Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  Jamie Tabor QC, defending, told the court that Ford felt completely isolated in the run-up to the attack, spending a lot of time locked in his garage watching TV. He said he was terrified his wife would leave him, taking the four stepchildren and his two natural children.

  Ford told the police he felt Lesley had too much control over his life and they rowed because she objected to him drinking after work. He was also unhappy about being unable to record TV shows because the children were watching other channels.

  Lee Ford apparently ‘flipped’ after a row in the bedroom with his 36-year-old wife about access to the children and smashed her in the face with a rounders bat belonging to his youngest daughter. After that, he went to the garage to cool down. There he found a 2-ft length of rope.

  ‘The next thing I remember is she is lying on the floor dead,’ said Ford. ‘I do not know why or what went through me.’

  Next came the murders of Sarah, 16-year-old Anne-Marie, 14-year-old Steven and 13-year-old Craig. These killings were not done on a whim, or in a frenzy of anger, it appears − they were chillingly calculated.

  ‘The cause of death was given as ligature strangling,’ said Pascoe. ‘They were garrotted so precisely as to leave little or no bruising and no damage to the structure of the neck. He admitted using a rope from behind to kill each of his victims.’

  The four stepchildren were killed in the kitchen. Anne-Marie and Sarah had been dressed casually while the two brothers and Ford’s wife had been wearing nightclothes. This was because the murders took place over a 24-hour period.

  ‘Garrotting can be described as a clean and very efficient form of killing,’ Pascoe added. ‘The Crown asserts that such a killing does give an insight into the degree of detachment and planning the defendant must have used to carry out each murder. On the defendant’s account, these murders were not one after the other but over a night and subsequent morning.’

  Ford told the police, ‘There was no struggle. It was with a rope from behind and they did not know it was coming and none knew another one had gone before. What my own hands had done – what a piece of rope has done – to five people is unbelievable.’

  The other two children were spared, seemingly, because they were of his blood.

  The date of the murders was fixed by a final text message sent from Sarah’s phone on 30 August 2000. Eight days later, a friend from McDonald’s, where she worked, texted poignantly, ‘Are you still alive?’

  On 1 September, the day after the murders, Ford called the Jobcentre to cancel an appointment, saying his family were suffering from food poisoning. After hiding the bodies in the woodshed in the back garden of the bungalow, Ford told friends that his wife had left him after a big row. He borrowed a pickaxe from a friend claiming he had to remove wood from the shed where three of the bodies were later recovered.

  Ford tried to return a dog his wife had bought days earlier and told the school that the younger children attended that they would not be returning for the new academic year, saying his wife would not cause a problem. He also tried to revive a relationship with an old flame, claiming ‘his wife would not be coming back’.

  During September, Ford returned Craig’s and Steven’s school books and, on 28 September, he made an attempt to cash Sarah’s last pay cheque from McDonald’s.

  After the police first called on 30 September, Ford donned a face mask, wrapped the rotting bodies of Sarah and Anne-Marie with polythene, put them into the boot of his car and drove them out to the fields, where he buried them.

  Two days later, he packed the two surviving children off to their grandparents in Telford, Shropshire, intending to return and re-bury the other three bodies. But while he was away, his brother-in-law raised the alarm. When he got back to Helston, he was arrested and taken to Camborne Police Station for questioning, and had no further opportunity to move the bodies of his wife and the two boys. They remained in the woodshed where they were found.

  13

  MULTI-FACETED MONSTER

  Belgian child molester Marc Dutroux was finally incarcerated after two young girls he had repeatedly raped were released from his cellar in Marcinelle, Belgium, in 1996. It was only then that the bodies of two eight-year-old girls were found buried in the garden of another house belonging to Dutroux. They had starved to death in the cellar where he had sexually abused them.

  The two eight-year-olds were Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo. They had been kidnapped together from Grâce-Hollogne in Belgium on 24 June 1995. Now only did Dutroux sexually abuse the two defenceless children, he produced pornographic videos of their ordeal as well.

