In November 1997 Agnes Pandy, forty, told Belgian investigators what had happened to her family. Her father, the Hungarian-born Protestant pastor Andras Pandy, had been arrested the month before. According to her, the missing were dead: her mother, her two brothers, her father's second wife and two stepsisters. They had been shot or struck with a sledgehammer in his houses in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean, dismembered, partly dissolved in a bath of Liquid-Plumr drain cleaner in the basement, and what remained was taken to an abattoir in Anderlecht. She said she had killed her mother herself and taken part in four of the other killings, and that she had been her father's victim since she was a child.
Pandy was born on June 1, 1927, in Chop, then in Czechoslovakia and now in Ukraine, to Hungarian parents. He was a councillor of the Reformed Church in Hungary when he married Ilona Sőrés, and after the failed revolution of 1956 they fled to Belgium, where he became pastor to a small Hungarian Protestant congregation in Brussels and a religious teacher for the United Protestant Church. Agnes was born in 1957, Dániel in 1961 and Zoltán in 1966. Soon after Zoltán's birth he accused his wife of infidelity and they separated; she took the boys and left Agnes, then eleven, with him, and he began abusing her.
In the 1970s he courted women through dating advertisements in Hungarian newspapers, often under a false name. On visits to Hungary he met Edit Fintor, a married woman with three daughters, Tímea, Tünde and Andrea, and she left her husband and came to Belgium with him; they married in 1979 and had two children. In 1984 he began raping Tímea, then twenty, and made her pregnant. Her family dismissed her account, Agnes attacked her with an iron bar in a basement, and in 1986 Tímea fled, first to relatives in Vancouver and then to Hungary. Before she left she told her mother the truth. After a violent argument, Edit Fintor and fourteen-year-old Andrea disappeared, and Pandy showed the police a forged telegram saying his wife had gone to Germany with a lover. In 1988 Ilona Sőrés and her sons vanished; he said first that they had moved to France, then South America. In 1990, while Agnes was away on holiday with the younger children, Tünde, eighteen, disappeared too. He said she had become disturbed and gone to live with another family.
For years the answers satisfied the authorities. He produced forged letters and false testimony, took the children on visits and asked friends to write that they had seen them. A Dutch colleague, the minister Andries den Broer, reportedly wrote to the Ministry of Justice and to Queen Fabiola about his suspicions and got no answer. In 1992 Agnes tried to report her father for sexual abuse. Belgian and Hungarian police began a joint inquiry; Pandy kept a summer house near the Danube and was known for inviting Hungarian women back to Brussels, and two sisters later said he had kept them locked in his house to cook and clean until they refused to marry him. He was arrested on October 16, 1997, the day of the White March in Brussels for the victims of Marc Dutroux, and the Belgian press called him Father Bluebeard.
Under the concrete of his basement on Vandemaelen Street, investigators found the skeletal remains of seven women and a man. DNA tests in January 1998 showed that none were his relatives, and who they were has never been established. Hidden in the ceiling of another of his houses were three rifles and four handguns. No identifiable remains of the six family members were ever found.
The trial opened in Brussels on February 18, 2002, and ran for two weeks. Agnes was the prosecution's main witness. Pandy called it a witch trial, told the jury that the missing were alive and that he was in contact with them through angels, and said it was up to the court to prove they were dead. On March 5 the jury convicted him of the six murders, the attempted murder of Tímea and the rape of three of his daughters, and on March 6 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Agnes was convicted as an accomplice in five murders and an attempted murder and given twenty-one years; prosecutors had asked for twenty-nine, and her lawyers argued that she had been under the overwhelming spell of a father who raped her. He was held at Leuven Central prison and later moved to Bruges for his health, and he died on December 23, 2013, at eighty-six.