 28th of May, 1996,

he kidnapped 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne

on her way to school, and locked her in his dungeon.

For the next three months,

Dutroux emotionally tortured Sabine

by making her think she was in contact

with her mother and father.

-She wrote letters to her parents,

but obviously he didn't send the letters.

He read them.

He used what was in the letters to manipulate her,

yet she resisted.

Despite everything, she did not create that attachment with him.

-Dutroux was still on the hunt for more girls.

On August 9, he abducted 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez

as she walked home from her local swimming pool,

before taking her back to his Marcinelle home

to join Sabine Dardenne in the underground dungeon.

But Laetitia's kidnapping would be the first step

in the dramatic downfall of Marc Dutroux.

-By accident, it was an eyewitness

who saw her being bundled into a van on that day

and got part of the number plate.

-The man had seen a suspicious white van

driving away from the swimming pool

where Laetitia was last seen,

a white Renault Trafic with a license plate

beginning with the letters "F-F-R."

Prosecutor Michel Bourlet began to investigate.

[ Man speaking French ]

-I had the beginning of a license plate

and a make of car to work with.

There were 20 names that matched,

and the police officer said,

"Ah, among these 20 names there is a certain,"

and he said that with a Flemish accent

because he was Flemish,

"Dutroux, Dutroux, this name sounds familiar."

So I asked, "Who is this Dutroux?"

"He's a man who lives in Charleroi

who owns a white van with a license plate

beginning with the letters FFR

who was sentenced in 1989 on multiple abductions

and rape charges to 13 years in prison,

so he is a high-profile suspect."

-One of the police officers working with Michel

had been involved in a separate investigation

called Operation Othello, led by authorities in Charleroi

looking into Dutroux's movements.

-He provides us with

all the information from that dossier,

which he had been collecting since July 1995.

We are currently in August 1996.

-Investigator Michel and his partner, Jean-Marc Connerotte,

found even more damning information in the Othello file:

the testimony of a man who'd been approached by Dutroux

to help him kidnap girls.

-He had asked a certain Claude Thirault,

from the Charleroi region,

who is also a fugitive who needed money.

He said to him, "I'll pay you to help me abduct girls,"

but this guy was a police informant,

so he went and told the gendarmerie,

"There's a guy named Marc Dutroux who lives there.

He offered me money to kidnap children."

-With such strong evidence, obviously, Mr. Connerotte and I

decided immediately to take major action

concerning Marc Dutroux.

-Michel and his team were planning a synchronized raid

on all seven of Marc Dutroux's Charleroi homes.

If they could find him, it may lead them

to missing 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez,

and there was a good chance that she may still be alive,

but they needed to act fast.

On the 13th of August, over 40 special ops police officers

took part in a synchronized raid

on all seven of Dutroux's properties in Charleroi.

[ Man speaking French ]

-At about 1:00 in the afternoon, I was at the headquarters

of the gendarmerie of Charleroi at the very moment

when Mr. Connerotte received the news

that in one the properties in Sars-la-Buissiere,

Dutroux was found with his wife and the vehicle.

This was the time to act as it seemed

that Dutroux was about to change the license plate on the van.

-Dutroux, his wife, Michelle Martin,

and an accomplice, Michel Lelievre,

were taken in for questioning.

Over several hours of interrogations,

all three maintained their innocence.

-He was consistent in his lies,

following each lie by telling another lie.

It was a manipulative behavior,

but otherwise, he stayed very, very calm.

Belgian authorities had no choice

but to eventually release Lelievre,

who denied being with Dutroux

on the day Laetitia was kidnapped.

But moments after he left the police station in Charleroi,

a startling witness account came through.

[ Man speaking French ]

-The neighbors of his property in Marcinelle saw Marc Dutroux

and Lelievre return on Friday evening

carrying a child covered by a blanket

as they returned to his house, to Dutroux's house.

-Lelievre was immediately re-arrested

and taken back into custody.

As his accomplice's alibi began to crumble,

Dutroux's interrogation took a drastic turn.

[ Man speaking French ]

-Dutroux knows that we had proof

that Laetitia was in the car, so he says,

"Yes, I was in Bertrix," which he denied at the start.

"I met a young girl. I talked with her,

and then she told me she was tired of her parents."

Stories because there were parts against him,

and he changes the stories to suit his narrative on the spot.

Then at the same time,

Lelievre said she was with Dutroux,

and finally, on Thursday, he ends up telling us,

now that all of these parts of the story contradict each other,

"I will give you the two girls."

-Dutroux pointed to a poster inside the interrogation room

of another missing girl, Sabine Dardenne.

Twelve-year-old Sabine had been kidnapped by him in May.

