Andras Pandy was born in Hungary in 1927, trained as a Protestant pastor, and settled in Belgium after the 1956 uprising, working as a religious teacher in Brussels schools and as a pastor to the Hungarian community.
Between 1986 and 1992 he killed his first two wives, Ilona Sores and Edit Fintor, and four of his children. He shot or battered them at his house in Brussels, dismembered the bodies, and destroyed them with a commercial drain cleaner, disposing of what remained.
He kept the deaths concealed for years by an elaborate deception. He produced women he claimed were his wives at official appointments, used his own daughter to impersonate her mother, and continued to draw the children's welfare payments. He travelled to Hungary and returned with documents suggesting the missing were alive there.
For a decade the Belgian state was satisfied. The people it was asking after were dead and the answers were being supplied by the man who had killed them.
He was also, on the evidence at trial, sexually abusing his children over many years, and his daughter Agnes said in court that he had forced her to participate in the killings.
He was arrested on October 20, 1997. The prosecution never recovered identifiable remains.
That is what makes the case unusual. There were no bodies, no forensic identifications and no confession. The convictions rest on Agnes Pandy's testimony, on the paper trail of his own deception, and on traces found at the house.
He was convicted on March 8, 2002 and sentenced to life. Agnes was convicted as an accomplice and given twenty-one years.
He denied everything to the end and died in prison on December 23, 2013.