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

by Cawthorne Nigel

  The failure of the Belgian authorities was demonstrated again when a key to Dutroux’s handcuffs was found in his cell, having been smuggled in, apparently, in a bag of salt. Some of the staff involved in the prison were then accused to trying to organise his escape.

  The final showdown came on 19 April 2004, when Sabine Dardenne, now aged 20, took the stand. She told of the ordeal to which she had been subjected, both physically and mentally, for 80 days and rejected out of hand the apology he had given in court. When she met his stare, he was forced to lower his eyes.

  On the second day of her testimony, Dutroux accused her of asking him to kidnap another victim so that she could have a friend. He also claimed that he had protected her from the paedophile ring.

  ‘So, if I understand you, I should be thankful?’ she countered.

  Laetitia Delhez also testified, and then the two of them accompanied the court on a visit to the house and the dungeon where they had been held.

  Back in the courtroom, Dutroux admitted the kidnapping and rape charges, expressing his ‘sincere regret’. But he denied murdering the girls found buried in the garden, blaming Martin, Lelièvre and Nihoul.

  At the end of the three-month trial, the task for the jury was not an easy one. The eight women and four men were sent to a fortified army barracks in Arlon, where the judge asked them to evaluate 243 questions. They had to review around 400,000 pages of evidence, including the testimony of over 500 witnesses. It took them three days to return with a verdict.

  Dutroux was found guilty of kidnapping and raping all six girls, and murdering An Marchel, Eefje Lambrecks and Bernard Weinstein; Lelièvre was found guilty of kidnapping, but acquitted of murder; Martin was convict of kidnapping and rape. The jury could not agree a verdict in Nihoul’s case and were sent back to re-evaluate the 243 questions. The evidence showed that he was involved in supplying prostitutes, but the court accepted that he had had nothing to do with paedophilia. He was eventually acquitted of involvement in the abductions of the girls, but was convicted of human trafficking and drugs charges.

  On 22 June 2004, Dutroux was sentenced to life and put at ‘the government’s disposition’. That meant, if he should be, by some oversight, paroled again in the future, the government could return him to prison. Lelièvre got 25 years; Martin 30; and Nihoul 5. But one question remained unanswered: Was there really a vast network of paedophiles at work in Belgium as Dutroux claimed?

  Sabine Dardenne has said that she has never completely overcome the guilt she felt over Laetitia, who she believes was abducted because she asked Dutroux for the company of a friend. But the request was the innocent plea of a 12-year-old. Laetitia does not blame her. Indeed, if Laetitia had not been kidnapped, Sabine would probably not have survived her ordeal and Dutroux would have been free to abduct and abuse other girls, and bury them in the back garden.

  14

  THE BLACK WIDOW

  Jacqueline Moore felt that she had no regrets for having killed her husband and disposing of his body in the back garden of the farmhouse in the mountains above Cartagena on the Costa Blanca where they had moved four years earlier.

  Ray Moore – a 42-year-old former steeplejack – came home drunk one night ‘and kicked the hell out of me,’ the 44-year-old former ambulance driver and three-times married mum admitted to a reporter, continuing, ‘I was still in my nightie and he had been out on a four-day bender drinking whisky.’

  When she tried to push him back through the doorway, she went on, he smashed both of her hands with a shovel. ‘It was fight to the death,’ she said.

  She called George Ross, one of her children from an earlier marriage who lived in a caravan next to the farmhouse, because he did not get on with his hard-drinking stepfather. When Ray came at her again, Jacqueline Moore got him in a headlock, then kicked his legs from under him. Once he was on the floor, she got a pillow, put it over his face and sat on it.

  Ross also admitted kicking his stepfather savagely, but said it was his mother’s decision to finish him off. Once he was dead, they dragged him outside and hid the body in the back garden under a tarpaulin and some rocks. She said she did not tell the police because she was afraid of getting two years’ imprisonment for manslaughter.