-Two days after his arrest,

Dutroux confessed and took the police to the basement

where Sabine and Laetitia were found alive.

-On the 15th of August, 1996,

Dutroux led the investigators to his property in Marcinelle

where, hidden behind a false wall in the basement,

was the dungeon where he'd been keeping Sabine Dardenne

and Laetitia Delhez locked up.

-He pulled down the wardrobe

and inside the cage behind was Sabine and Laetitia.

-And then we got this, yeah, that moment of incredible news

that two kidnapped girls had been found alive

in the cage of a person who had been convicted

before for this kind of crimes.

-It was such a huge thing.

All the journalists were on the scene at the time.

The news, magazines were there.

It is as if there had been a terrorist attack.

No one could believe that such a person could exist in Belgium.

It was unthinkable.

-Douglas De Coninck was one of the few journalists

who was allowed to enter Dutroux's basement.

-We had seen pictures. We had been seen images,

but being there is difficult to describe

because it's, like, constructed to...

You wouldn't even put a dog in such a small place.

This was really the kind of cage

they made to hide girls from the police.

-As Belgium awoke in shock to the news

that a man from Marcinelle had abducted,

raped, and tortured two girls over several months,

the families of Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez

rejoiced that their daughters had been found alive.

[ Man speaking French ]

-There are rare occasions when we find the relatives,

and the policemen or a magistrate

has the opportunity to return a child

who had been kidnapped in such circumstances alive.

It's fantastic, obviously.

It is a joy that can be shared with the parents.

-Over the next 48 hours, investigators continue

to relentlessly question Dutroux.

They were desperate to find the two eight-year-old girls,

Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo,

who had been missing for almost a year.

-Marc Dutroux was playing a game with these investigators.

He knew that he never would get out of prison anymore.

He knew that he would presented

as the most famous criminal we've ever had in Belgium,

and he wanted to exploit that situation.

-He had to be flattered.

They had to make him believe

that they believed his pitiful story,

make him believe that things were not that bad for him.

"It's true that you were ingenious on this one.

You were not caught, and you fooled the police

and here and there."

At that point, his ego had been flattered,

and little by little, he let information slip.

That's his attitude.

-After 48 hours of this cat-and-mouse game,

Marc Dutroux finally revealed to investigators

that he had abducted the two eight-year-old girls.

Officer Jean Pierre Adam was in the interrogation room.

[ Man speaking French ]

-As he did not say he had killed them,

we hoped they would be alive.

We had to go fast.

It could have been a matter of life or death for them.

They could very well have been left there

without food or drink.

-But there was no happy ending this time.

In the back garden of Dutroux's house in Marcinelle,

police found the bodies of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo.

[ Man speaking French ]

-I'll remember all my life the moment that I learned

that we had found the bodies of Julie and Melissa.

It was disappointing because we always hoped to find them alive.

It was a great moment of solitude.

Yeah.

I put myself in the place of the parents.

For them, it is 100,000 times worse,

but even for me and my colleagues

who were looking for the right information,

well, we were extremely disappointed.

-I could only imagine what the parents of Lejeune

and Russo must have felt.

I mean, not only have their daughters disappeared,

but they're allowed to starve to death

and are then unceremoniously shoved in a bin bag

and buried in the garden.

It is unimaginable cruelty and something that sets

Dutroux apart from some other serial killers.

-Despite the bodies of both girls

being found buried in the garden of his house,

Dutroux denied both abducting and killing them.

-"Well, it's not me who took them away.

It's not my fault that they died."

Yes. That's what he said to me.

It's Martin who should have fed them,

who did not come to feed them.

-The police also found the body of a French man

named Bernard Weinstein buried in Dutroux's garden.

It's believed that he helped

Dutroux kidnap Julie and Melissa in June 1995.

Back in the police station,

the pedophile soon confessed to abducting another two girls.

-In the meantime, we also had a fairly rapid confession

about the abduction of An and Eefje on the Belgian coast.

-It was the news that Eefje's father, Jean, had been dreading.

[ Man speaking French ]

-To begin with, we were not told anything.

Then the police started asking questions,

if we had any more people, children,

if he'd been involved with more children.

Finally, Dutroux also admitted that he had An and Eefje.

-Dutroux pointed investigators to a property

in the Jumet district of Charleroi

owned by Bernard Weinstein,

the accomplice whose body had just been found

in Dutroux's back garden in Marcinelle.

On September 3, 1996,

near a shack not far away from the house,

police exhumed the bodies of An Marchel and Eefje Lambrecks.

They had been missing for over a year.

Postmortem results revealed the pair had been buried alive.