  While Dutroux admitted raping the two girls, he refused to admit responsibility for their deaths; they had died while he was in jail for four months for stealing a car. He claimed that, before he went to prison on 6 December 1995, he had left instructions with his accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, to feed them. He also said that Weinstein had kidnapped the two girls, admittedly on Dutroux’s instructions. Dutroux also said that he was so annoyed at Weinstein’s failure to feed the two girls, he had given him barbiturates and buried him alive alongside Julie and Melissa in the garden at Sars-la-Buissière. In due course, his body was found.

  Another of Dutroux’s accomplices, Michel Lelièvre, admitted kidnapping 17-year-old An Marchal and 19-year-old Eefje Lambreks on 22 August 1995 when the two girls were on a camping trip to the Belgian port of Ostend. Their bodies were found under a garden shed next to another house owned by Dutroux, which had then been occupied by Bernard Weinstein.

  At one time, there had been four girls at the house in Marcinelle – Julie and Melissa in the dungeon, with An and Eefje chained up upstairs. Eefje had made several escape attempts. In one, she managed to get out on to the roof, but Dutroux had caught her. Eventually, he found the two older girls so troublesome he drugged them and buried them alive.

  Four girls and Weinstein were already dead when 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne was kidnapped on her way to school in Tournai on 28 May 1996. She was cycling past the high wall of the local football stadium when a rusty camper van pulled up beside her. The side door slid open. A man leaned out, plucked her from her bike and threw her in the back. It was all over in a split second.

  Sabine tried to fight her abductor off, but was small for her age and he was a fully grown man. He shoved some pills in her mouth and trussed her up in a blanket. He told her to shut up and nothing would happen to her. After a while, the van stopped and her captors put her in a trunk. It was so small they had to bend her double.

  After a couple of minutes, the trunk was opened again and she found herself in a room with ‘the man with the moustache’. He took her upstairs, told her to undress and get into one of the bunk beds. Once she was naked, he put a chain around her neck. It was just long enough to allow her to walk to a chamber pot. He left her there overnight.

  The following day, he returned and said that her parents had been asked for a ransom of 3 million francs (£60,000) for her return. If they could not raise the money, the kidnappers intended to kill her. In the meantime, he took Polaroid pictures of her naked in her chains. He then took her into another bedroom where there was a double bed and sexually abused her. She could not stop crying, which annoyed him. He seemed to think that she should have enjoyed it. She said later that he did not beat her or rape her then, but the things he did to her were so disgusting that she did not want to think about it.

  She complained about being kept naked all the time. Eventually, he gave her back her underwear; then, some time later, he returned her jeans, which she could wear when she went downstairs to eat. But she was regularly taken upstairs for more photo sessions and sexual abuse.

  Then she was told that her parents had refused to pay the ransom. As a result, the boss of the supposed kidnap gang had ordered that she be killed. But her captor pretended to be her saviour and said he would hide her in the tiny, airless cellar which was 3-ft wide and 9-ft long. She was put down there in a cage with a stinking mattress. Occas
ionally, her jailor would go away for days on end, leaving her down there. Otherwise, there would be more nude photographs and ‘other things’. Eventually, he raped her and forced her to sleep with him in chains.

  The rape had left her haemorrhaging badly and in terrible pain. She was afraid that she was going to die from loss of blood alone in her underground prison, and began to wish that he would finish her off with a bullet in the head.

  Her captor, Marc Dutroux, was already a convicted paedophile. Born in Ixelles, Belgium, in 1956, Dutroux was the oldest of five children. His parents, both teachers, emigrated to the Belgian Congo, but returned to Belgium when Dutroux was four. When they separated in 1971, Dutroux stayed with his mother. He married at the age of nineteen and fathered two children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1983. By then, he was having an affair with Michelle Martin. In 1986, Dutroux and Martin were arrested for the abduction and rape of five young girls. Dutroux was sentenced to 13 years; Martin got five. They married while in prison in 1989 and would eventually have three children together after they were both released, after just three years, for good behaviour.

