Dutroux was born in Brussels on November 6, 1956. In 1989 he was convicted of the abduction and rape of five girls and sentenced to thirteen years. He was released on parole in 1992, after three years, on the recommendation of the authorities and over his own mother's written warning to them that he was dangerous.
In 1995 and 1996, with his wife Michelle Martin and associates, he abducted six girls and young women. Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, both eight, were taken in June 1995 and held in a concealed cellar at his house in Marcinelle; they starved to death in it in early 1996 while Dutroux was in custody on an unrelated car theft charge and Martin, who knew they were there, did not feed them. An Marchal, seventeen, and Eefje Lambrecks, nineteen, were taken in August 1995 and killed. Sabine Dardenne, twelve, and Laetitia Delhez, fourteen, were taken in 1996 and were found alive in the cellar when he was arrested on August 13, 1996. He also killed Bernard Weinstein, an accomplice.
The investigation before that arrest is the substance of the case. Police had searched the house while the two eight-year-olds were alive in it and did not find the cellar, having heard children's voices and accepted an explanation for them. Files were not shared between jurisdictions. Informants' warnings were not acted on. When the investigating magistrate Jean-Marc Connerotte, who had found the surviving girls, was removed from the case in October 1996 on a technicality after attending a fundraising dinner for the victims' families, some 300,000 people marched in Brussels in what became known as the White March. The Belgian federal police were subsequently restructured, and a parliamentary inquiry examined the failures at length.
He was tried at Arlon in 2004 and convicted on March 17 of the abductions and of three murders, and sentenced to life imprisonment on June 22, 2004. Martin received thirty years and was released to a convent in 2012, which caused further public anger. Dutroux has applied for release repeatedly and been refused, most recently on assessments that he remains dangerous.
Claims that he was part of a protected paedophile network involving officials were made throughout, and the parliamentary inquiry found incompetence, negligence and rivalry between services rather than protection. That finding has never satisfied a substantial part of Belgian opinion, and the entry records both the finding and the fact that it is not accepted.