On the night of January 2, 2010, Kevin Paulus, twenty-two, drove his girlfriend, Shana Appeltans, eighteen, home to her parents' house in Loksbergen, part of Halen in the Belgian province of Limburg, from a New Year's party a kilometer away. She was a student in the middle of exams, so the couple left before the rest of the family. Next door lived Ronald Janssen, a teacher who had been feuding with the Appeltans family and told friends his neighbors were lowlifes who tormented him. He fetched a pistol and something to burn with, confronted the couple and forced them at gunpoint to drive to a remote spot. There he shot Kevin Paulus three times. He tried to rape Shana Appeltans and tortured her, and then killed her with a shot to the neck. He drove the small Opel on to a farm track beside the motorway, with Paulus's body in the trunk and hers on the back seat, and set it on fire. The fire brigade was called 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 born at Boorsem on February 6, 1971, and taught technical drawing at the Sint-Martinus schools in Herk-de-Stad. He was separated from his wife and had two children. Colleagues and neighbors described a quiet, unremarkable man. On January 5 he was arrested as a suspect, and on January 7 he confessed; some accounts give the arrest as January 4 and the confession that evening. He claimed that Paulus's constant harassment had driven him to it, and the investigation showed that was not true.
Under further questioning, on January 10 or 11, he admitted a murder that had been unsolved for nearly three years. On April 27, 2007, at about four in the morning, eighteen-year-old Annick Van Uytsel had left an end-of-school party and started cycling home toward Kaggevinne, near Diest. She sent her boyfriend a text at 5:01. The last signal from her phone came from Halen, which was not on her way home. On May 3 investigators found her body in the Albert Canal at Lummen, wrapped in a bag weighted with stones; the autopsy found she had been killed by a blow to the head and had been in the water for days. Her bicycle turned up in Leuven on August 26, 2008. An anonymous caller had meanwhile claimed she was the victim of a hit and run; he had nothing to do with the case and was later ordered to compensate her parents. A television appeal produced about a hundred tips, none of them useful.
Janssen said he had been driving his van that night when he remembered hearing at school about the party in Schaffen, and went there. He came across her cycling home. He followed her because she was young and alone. On a deserted lane he cut her off, pushed her onto the verge, bound her hands with wide brown packing tape, taped her mouth and forced her into his blue van at the point of a knife or gun. He held her for several hours in his cellar. He denied meaning to rape her and said he had simply needed affection. He kept her body for a day before dumping it in the canal. Forensic work backed him up: her bicycle had spent time in a pond near his house, and a hair of his was found in the bag she was wrapped in.
His trial opened at the assize court in Tongeren on September 20, 2011, with the selection of the jury, and the hearings began on September 23. Before the trial he was released from prosecution for the fourth killing he had confessed to, of a person who has never been identified. On October 20 the jury took about two hours to find him guilty of unlawful detention, rape, torture and three premeditated murders. On October 21 the court sentenced him to life without remission, refusing any mitigation because of the premeditation and the torture.
A second trial opened at Hasselt on September 10, 2012, on twelve further charges. 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.
Comité P, the Belgian police oversight body, examined the investigation into Annick Van Uytsel's death. Its findings, reported before the trial, described missed opportunities, absent leadership, poor handling of information and unclear arrangements between the services involved during the nearly three years he was free. After his arrest, files on several unsolved killings in Belgium and the Netherlands were reopened. None has been attributed to him in court.