  Dutroux was an electrician by trade, but in the mid-1990s he was unemployed and living on welfare in the city of Charleroi, known at the time for its high unemployment. He supplemented his income with muggings, drug dealing and stealing cars that were smuggled into Eastern Europe and sold in Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. But his most lucrative sideline was in the sex trade; he produced and dealt in pornography, and sold young girls into prostitution across Europe. By 1996, he owned seven houses in Belgium. Most of them stood vacant and were the perfect hiding places for the girls he had kidnapped, who were then used in pornographic videos or sold on as prostitutes.

  The police knew of his activities. In 1993, an informant reported that Dutroux had offered him over 100,000 Belgian francs (£2,000) to kidnap young girls. In 1995, the same man told the police that Dutroux was building a dungeon in which to keep girls whom he would later sell into prostitution. That year, Dutroux’s own mother wrote to prosecutors telling them that her son had been keeping young girls in one of his empty houses. But no one did anything about it.

  As her captivity dragged on, Sabine became consumed with despair. There was no one to talk to. It was summertime and she wanted to go out in the sunshine. Dutroux shoved two chairs together and told her she should ‘sunbathe’ – naked, of course – right there in the front room.

  She kept saying that she wanted to see her friends. This had unintended and tragic consequences. One day, he announced that he had brought her a friend. Sabine could hardly believe her ears.

  First, she had to endure another ‘sunbathing’ session. Then she was taken upstairs where she found another girl naked and chained to the bunk, as she had been when she first arrived. The new girl asked Sabine how long she had been there; Sabine said it was 77 days.

  The new girl was 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez. Dutroux tried to get her to walk around naked, but she kept putting her clothes back on and he gave up. Soon she joined Sabine down in the cellar. She brought important news; she had seen Sabine’s picture on posters that had been pasted up all over the country. Sabine had not been forgotten as she had feared.

  Laetitia had been snatched in the town of Bertrix on the French border. She had been walking home from the swimming pool when an old van pulled up alongside her. Dutroux had grabbed her and bundled her though the side door in the same way Sabine had been taken. From Laetitia’s description, it seemed that the driver was the same man Sabine had seen.

  Laetitia was two years older than Sabine. She had already had her first period, so Dutroux forced her to take contraceptive pills. After the first time Laetitia had been raped and abused, Dutroux suddenly stopped coming to get her. A couple of days passed and they figured that he must have gone away again.

  In fact, on 13 August 1996, Dutroux, his wife and the driver Michel Lelièvre had been arrested. There had been a witness to the abduction of Laetitia Delhez who noted down part of the licence-plate number of the van. It matched one registered to Dutroux. A search was made of the house by an officer of the child protection squad, but he found nothing. The door to the cellar had been skilfully concealed.

  Two days later, Laetitia and Sabine heard bricks being chipped from the walls. The two girls were terrified. Then they heard Dutroux’s voice saying, ‘It’s me.’ But there were other men with him. Fearing the worst, Sabine said that she was not coming out. Laetitia then recognised one of the men who had come into the cellar − he was a policeman from Bertrix. Sabine was still hesitant; she turned to Dutroux and asked if she could leave. He said she could. As they left, both Sabine and Laetitia gave Dutroux a kiss goodbye on the cheek.

  Sabine then flung herself on to the nearest policemen and did not want to let him go. Laetitia did the same with the policeman from Bertrix. Then, after 80 days in the dank cellar, Sabine was taken out into the sunshine and fresh air. It was only at the police station that Sabine discovered that the investigators had give up any hope of finding her alive long ago. It was Laetitia the police had been looking for when they visited Dutroux’s house.

  When Dutroux’s various houses were searched, the police found over 300 pornographic videos featuring children; 6,000 hair samples taken from the dungeon were analysed to see if Dutroux had kept other victims there. It was only after that that the four bodies were found in the back garden.