-At that time, it was only then that people began to make more

or less the connection between everything.

No one had made the link.

-The nation was completely stunned.

Between 1995 and 1996, Marc Dutroux,

a convicted child abuser, had abducted

and raped six young girls aged between eight and 19 years old.

Four of them were now dead.

-For him, his fantasy was to take young girls.

He soon realized that Julie and Melissa

were sexually too young for him,

so he took ones that were a little older.

That was An and Eefje,

but he found that they were too difficult to manage

because they were older, stronger, more intelligent.

There was one that escaped several times.

He had to catch her again,

and it became unmanageable for him,

so he killed them as well.

In his crazy and depraved mind, the first ones were too young,

the others were too old.

He chose in between, so he first took Sabine and then Laetitia.

-These are some of the most horrendous crimes

that any criminologist will ever come across,

but this is somebody who just wouldn't have felt bad

about his victims at all.

He has no sense of connection to them or empathy with them.

-Due to the size of the ongoing investigation,

it would take seven years before

Dutroux, Martin and their accomplice, Michel Lelievre,

were finally taken to trial.

During those years, the sheer gruesomeness of Dutroux's crimes

coupled with the major shortcomings of police

investigations led to widespread protests across the country.

-It's as if something falls on your head,

and you say to yourself, "But how did we not see it?

How did we not see it happen?"

Those events deeply shook society.

You wondered what we're going to build tomorrow on.

-Dutroux's case had grabbed the headlines

of every news outlet in Belgium

and had become an international story.

Belgian society was on the verge of breaking point.

The trial against Marc Dutroux, his wife, Michelle,

and an accomplice, Michel Lelievre,

was due to begin on the 1st of March, 2004,

nearly eight years after the bodies of four girls

had been found in two properties linked to Dutroux.

By the time the trial arrived, the story had become

one of the biggest controversies in Belgian history.

-Belgian society still remains deeply divided

over whether they've got the right people in the dock

and just how thoroughly the case has been investigated.

-You lived and went to sleep with this trial.

It was like an addiction.

There was so many pages in the newspaper,

so many hours on television.

-The prosecution had brought over 200 charges

against Dutroux and his accomplices.

-There was the kidnapping, the abduction,

rape and murder of young girls,

so if you multiply that by four or five,

there were roughly 235, 255 charges attributable to him.

The trial began on March 1, 2004,

at the Arlon assize court in southeast Belgium.

Dutroux pleaded guilty to the murder

of his French accomplice, Bernard Weinstein,

but denied kidnapping

eight-year-olds Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo

and killing camping friends An Marchel and Eefje Lambrecks.

-He continued to deny kidnapping Julie and Melissa,

and he also denied the fact that he had killed An and Eefje,

but the most important thing

with regards to the kidnapping of Julie and Melissa,

he said, "The death of Julie and Melissa is not my fault.

I was in prison."

-He said one was already deceased

and the other practically dead.

He tried, he said, that's what he said,

to save her, but he could not do it.

He could not do it, so he buried them.

-As the prosecution began to make its case,

the most gruesome details of Dutroux's crimes

were laid bare in front of the eyes of the jury

and of the families of the girls.

[ Man speaking foreign language ]

-They asked about the photos, how they had been found.

Photos had been taken, and I left the courthouse.

I did not look at those photos.

They were too horrible.

-True, that it's very dramatical to be there

because we have to see, again,

everything that was not so easy to see and to accept.

-The testimony of kidnapped 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne,

now age 21, described how Dutroux had repeatedly raped her

during the 80 days

she was held prisoner inside Dutroux's dungeon.

-For 14 weeks, the self-obsessed psychopath

used the courtroom as his stage,

communicating with his captive audience

from behind the glass cage

where he was made to sit for his own protection.

-I start to understand him better

just by hearing him talking in direct.

For example, one of the moments that I never forget

was the air-co didn't work any more.

It was just terribly hot in that courtroom,

and there were some people saying,

"We cannot go through this.

We should stop today and wait until the plumber has arrived,"

and then, suddenly, Marc Dutroux knocked on his glass

and said, "I can fix it."

He started a whole explanation about

what was wrong with the system and how to fix it,

and he just had to be released from the box,

and he would do it.

-Marc Dutroux is a textbook psychopath, in my opinion,

and when we look at psychopathy,

these are people who are not as emotionally complex

as the rest of us.

They don't have that same depth of feeling.

They lack a conscience.

They operate pretty much like robots,

so they are able to kind of live in the present,

just simply follow their own wants and desires,

but I think one important thing to remember about psychopaths

is they're not mentally ill.

They are rational.

They're aware of what they're doing.

Their actions are the results of choice.