  Ross was waiting for the neighbours to go away so he could use their mini-digger to dig a deeper hole in the garden for the body. However, the family dog, an English pointer called Bandit, had other ideas and brought a leg into the house. ‘It was so funny,’ Jacqueline Moore said, ‘because the dog had dug it up and it was still wearing a sock.’

  Clearly, a more permanent solution had to be found. Moore and Ross chopped up the body and burnt it, bit by bit, in the oil drum they used as a barbecue. The shin bone the dog had brought in also went on the fire.

  Back in England, Ray Moore’s parents became suspicious when he stopped phoning, so they went to the police. The British police called Interpol, and the Spanish police then visited the farmhouse to ask Moore where her husband was. She told them that they had had a fight, she had broken his nose and he had left with his things in a carrier bag. She had not seen him since.

  By then Jacqueline Moore searched for a new partner on the Internet, claiming she was a wealthy English widow. When a man showed interest and flew out to Spain to see her, she texted love notes to him, signing them ‘The Black Widow’. It was also a tag she used on chat lines.

  Besotted with her new suitor, she told him what she had done and offered to show him where the ashes had been scattered. He was horrified and, fearing that Moore might finish him off next, tipped off the Sunday People. ‘She told me she never wanted me to leave and warned matter-of-factly that she had killed once and got away with it and she could always do it again,’ he told the newspaper. ‘Whenever she wanted me to contact her on the chat line, she told me to use the title “Black Widow” as a code word because she liked to be referred to as that. In view of what she did, that just shows how sick she is in her mind. She seems very proud of the fact that she is a killer and thought it would be an amusing nickname to use. Everyone I met near where she lives seemed to be afraid of her because she has a temper, drinks a lot and is violent. Even her own son George is terrified of upsetting her.’

  The newspaper sent a reporter and Moore admitted everything. She also confessed to Simone Morris, a 26-year-old care assistant from Westcliff who had gone out to stay with Moore in the farmhouse. ‘One day over breakfast, she looked at me across the table and said, “I’ve got something to tell you,”’ said Simone. ‘She said she murdered her husband and buried him. She said she had chopped him up, burnt him on the barbecue and buried him in the garden. I didn’t believe her at first, but she kept saying it and I started to get really scared.’

  When Simone returned to England, detectives were waiting to interview her.

  Five years after the crime, Jacqueline Moore went on trial in Murcia. She then claimed that her husband had died because he had fallen and hit his head while drunk. At the time of his death, she said, he was drinking twenty-four bottles of beer, eight litres of wine and one or two bottles of whisky or vodka a day. She admitted seeing her son hitting and kicking her husband when he was on the floor, but said he was already dead by then. She also denied dismembering her husband’s body and they only put his bones on the barbecue because this was ‘his last wish’.

  In May 2007, Jacqueline was convicted of murder. George Ross was cleared of murder, but found guilty of assault. She was sentenced to 14 years, 11 months for murder, plus a further 4 months for the desecration of a body.

  15

  THE OGRE OF THE ARDENNES

  The case of Marc Dutroux was just coming to an end when Monique Olivier went to the police and told them that her husband, 62-year-old Michel Fourniret, was responsible for killing nine people in France and Belgium. She said she had come forward after seeing Dutroux’s wife get 30 years for covering up her husband’s crimes.

  Fourniret was already in a Belgian jail for trying to abduct a 13-
year-old Congolese girl. She managed to bite her way through the ropes around her wrists and flee, having the presence of mind to make a note of the registration number of his car.

  Confronted with his wife’s allegations, Fourniret immediately admitted to six of the murders, confessing to two more later. But he continued to deny murdering their au pair, a 16-year-old unnamed Belgian girl, despite the fact that Olivier said that she came home to find her husband naked with the girl and saying that he had strangled the au pair to silence her. However, he did admit to having robbed and shot an unidentified man at a service station on a French highway, bringing the death toll back up to nine. After his confession, Fourniret and his wife took the police on a tour of their property in the Ardennes to look for bodies there.

