On December 13, 1995, a gendarmerie officer named René Michaux led a search of a small house in Marcinelle, on the southern edge of Charleroi. The owner, Marc Dutroux, was in custody on a car-theft charge, and informants, including his own mother, had told the police he was dangerous. In the basement Michaux heard children's voices. He decided they came from outside. Behind a heavy concrete door disguised as a wall of shelving, in a cell little more than two meters long and less than a meter wide, were Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo, both eight years old. They had been missing since June. By the time Dutroux came home, they were dead.
That search is the center of the Dutroux case, and of what it did to Belgium. He was a former electrician, unemployed, who owned several houses around Charleroi and had already served time for exactly this kind of crime. Between June 1995 and August 1996 he abducted six girls and young women, with help from his wife, Michelle Martin, and from an accomplice, Michel Lelièvre. Four of them died. At almost every stage the police had information that could have stopped him, and the failure to use it brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets.
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 serving about three.
Julie and Mélissa were school friends from Grâce-Hollogne, a suburb of Liège. On June 24, 1995, they went out for a walk together and did not come back. Their parents organized a search that covered the country: for months the two girls' faces looked out from posters on car windshields and lampposts across Belgium. They were in the cell at Marcinelle, roughly sixty miles away. In August 1995 Dutroux and his accomplices took two more young women, An Marchal, seventeen, and Eefje Lambrecks, nineteen, who were on holiday together at the coast.
In December 1995 Dutroux was arrested for car theft and held for about four months. He later said he had told Martin to feed the two girls in the cellar. She did not. She told the court at his trial that she had been too frightened to go down to them. Julie and Mélissa starved to death. Mélissa's father, Gino Russo, has always maintained that the girls could not have survived as long as they did in that space without someone caring for them, and he regards the question of who that was as unanswered.
The search on December 13 took place during those four months, while at least the two children were alive in the house. Michaux and a locksmith went into the basement; he heard the voices and did not look further. Letters that Sabine Dardenne later hid in the house were also missed in a subsequent search, and Michel Bourlet, the prosecutor who eventually brought the case, criticized Michaux in open court in 2004. Bernard Weinstein, an associate of Dutroux's, disappeared around the same time. Dutroux later admitted killing him.
When Dutroux was released in the spring of 1996 he resumed. On May 28, Sabine Dardenne, twelve, was grabbed as she cycled to school in Kain, near Tournai, and taken to the cell at Marcinelle, where she was chained, drugged and repeatedly raped. Dutroux told her she was being held by a gang that meant to kill her and that he was protecting her. On August 9, Laetitia Delhez, fourteen, was taken as she walked home from the swimming pool in Bertrix, in the Ardennes. This time a woman saw the van and wrote down part of its license plate.
The Bertrix abduction fell to the prosecutor's office in Neufchâteau, where Bourlet and the investigating magistrate Jean-Marc Connerotte moved quickly. The van traced to Dutroux. On August 13, 1996, he, Martin and Lelièvre were arrested. An initial search of his houses found nothing, but two days later Dutroux and Lelièvre confessed, and on August 15 Dutroux led officers to the concealed cell at Marcinelle, where Sabine and Laetitia were found alive. Sabine had been held for eighty days, Laetitia for six.
On August 17 Dutroux took the police to another of his properties, at Sars-la-Buissière, where the bodies of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo and of Bernard Weinstein were buried in the garden. A postmortem found that the girls had starved. The bodies of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks were dug up later that summer from the grounds of a house he owned near Charleroi. The two young women had been drugged, gagged and buried alive. The businessman Michel Nihoul was arrested on August 16 on suspicion of conspiracy.
The country's grief turned into fury as the details emerged: the parole in 1992, the missed search, the warnings not acted on, the files that different police forces had not shared. In October 1996 Connerotte was removed from the investigation after he attended a spaghetti dinner held to raise money for the victims' families, on the ground that it compromised his impartiality. On October 20, 1996, between 275,000 and 350,000 people walked through Brussels in the White March, the largest demonstration in the country's history. A parliamentary inquiry found that rivalry between police services had hindered the search for the missing girls. The federal police unit for missing persons, set up on September 4, 1995, in the first months of the search, grew out of the case. In 1998 Dutroux briefly escaped from custody. He was recaptured, but the ministers of justice and of the interior and the head of the gendarmerie resigned. The case led directly to reforms of the Belgian police and judiciary and to stronger child-protection laws.