-What many found so disturbing was the role

of Dutroux's wife, Michelle, who became a silent witness

and, at times, accomplice to his heinous crimes.

-This Michelle Martin, she's a total riddle

because she's different.

She's not like Dutroux.

I think if she had not met Dutroux,

she might not have done what she did,

and here, she also tried to explain she regretted it,

but it's so strange that, as an explanation,

she was going to feed the dog, and, in the house,

the kids were downstairs, yet she did not go to them.

How can people live with themselves?

It's not them who created the horror

but the fact that they can live alongside it...

-Dutroux's defense lawyers argued that he was part

of a Europe-wide pedophile network.

-It was very weird because

Marc Dutroux had changed his lawyers on several occasions,

and now he showed up with four lawyers

with each a different defense line.

There was one saying, "He's a psychopath.

Don't listen to all these stories about networks

or a criminal organization behind him. No, it's him alone."

It was his other lawyer saying, "He's part of a big network.

He's just the guy who kidnaps girls,

brings them to sex parties and cleans up the mess."

-But the jury ruled out the involvement of others,

and on June 17, 2004, they found Marc Dutroux guilty.

-To all the charges that I brought against Dutroux,

the jury answered positively.

-Well, there was very not much suspense

because you could feel no matter how the jury was critical

towards the official story,

it was clear that they would condemn Marc Dutroux

for every accusation.

-On the 22nd of June, 2004,

Marc Dutroux was given the maximum life sentence.

His wife, Michelle Martin, received 30 years in prison

and Michel Lelievre, 25 years for his part in the crimes.

Despite the four-month trial, there are still many questions

left unanswered in the Dutroux case.

-For example, the exact locations

as well Julie and Melissa as An and Eefje...

Their parents, until today, they don't know where it happened,

and it's crucial because if you want

to determine responsibilities, to know what exactly happened,

that's what these parents is promised,

what they absolutely want,

just a convincing explanation of what happened.

They never got that.

-I was hoping for more justice

so that we'd know who we were dealing with

and also what happened to Eefje.

How was she murdered?

And that we still don't know.

We do not know the details,

so we have never found out how she died.

-Dutroux's wife, Michelle,

was controversially released from prison

on August 28, 2012.

She now lives in hiding under protection

from the Belgian authorities.

-Dutroux asked to be released on the grounds

that he'd seen the light,

that he was no danger to anybody anymore,

that, after all, they'd released his wife.

Why couldn't they release him?

The request was refused,

and he is in solitary confinement.

-Marc Dutroux has continued to deny killing the four girls

and, despite pleas from the families and the survivors,

has never given an explanation for his actions.

Many people believe his crimes spread further and wider

and that there were other accomplices involved,

leaving some with a feeling that justice had not been served.

-We did not get any answers,

and we started our own investigation.

We examined dossiers ourselves.

We found out some things,

but much more is still unclear.

-The fact that this was a case of child abduction,

this was a case where the deep violence used against children

was so evident, so uncommon,

that it was hard to believe that this guy not only

was released from prison after only a few years

but managed to find a way to start immediately again

with kidnapping girls, buying houses,

and he was like...

everything that could be worse was worse.

-Dutroux's crimes not only affected

the families of his victims --

the entire country was sickened by this deadly psychopath.

-Unfortunately, Dutroux is the one thing

that Belgium would not want to be remembered for.

In the years between 1996 and '98,

one-third of the Belgian people whose name

was Dutroux asked to change their name.

It is a commentary on how deeply affected

the country was by this lone wolf.

♪

-Well, some of the things that Marc Dutroux did

were incredibly depraved,

and he didn't seem to have any bad feelings about that.

He completely lacks any empathy for his victims.

He treated his victims essentially as commodities,

as items to use and discard when he was fed up with them.

-He is depraved. There are no physical signs.

He's a man who, if you meet on the street, you'll meet him.

He doesn't stand out, but when you analyze his personality,

it's that of a depraved man, that's all, an intelligent man

who knows what he wants but is depraved.

-He's a psychopath, someone who has no feelings for people.

He thinks he can reconstruct his fantasies.

He believes that he is going to kidnap two girls away

and that they will become attached to him

and that they will love him.

He will grow old with them.

One must be seriously disturbed to think that.

-Marc Dutroux's hideous crimes left many families in mourning

and a whole nation stunned.

By manipulating those around him,

he was able to satisfy his depraved sexual urges.

We may never know the truth about how far

and wide Dutroux's network of crime spread

or how many children may have suffered

in his homemade dungeon,

but we can be sure that Marc Dutroux

will never be free to cause harm to anyone ever again.

♪

♪

♪