AN ENTIRE country is haunted by the spectre of an evil paedophile and murderer who kidnapped girls off the streets and locked them up in his sickening "House of Horrors".
Marc Dutroux, the notorious Belgian serial killer, earned his infamous nickname as "Le Monstre", or "The Monster".
Now, over a quarter of a century on from his chilling crimes, a new true crime podcast has spoken to the relatives of his victims and some of the investigating police officers at the time, to uncover the truth behind the horrors that still terrorise Belgium today.
Le Monstre killed at least 11 victims - abducting and torturing children as young as eight.
Speaking to The Sun Online, journalist Matt Grave, host of the new true crime podcast Le Monstre, said he had always been fascinated by the case, having moved to Belgium just as the grisly events were unfolding.
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"It was completely insane," he said. "You couldn't even write a Hollywood script as crazy as this."
The Dutroux case, he explained, "resulted in the largest protest in the history of Belgium, the country's FBI was disbanded as a result of cases, and the king got involved.
"There was even talk of revolution."
Matt said that police - through incompetence or corruption - missed a major opportunity to uncover Dutroux's secret basement where he kept his victims weeks earlier.
On December 13, 1995, seven months after the first disappearances, Dutroux was arrested for stealing a truck.
Police investigator Rene Michaux went looking around Dutroux's house in Charleroi.
Michaux went down into the basement with a locksmith. The locksmith said he heard voices.
As Matt explains: "Michaux shushes him, and the voices stopped. They leave. The locksmith said, 'Are you sure?'
"Michaux says 'who's the cop here, you or me?' The girls were in the cell at that time. The locksmith said in court under oath that he didn't know they were looking for girls.
"He said, 'I don't know a single person in the world, were they to be looking for girls and heard what I heard, would have left that place without ripping the house apart.'"
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Matt said Michaux went back to the house again later the same month and carried out a second search, but found nothing.
Michaux was used as a "sacrificial lamb" by the Belgian police and dismissed as an idiot, according to Matt.
Alleged links existed at the time between the police and the criminal underworld in Charleroi.
"A war was taking place between the gendarmerie, the judicial police, and judicial magistrates," Matt said.
"The gendarmerie wanted to take over. They wanted to show that the police in Charleroi were corrupt and were involved in car theft rings.
"They wanted to nail judicial police on the car theft ring. There were fears that if Dutroux went down he would take other powerful people with him."
MAKING A KILLER
According to Dutroux, his upbringing was difficult. He described his father as "agitated and unstable," and his mother as "calculating and devious".
The couple, both teachers, moved to what was then the Belgian Congo, later the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with their young son, before finally settling in Charleroi, a gritty industrial city in the south of Belgium.
Once the centre of the country's coal and steel industries, after the 1950s, the city's economy collapsed and crime flourished.
By the 1970s, when Dutroux was a teenager, Charleroi was known for organised crime and corruption.
In 1971, his parents divorced and his mother started a relationship with one of her students who was only about two years older than Dutroux.
Dutroux was known as a difficult child. Teachers described him as undisciplined and intolerable.
He was kicked out of school for selling pornographic images to students.
In 1989, he was convicted of the rape and abduction of five young girls but was released on parole after just three years' imprisonment.
While inside, according to Matt, Dutroux told a cellmate that he wanted to build a secret basement in his home, which the fellow inmate believed was to hide kidnapped children.
His own mother wrote to the parole board begging for him to not be freed, but it was all in vain.
TAKEN MINUTES FROM HOME
On June 24, 1995, two eight-year-old classmates Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo disappeared after going for a walk close to their home in Grace-Hollogne, 50 miles southeast of the Belgian capital Brussels.
They had left Melissa's home to walk down to an overpass bridge less than 500 metres away.
At the time, Melissa's mum Carine told reporters: "I got on my bike and decided to meet them, so we could finish the walk together.
"I rode down to the bridge and back and didn't see them, and then took the same route back and forth three times and I still didn't see them."
At around six, Julie's mother arrived and the two carried out a more extensive search by car before, 45 minutes later and worried, they called the police.
It seemed as if the girls had vanished without a trace, but police had a couple of leads to go on.