  Although Fourniret was only a carpenter and a forest warden, they lived in an opulent 18th-century château. Previously, when he was serving time in a French jail, he befriended cellmate Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch of the quasi-political bank robbers Gang des Postiches. On his release, Fourniret persuaded Hellegouarch’s wife Farida to lead him to the gang’s stash of bullion and gold coins hidden behind the tomb of former Mayor Louis Gloriand in the cemetery of Fontenay-en-Parisis. Then he killed her and took the money to buy the château.

  Fourniret and Olivier led the police to two areas of the 32 acres of grounds that surrounded the château. There he had buried the bodies of 12-year-old Belgian schoolgirl Elisabeth Brichet and 22-year-old French student Jeanne-Marie Desramault. Elisabeth had disappeared from Namur in 1989 after playing with a friend and had long been thought to have been a victim of Marc Dutroux. Jeanne-Marie had also disappeared in 1989 and had last been seen at the railway station in Charleville-Mézières, capital of the Ardennes department. It was thought that other bodies were buried in the area.

  The body of 17-year-old Isabelle Laville had been thrown down a well nearby. She had been abducted by Fourniret and Olivier as she walked home from school in Auxerre, Burgundy, on 11 December 1987, before being raped and murdered.

  The remains of 20-year-old Fabienne Leroy, who had gone missing in Mourmelon, was found in nearby woods. She had been kidnapped and raped in Chalons-en-Champagne, eastern France, in 1988. Thirteen-year-old Natacha Danais had been kidnapped in 1990 near Nantes, western France; her body was found three days later on a nearby beach. Celine Saison was 18 when she was kidnapped in Charleville-Mézières in 2000 and raped; her body was found three months later in Belgium. And 13-year-old Mananya Thumphong was abducted in 2001 in Sedan, north-east France, and raped. Her body was found in Belgium in 2002.

  Olivier told the police that their former au pair had been buried in the garden of their previous house in Belgium but, although the garden was searched, her body was not found.

  The investigation was complicated by the fact that the Belgian authorities would not hand Fourniret over to the French until they had finished questioning him. Consequently, the French police had to go across the border into Belgium to interview the man the press were already calling the ‘Ogre of the Ardennes’. They were particularly eager to talk to him about the murder of a 20-year-old English women named Joanna Parrish, which occurred 14 years earlier.

  Her naked body had been found on 17 May 1990 in a barrel floating on the river Yonne, near the village of Monéteau, three-and-a-half miles from Auxerre. A language student at Leeds University, Joanna had taken a job as an assistant English teacher in Auxerre and was due to return to England one week later.

  The post-mortem report showed that she had been drugged, bound, beaten, raped and strangled. Her body had been dumped in the river only hours before it was found, but the scene of the crime was contaminated when the banks of the river were trampled by onlookers.

  Joanna had last been seen at 6.30pm the day before by a friend. She was saving to take a holiday with her fiancé and had arranged to meet a man who had said that he wanted English lessons for his son. The rendezvous was at 7.00pm in the town square.

  Dissatisfied with the way the investigation was being handled, Joanna’s parents handed out leaflets offering a reward for information regarding their daughter’s death. This attracted enquiries about 13 unsolved murders of women and disappearances in the area over the previous 30 years.

  Seven of the victims came from the Medical-Education Institute for young women with special needs in Auxerre. The 68-year-old school bus-driver, Emile Louis, confessed to raping and murdering the girls, aged 16–22, between 1977−79. However, he could not be charged with the murders in France because of a ten-year statute of limitations. Instead, he was charged with kidnapping that was not subject to this legal restriction.

  Louis could not have been responsible for Joanna’s death, although he might have been linked to Fourniret and Olivier via a sex ring. Fourniret, though, could certainly have been responsible for Joanna’s death.

  In January 1984, a 19-year-old woman was found roaming the streets of Auxerre in a confused state. She claimed to have been sexually abused and tortured in the cellar of a house belonging to Claude and Monique Dunand. In the cellar, the police found a naked girl suspended from a ladder by her wrists. Local mentally handicapped girls had been lured to the house where they had been held captive to be raped and tortured by important guests whom the Dunands refused to name. However, a list of names was found; then it mysteriously disappeared. Other documents concerning murder and missing persons cases also went missing from the courthouse in Auxerre. These included witness statements and other evidence from Joanna Parrish’s file.