  During the investigation, businessman Jean-Michel Nihoul was arrested. He had organised an orgy at a Belgian château attended by police officers, several government officials, and a former European commissioner. Seven other people were arrested in connection with the paedophile ring, and nine police officers in Charleroi were detained for questioning over possible negligence in the investigation.

  There was a massive outcry about the whole affair in Belgium. Demands were made to tighten parole conditions for convicted paedophiles; there was also a call for the reinstatement of the death penalty which had been ended in Belgium just months before Sabine and Laetitia were found.

  The outrage boiled over when Jean-Marc Connerotte, the investigating judge in the case, was dismissed for having attended a fund-raising dinner to help the search for missing children. The Belgian Supreme Court decided that this might taint his objectivity in the Dutroux case. As a result, 300,000 people took to the streets of Brussels, dressed in white as a symbol of innocence. This was the largest demonstration in Belgium since the Second World War. There was talk that the government was involved a cover-up and strikes broke out across the country in protest. The prime minister promised to speed up reforms to the judicial system and even the king of Belgium had to speak out on the Dutroux case.

  A parliamentary committee investigating the matter published a report saying that failures in the investigation of the paedophile ring meant that the four girls who were dead could have been saved. A complete reorganisation of the Belgian police force was called for.

  Meanwhile, the police had made another error. Dutroux was allowed to travel to Neufchâteau to consult files he would use in his forthcoming trial. While there, he knocked out one of his police guards, and struck another so that he fell to the ground and took his gun; then he stole a car and made a break for it with half of the local gendarmerie on his tail. Sabine heard helicopters circling above her school. Another pupil asked her if she was frightened when they heard that Dutroux had escaped. But Sabine was sanguine; she figured that Dutroux would have to be exceptionally stupid to come within a million miles of her. As it was, police officers were sent to patrol the school corridors. Bodyguards were sent to her home but, by the time she returned there after school, Dutroux had already been captured. Taking refuge in a wood, he had given himself up to a forest warden. However, his escape forced the resignation of the state police chief, the minister of justice and the minister of the interior.

  After his escape attempt, Dutroux went on trial for assault and theft, and was sentenced to five years. But his trial in connecti
on with Sabine and the other girls was delayed when a magazine in Luxembourg printed the names of 50 alleged paedophiles said to have come from the files of the Dutroux investigation.

  Dutroux managed to stall things further by claiming that the Belgian state was violating his human rights. He went to court to demand that he be released from solitary confinement, undergo fewer body searches and be allowed to sleep uninterrupted. This outraged the Belgian people again, considering what he had put his victims through. The state argued that Dutroux was being given special treatment for his own protection.

  Then an unauthorised interview was released by a Belgian TV channel. In it, Dutroux was heard to admit incarcerating Julie, Melissa, An and Eefje, effectively admitting his guilt. The authenticity and admissibility of this evidence then had to be examined. These issues meant that his trial for the substantive charges of murder and kidnap was postponed repeatedly. Indeed, it was over seven years before the case came to court.

  The trial eventually began on 1 March 2004. There were four defendants – Dutroux, his now ex-wife Martin, Lelièvre and Nihoul. By this time, Dutroux was maintaining that he was merely a pawn in the paedophile ring masterminded by Nihoul. Dutroux claimed the girls he kidnapped were to be sold on to Nihoul who then supplied the paedophiles. To muddy the water further, Dutroux claimed that two police officers helped in the kidnapping of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks.

  The investigating judge Jacques Langlois then alleged that it was Michelle Martin who had left Julie and Melissa to starve, not Weinstein. She had been afraid to go down into the cellar to feed them in case they attacked her, although she claimed she had no idea how or why they had died.

  Jean-Marc Connerotte then testified that Dutroux had constructed the dungeon and its ventilation system so well that it would have been difficult to detect the girls’ presence even with sniffer dogs. He also testified that his investigation had been hampered by people in government, and that contracts had been taken out against investigating magistrates. He needed armed guards and bulletproof vehicles to protect him from powerful individuals who did not want the truth to come out. And he blamed incompetence of the police in Charleroi for the deaths of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo.