From our comfortable seat in life … we never could have imagined that thousands of well-off adults, integrated and even cultured, find pleasure in seeing children tortured and killed.”

From a front-page editorial in Italy’s Corriere della Sera, reprinted in The Irish Times, September 29, 2000

“British detectives are trying to close a website showing pictures of a man eating a dismembered baby … the website, based in California … has been linked with the ritual abuse of children … A second website showing similar scenes of sadistic and ritualistic abuse has been successfully shut.”

Independent, February 21, 2001

“Paedophiles can boldly and courageously affirm what they choose... I am also a theologian and as a theologian, I believe it is God's will that there be closeness and intimacy, unity of flesh, between people... paedophiles can make the assertion that the pursuit of intimacy and love is what they choose. With boldness, they can say, 'I believe this is in fact part of God's will'."

Ralph Underwager, 'expert' witness for the defense in scores of child abuse cases and former vocal member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, in an interview in Paidika (a pro-pedophilia publication), conducted in June 1991 

To the vast majority of Americans, the name Marc Dutroux does not mean much. Drop that name in Belgium though and you are likely to elicit some very visceral reactions. Dutroux - convicted along with his wife in 1989 for the rape and violent abuse of five young girls, the youngest of whom was just eleven - now stands accused of being a key player in an international child prostitution and pornography ring whose practices included kidnapping, rape, sadistic torture, and murder.

Dutroux was sentenced in 1989 to thirteen years for his crimes, but was freed after having served just three. This was in spite of the fact that, as prison governor Yvan Stuaert would later tell a parliamentary commission: “A medical report described him as a perverse psychopath, an explosive mix. He was an evident danger to society.” The man who turned Dutroux loose on society, Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet, was rewarded with a prestigious appointment to serve as a judge at the European Court of Justice at The Hague.

Shortly after Dutroux’s release, young girls began to disappear in the vicinity of some of his homes. Though technically unemployed and drawing welfare from the state, he nevertheless owned at least six houses and lived quite lavishly. His rather lucrative income appears to have been derived from trading in child sex-slaves, child prostitution, and child pornography. Many of his houses appeared to stand vacant, though at least some of them were in fact used as torture and imprisonment centers where kidnapped girls were taken and held in underground dungeons. Some of Dutroux’s homes were used in this way for several years following his early release, with a growing body of evidence to indicate that fact to the police. Authorities nevertheless failed to act on the information, or acted on it in ways that implied either complete incompetence (according to most press reports), or police complicity in the operation (according to any sort of logic). 

Officials seem to have routinely ignored tips that later proved accurate, including a report from Dutroux's own mother that her son was holding girls prisoner in one of his houses. In addition, key facts were withheld from investigators working on the disappearances and lines of communication were unaccountably broken, inexcusably hindering the investigation. Police did search one of Dutroux's homes on no less than three separate occasions over the course of the investigation. On at least two of those occasions, two of the missing girls were being held in heinous conditions, imprisoned in a custom-built dungeon in the basement. Nevertheless, according to the Guardian, the police searches came up empty – even though the investigating officers reported “hearing children’s voices on one occasion.” 

It was not until August 13, 1996, four years after the disappearances began, that authorities arrested Dutroux, along with his wife (an elementary school teacher), a lodger, a policeman, and a man the Guardian described as “an associate with political connections” – elsewhere identified as Jean-Michel Nihoul, a Brussels businessman and nightclub owner. One of those taken into custody - Michel Lelievre, described in a May 2002 BBC report as a “drug addict and petty thief” - reportedly told his interrogators that at least some of the girls abducted by the ring “were kidnapped to order, for someone else.” This was just one of many statements by suspects and witnesses that would later be dismissed by Belgian officials. 

Two days after the arrests, police again searched Dutroux's home and discovered the soundproof dungeon/torture center. As CNN reported, three years earlier “police ignored tips from an informant who said Dutroux was building secret cellars to hold girls before selling them abroad.” In addition, in 1995, the same informant had told police that Dutroux had offered an unidentified third man “the equivalent of $3,000 to $5,000 to kidnap girls.” Incredibly, it was later reported by the Guardian that police actually had in their possession a videotape of the dungeon being constructed: “Belgian police could have saved the lives of two children [who were] allegedly murdered by the paedophile Marc Dutroux if they had watched a video seized from his home which showed him building their hidden cell.” The tape had been seized in one of the earlier searches. 

At the time of the final search, two fourteen-year-old girls were found imprisoned in the dungeon, chained and starving. They described to police how they had been used as child prostitutes and in the production of child pornography videos. More than 300 such videos were taken into custody by the police.

On August 17, 1996, the story got grimmer as police dug up the bodies of two eight-year-old girls at another of Dutroux's homes. It would later be learned that the girls had been kept in one of Dutroux’s dungeons for nine months after their abductions, during which time they were repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted – all captured on videotape. The girls were then left to slowly starve to death. Alongside of their decimated corpses was the body of Bernard Weinstein, a former accomplice of Dutroux who had occupied one of the houses for several years. Weinstein had been buried alive.  

A few weeks later, two more girls were found buried under concrete at yet another of the Dutroux properties. By that time, ten people connected to the case were reportedly in custody. As the body count mounted, the outrage of the Belgian people grew. They demanded to know why this man, dubbed the 'Belgian Beast,' had been released after having served such an absurdly short sentence. And they demanded to know why, as evidence had continued to mount and girls had continued to disappear, the police had chosen to do nothing. How many girls, they wanted to know, had been killed due to this inaction? 

Adding further fuel to the fire, as a Los Angeles Times report revealed, were claims by “a highly regarded children’s activist, Marie-France Botte … [that] the Justice Ministry is sitting on a politically sensitive list of customers of pedophile videotapes.” The same report noted, “the affair has become further clouded by the discovery of a motorcycle that reportedly matches the description of one used in the 1991 assassination of prominent Belgian businessman and politician Andre Cools. Michel Bourlet, the head prosecutor on the pedophile case, meanwhile, has publicly declared that the investigation can be thoroughly pursued only without political interference. Several years ago, Bourlet was removed from the highly charged Cools case, which remains unsolved.”