  French policeman Christian Jambert looked into the case, but was found dead from a single gunshot wound to the head only days before an official inquiry was due to open. His death was registered as suicide. After several senior magistrates were found guilty of negligence, Jambert’s body was exhumed and it was found that he had been shot, not once, but twice in the head – making suicide impossible. Nevertheless, the Parrish investigation had run into a brick wall.

  Olivier admitted to having lured three girls to their house, knowing that Fourniret would kill them, and was extradited to France to stand trial. In prison there, she said that Fourniret had strangled a young woman and dumped her body in the river near Auxerre in 1990.

  Fourniret was sentenced to life imprisonment for seven murders; Olivier was also sentenced to life for complicity in five of the killings and must serve at least 28 years. The couple had first met when Fourniret was on remand, awaiting trial for a sex offence, when he had placed an ad in a Catholic magazine asking for a pen-pal. Olivier replied.

  When he got out, they signed a criminal pact; if he would kill her former husband, she would help entrap the virgins he craved. While he did not fulfil his side of the bargain, she went out with him in his van. When they spotted Isabelle Laville, he stopped and asked for directions, and persuaded her to get into the car. His wife’s presence had helped reassure the hapless victim. A year later, Fabienne Leroy was kidnapped in a supermarket car park. She was shot in the chest.

  Fourniret admitted to killing more than seven – strangling, shooting or stabbing the victims – but he denied raping them, and he continued to deny any involvement in the death of Joanna Parrish.

  16

  A DISHONOUR KILLING

  The body of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod was found in a suitcase buried 5ft under the garden of a house in Alexandra Road in the Handsworth district of Birmingham in 2006, three months after she went missing from her home in London. Her 52-year-old father, Mahmod Mahmod, and 50-year-old uncle Ari Mahmod, were found guilty of ordering her killing and were sentenced to life imprisonment, serving a minimum of 20 and 23 years respectively.

  Banaz was killed because she had walked out of an unhappy arranged marriage that she had been forced into as a teenager. Her husband had beaten and raped her.

  ‘It was like I was his shoe and he would wear it whenever he liked,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know if this was normal in my culture, or here. I was 17.’

  She had fallen in love with 28-yea
r-old Iranian Kurd Rahmat Sulemani. After returning to her family in Mitcham, south London, she had tried to carry on the relationship with him.

  Her parents were furious because Sulemani was not from the immediate family and was not a strict Muslim. Banaz was terrified and wrote to the police naming the men she said had been contracted to kill her. Since then, two of them had fled the country. However, 30-year-old Mohamad Hama admitted to her killing; he had been recruited by her father and uncle.

  This was no ‘honour’ killing. Banaz was brutally raped and tortured before she was killed. Hama was recorded talking to a friend in prison, telling him that he had been ‘slapping’ and ‘fucking’ Banaz and subjecting her to degrading sexual acts, with her uncle Ari supervising.

  ‘I saw her stark naked, without wearing pants or underwear,’ Hama said. Ari had told them that there was no one else there, but her sister Biza was in the house. The rape, torture and murder took more than two hours.

  ‘Her soul and her life would not leave,’ said Hama. Banaz was garrotted for five minutes, but it took another half an hour for her to die.

  ‘The wire was thick and the soul would not just leave like that,’ said Hama. ‘We could not remove it. All in all, it took five minutes. I was kicking and stamping on her neck to get the soul out.’

  Hama also expressed concern about burying the body in Birmingham. His fingerprints would be on it and he could also be identified from his DNA as he had raped her. However, Hama joked about Banaz’s hair and elbow sticking out of the suitcase when they were loading it into a car. ‘The road was crowded and the police came past,’ he said. ‘People were passing by – and we were dragging the bag. I almost ran away. Mr Ari had it and we were around by each side of him. You know what it was, sticking out, her elbow, her hair was falling out so much. That was a stupid thing, a silly thing.’