On the evening of the disappearance, a local woman had spotted two small girls who matched Julie and Melissa's descriptions getting into a dark Peugeot 205 on an access road close to the bridge.
A separate red Ford Fiesta was seen parked by the side of the motorway under the bridge.
Another woman who lived in the nearby town of Liege, just six miles away, said that the same day, her six-year-old daughter and a friend, eight, had almost been kidnapped by a man in a red Ford Fiesta.
A man, around five foot eight and wearing dark trousers with a blue and green striped shirt was trying to tempt the girls into his car with sweets.
He had one hand on the steering wheel while the other held a moist handkerchief that gave off a strange smell.
When the woman came out she saw her daughter's friend sitting in the car's passenger seat.
She tore her out of the car and ushered the girls back into the house before calling the police.
Belgium was a paradise for perverts in those days
Douglas DeKoenig
Matt spoke to leading Belgian criminologist Carine Hutsebaut, who tried to help the police at the time of Julie and Melissa's disappearance.
Some two weeks after the girls went missing, she found herself at Melissa's house discussing the case with the police.
She was left frustrated by the sluggishness of the police and flabbergasted at their failure to carry out even the most basic investigation.
"The police were hostile," she told Matt. "They also hadn't preserved DNA from Melissa's room, two weeks on."
Carine's attempts to get the police to take the case more seriously were met with little response.
"I told them to take hair from Melissa's hairbrush or clothing, and look for someone who had been in prison for kidnapping and torture," she said.
"Police told me, 'listen, lady, this isn't the United States'."
Exasperated, Melissa's own father threw police out of the house.
SNATCHED FROM SHOW
On the night of August 23, 1995, two months after Julie and Melissa went missing, two teenage girls vanished after going on a night out to a hypnotist's show in Blankenberge on the Belgian coast, close to the city of Bruges.
An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19, were staying with some fellow teens in their theatre group in Westende, less than 20 miles away down the coast, when they went to see a hypnotist's show.
On the night they vanished, both girls were brought up on stage by the hypnotist for a group hypnosis show, and both seemed disorientated afterwards.
They were filmed boarding the last tram home at 12.40am and then spotted in Ostende at 1.20am, but they never made it home.
An's father Paul told Matt for 'Le Monstre' podcast: "I remember dropping her off at the train station with her bike and huge backpack.
"A few days later, we got a call from a friend saying they had never returned home that night or the next day.
"The friends had reported them missing to police in Westende, but they hadn't done anything."
An's parents drove to Westende that night, where they found her cherished stuffed Snoopy toy on her bed.
"That was when it really hit," he said. "Something terrible must have happened to An."
He said it was "very hard" to look at the last CCTV images of her leaving the hypnotist's show.
An looked "vacant" and was holding her hand strangely, walking in the opposite direction of the tram.
Paul discovered that during the show the girls had eaten lemons after being convinced they were peaches.
In the final images from the show, she can be seen rubbing her face and yelling "stop".
The partner of Eefje's father Jean Lambrecks agreed to speak to Matt for the podcast.
She revealed how, a few days before An and Eefje disappeared, they went to a bar in nearby Nieuwport, going for further drinks with the bar owner.
He took them back to their holiday home, even giving them some liquor.
The partner said Effje saw the man again on Monday night, this time close to their bungalow in his jeep.
He tried to get the girls drunk again.
The girls were later seen in front of the Hotel Brazil, a seedy bar known for sex trafficking, prostitution and guns.
The licence plate in Liege belonged to a friend of the bar owner.
Belgian journalist Douglas DeKoenig, who covered the case for De Morgen newspaper, claimed police were "indifferent" to the disappearance or deaths of young girls at the time.
"Every police station had a child abduction section, and the most stupid officers were put there," he said.
"Belgium was a paradise for perverts in those days."
The death penalty was abolished in Belgium in 1996, although the majority of Belgians polled at the time of the trial wanted Dutroux put to death for his crimes.
In June 2004, after a trial that tore Belgium apart, Dutroux was handed a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
His ex-wife Michelle Martin was also jailed for 30 years for complicity in the starvation deaths of Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune and abducting others.
To listen to the thrilling new true crime podcast, go to Le Monstre's website.
