Ronald Alain Janssen was born in Boorsem on February 6, 1971. He taught technical drawing at the Sint-Martinus schools in Herk-de-Stad and lived in Loksbergen, part of Halen, in the province of Limburg. He was separated from his wife and had two children. Colleagues and neighbours described a quiet, unremarkable man.
On April 28, 2007 eighteen-year-old Annick Van Uytsel left a party in Schaffen at about four in the morning and cycled home towards Kaggevinne, near Diest. She sent her boyfriend a text at one minute past five. Her parents began worrying at six. Her body was found later, wrapped in grey plastic bags, a cloth and a blue tarpaulin. Her bicycle turned up in Leuven that July. An anonymous caller then claimed she had been the victim of a hit and run; he had nothing to do with the case and was later ordered to compensate her parents for the distress. A television appeal produced about a hundred tips and none of them led anywhere. Janssen had heard about the party at school that day and driven out to it. He said he came across her on the road.
On the night of January 2, 2010 his neighbour Shana Appeltans, eighteen, and her boyfriend Kevin Paulus, twenty-two, came back from an evening out. Janssen fetched a gun and something to burn with, rang their doorbell, and forced them into their own car at gunpoint. He made Paulus drive to a track outside the village and shot him. He raped and tortured Shana Appeltans and killed her. He set the car alight; the fire brigade were called to it at 2.43 in the morning. He burned his clothes in his stove, scattered the ashes in a ditch, and threw the gun into the Demer.
He was arrested within days and confessed. Accounts differ over the exact dates: Dutch-language sources give the arrest as January 5 and the confession on January 7, while others give January 4 and the same evening. He initially claimed that persistent goading by Kevin Paulus had driven him to it, which the investigation disproved. On January 11 he also admitted killing Annick Van Uytsel in 2007. He confessed to a fourth killing, of a person who has never been identified.
The trial opened at the assize court in Tongeren in September 2011. The jury took about two hours to convict him on every count: the unlawful detention and premeditated killing of Annick Van Uytsel, the premeditated killing of Kevin Paulus, and the rape, torture and premeditated killing of Shana Appeltans. On October 21, 2011 he was sentenced to life imprisonment without remission, the court refusing any mitigation because of the premeditation and the torture.
A second case followed at Hasselt in 2012. On October 5 he was convicted of ten rapes, with torture and assault, committed between 2001 and 2006 while he was teaching. No further prison term was added because he was already serving life; he was fined and ordered to pay more than three hundred thousand euros in damages. The Antwerp Court of Appeal upheld the convictions in full on May 24, 2013.
The police investigation into Annick Van Uytsel's death was examined by Comité P, the Belgian police oversight body. Its findings, reported before the trial, described missed opportunities, absent leadership, poor handling of information and unclear arrangements between the services involved, across nearly three years in which he was free.
Murderpedia records his victim count as three to fifteen. Three murders were proved and a fourth was confessed. No source found supports anything approaching fifteen; the figure appears to reflect the unsolved cases he was looked at for rather than any finding against him.