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Belgian Teacher Ronald Janssen Is Detained Over a Young Couple's Shooting and Confesses to a 2007 Murder

Shana Appeltans, 18, and Kevin Paulus, 22, were found shot in a burned-out car. Days later, Janssen admitted killing Annick Van Uytsel, prosecutors said.

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Illustration of police vehicles on a frosty lane beside brick houses in a Belgian village on a foggy winter morning. Not an actual scene from the case.

Belgian police detained teacher Ronald Janssen in early January 2010 over the shooting of a young couple near his village. Within days he had also confessed to a 2007 murder.

Shana Appeltans, 18, and Kevin Paulus, 22, were killed on January 2, the day after New Year's, and found shot in their burned-out car. Janssen, 38, a technical-drawing teacher from Loksbergen in Limburg province and a neighbor, was taken into custody, and the Hasselt prosecutor's office led the investigation. On January 11, Ivo Carmen of the Leuven prosecutor's office said Janssen had confessed over the weekend to the 2007 murder of Annick Van Uytsel, 18, of Diest, and had confirmed the confession to the investigating magistrate. Van Uytsel had disappeared in April 2007 after a party, and her body was later found in a canal. "No one in his immediate surroundings or environment had even the least suspicion that he was capable of doing something like this," Carmen said.

On January 12, the Bruges prosecutor ordered investigators to look for any link between Janssen and two unsolved killings on the Belgian coast: that of Ingrid Caeckaert, 26, found dead in her flat in Heist in 1991, and of Carola Titze, a 16-year-old German girl killed while on holiday in De Haan in 1996. In October 2011, a court in Tongeren convicted Janssen of the murders of Van Uytsel, Appeltans and Paulus and sentenced him to life in prison.

Prosecutors said no one around Janssen had suspected him of anything; within a week of his detention he had confessed to three killings.

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