The trial did not begin until March 2004, nearly eight years after the arrests, before a jury at the court of assizes in Arlon. The file ran to some 400,000 pages, and four defendants faced 243 questions of fact. Dutroux entered no plea, which Belgian procedure allows. He denied killing An, Eefje or Weinstein and said he had acted for a large criminal network, naming Nihoul as its link. Bourlet told the jury that Dutroux had not acted alone but did not argue for a network larger than the people in the dock. Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez gave evidence in person. Sabine looked at Dutroux and asked him why he had not killed her.
The jury retired on June 14 and returned on June 17, 2004. Dutroux was convicted of the abduction and rape of all six girls and of the murders of An Marchal, Eefje Lambrecks and Bernard Weinstein. Prosecutors had not charged him with murdering Julie and Mélissa, saying they could not establish when the girls had died; he and Martin were held responsible for their deaths through the abductions and confinement. Martin was convicted and later sentenced to thirty years; Lelièvre was convicted of taking part in the abductions and sentenced to twenty-five. The jury could not agree on whether Nihoul was involved in the kidnappings, and when sent back to consider whether he had been an accomplice, acquitted him; he was convicted of drug trafficking and people smuggling. On June 22, 2004, Dutroux was sentenced to life imprisonment, followed by ten years at the government's disposal. "For the record," he told the court before sentence, "I want to say that I didn't rape Julie and Melissa and I will continue to search for the truth about An, Eefje and Weinstein."
Whether the case ends with those four defendants has never been settled in Belgian public opinion. Dutroux's own account of a network, the removal of Connerotte, the missing videotapes and the sheer number of failures persuaded many that he had been protected. The parliamentary inquiry, the prosecutor and the jury found incompetence, rivalry and negligence, and no network beyond the people convicted. The families of the victims have not all accepted that conclusion, and neither has a large part of the public.
Martin was released on parole in August 2012 to a convent at Malonne, near Namur, which brought thousands of protesters out again. The law changed the next year: since 2013 the sentence-enforcement court that rules on release for prisoners like Dutroux has sat with five judges instead of three and must decide unanimously, and since January 1, 2012, the ten years at the government's disposal in his sentence have been administered by that court. In February 2013 Dutroux asked to serve his sentence at home under electronic monitoring, and was refused. In October 2019 the court in Brussels ordered a new psychiatric assessment at his lawyers' request; the report, delivered in October 2020, concluded that he still posed a danger to society, and his lawyer set the parole bid aside. One of the psychiatrists on that panel, Samuël Leistedt, said in 2026 that some people cannot be reintegrated and must stay in prison. His lawyer, Bruno Dayez, who calls whole-life imprisonment an abomination worse than the death penalty, said in 2025 that the likeliest outcome was that he would never leave, or leave only near the end of his life.
Nivelles, where he is held in isolation, produced a new case. On information from the prison that he had a mobile phone and had seen images of child sexual abuse, the Walloon Brabant prosecutor's office opened an investigation on July 11, 2024. A search of his cell on July 31 found no phone, but investigators seized four envelopes of pictures of naked women and girls, some of them minors; the magazine Humo later reported some two hundred images, around a hundred of them of children, a figure the prosecutor's office did not confirm. On June 13, 2025, prosecutors asked for him to be sent to the criminal court for possessing child abuse images. At a hearing on November 7, 2025, his lawyer asked for further inquiries; the investigating judge refused, and an appeals chamber upheld her on January 2, 2026. When the case leaked in February 2026, the prosecutor, Marc Rézette, confirmed the investigation and said the office would comment fully once the court had decided whether to send it to trial.
On August 13, 2026, Dutroux, then sixty-nine, had spent thirty years in prison, the point at which Belgian law allows a man serving life to apply for release. Jean-Denis Lejeune, Julie's father, has explained publicly that a life sentence in Belgium does not have to mean death in prison, and after a vigilante attack on a suspected pedophile in Namur in July 2025 he wrote that people had no choice but to trust the systems in place. In 2022 the Marcinelle house was demolished, and in 2023 the city of Charleroi opened a white memorial garden on the site, attended by the fathers of Julie and Mélissa. At Gino Russo's request, the cell beneath it was left intact.