Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (20 page)

Normally conspiracy theories come from the outside. Sceptical members of the public speculate about the truth behind something they have seen on the news or read about in the newspapers. Occasionally, however, such theories are actively put about by participants in the actual events. There are two possible explanations for such theories. One is that the participants are telling the truth – they know they are just scapegoats that are caught up in a wider conspiracy. The other possibility is that people who are caught red-handed while committing terrible acts will point to a larger conspiracy in the hope that it will get them off the hook.

Mostly it is quite easy to tell the difference, but in the case of the Belgian paedophile and serial murderer Marc Dutroux the uncertainty still lingers on. Did Dutroux murder four little girls purely for his own perverted pleasure, or was he – as he stated in court – merely the instrument of a paedophile conspiracy that reached all the way to the very top of Belgian society.

Let us start by examining the facts of the matter. Marc Dutroux was born in Brussels, Belgium's capital city, on 6 November 1956. He was the eldest of six children born to Victor and Jeanine Dutroux. Both parents were teachers and Dutroux claimed that they frequently beat him. However Dutroux's statements on this or any other matter have to be regarded with extreme caution because he was an inveterate liar. What we do know is that the couple split up in 1971, when Dutroux was fifteen. Soon afterwards he left home, drifted into petty crime and, according to some press accounts, became a homosexual prostitute.

However, by the time he was twenty he had found a trade as an electrician, and had married his first wife and had two children with her before she divorced him on the grounds of infidelity and violence. One of the women with whom he had extra-marital affairs was Michele Martin who later became his second wife. She also evidently shared his darker sexual predilections.

In 1989 the pair were convicted of child abuse, on the specific charge of jointly abducting five girls for Dutroux to rape. For his part Dutroux was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. However, he was released for good behaviour after serving only three years.

T
HE DUNGEON
Before going to prison, Dutroux had also become involved in a range of criminal enterprises from mugging to drug dealing. On his release from prison he made no effort to find legal work. Instead, the first thing he did was to build a dungeon underneath a house in the town of Charleroi, one of several houses he had bought with his criminal gains. The dungeon was not only going to be used for the abuse of children but also to film that abuse and sell the videos to a network of paedophiles.

As in so many serial killer cases, it is quite possible that Dutroux is guilty of more crimes than we are aware of. It also seems unlikely that his dungeon was unused for three years. However the first definite atrocity we know of began on 24 June 1995 when two 8-year-old girls, Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, were abducted from near their homes in Liège, Belgium. They were taken to Dutroux's dungeon where they were kept as sexual playthings, being almost certainly abused by the members of a paedophile ring.

Two months later the girls were still in the dungeon when Dutroux and an accomplice Bernard Weinstein abducted two teenage girls, An Marchal, aged nineteen, and Eefje Lambreks, aged seventeen, from the seaside town of Ostend. They were taken to Weinstein's house to be raped by Dutroux and Weinstein. At some point both girls were killed and then, for unknown reasons, Dutroux also killed Weinstein. He buried all three under a shed in the garden.

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EEDING THE DOGS, NOT THE CHILDREN
Meanwhile the two other girls were still alive in the Charleroi dungeon. The police received a tip-off that Dutroux had captured the girls but during a search of the house they failed to notice the dungeon – even though they had been specifically told of its existence. When in December 1995, Dutroux was sentenced to four months in prison for car theft, he told Michele Martin to feed the two girls. Almost unbelievably she failed to do this. Even though she visited the house regularly to feed Dutroux's dogs she claimed to have been too scared to go down into the cellar and feed the girls. As a result they starved to death.

When Dutroux came out of prison he found the dead bodies, put them in a freezer for a while and then buried them in the garden of another of his houses, in Sars-le-Buissiere. On 28 May he started to restock the dungeon. He kidnapped Sabine Dardenne, aged fourteen, and took her to the dungeon. He told her that he was rescuing her from a paedophile gang who were responsible for kidnapping her and were awaiting a ransom from her family. Nevertheless his "protection" didn't stop him from raping her some twenty times, as she recorded in her diary. After seventy-two days in the dungeon, she was joined by Dutroux's latest victim Laetitia Delhez, aged twelve, on 9 August.

This time, however, a witness had noticed a suspicious car close to where Delhez was abducted. The car belonged to Dutroux and on 13 August the police arrested Dutroux and Martin at the house in Sars-le-Buissiere. Two days later they raided the Charleroi house and this time they found the dungeon and were able to bring out Dardenne and Delhez alive. Over the next few weeks Dutroux began to confess, always insisting that he was merely a pawn in a much wider conspiracy, and he led the police to the bodies of his five victims as the nation looked on in horror.

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ORRUPTION IN HIGH PLACES
That horror turned to anger as the prosecution of the case seemed to drag on endlessly, fuelling speculation that it was being deliberately sabotaged by paedophiles in high-ranking jobs. The lead prosecutor was then removed from his job on a flimsy pretext. The Belgian public began to suspect that Dutroux's talk of a conspiracy was not merely an attempt to deflect attention from his own guilt. They mounted a huge demonstration against the corruption of the authorities.

Two years later Dutroux briefly escaped custody, further fuelling the public's anger and forcing the resignation of two government ministers. It was another six years, March 2004, before the case at last came to trial. Dutroux continued to insist that he was just a pawn in a huge conspiracy, but the brave testimony of the surviving victims, particularly the enormously impressive Sabine Dardenne, was devastating. She told the court that Dutroux had told her also that there was a wider conspiracy. He even presented himself as her protector. But then she revealed that she had never seen any of those alleged paedophiles. Instead it was Dutroux, and Dutroux alone, who had raped her repeatedly.

The defence tried to stick to its conspiracy theory. They pointed out that there was DNA from unknown persons in the dungeon. Dutroux tried to portray Nihoul, a con-man and a regular visitor to Belgium's sex clubs, as the lynch-pin of the conspiracy. However, while there was evidence that suggested that rich and powerful men were connected to Nihoul and would attend the same orgies (involving consenting adults), there was no proof that they were involved in Dutroux's much more sinister world.

The judge and jury clearly considered Dardenne's evidence to be the more compelling account. Dutroux was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Michele Martin was sentenced to thirty years for her unspeakable cruelty in abetting Dutroux and letting the two little girls starve to death. Jean-Michel Nihoul, meanwhile was acquitted of the kidnapping charges that linked him to Dutroux but was sentenced to ten years for smuggling drugs and people.

So were the jury right to reject the notion of a wider conspiracy? It seems likely. The suggestions of a cover-up are probably more to do with a mixture of extraordinary police incompetence and some high level interference relating to involvement in Nihoul's orgies rather than Dutroux's murders. As for the suggestion that there was Satanic abuse, this, like almost all cases of alleged Satanic abuse, seems to be the product of over-active imaginations.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which was run between 1932 and 1972, was one of the most shocking scientific studies ever to take place. In it, 399 black men, most of whom were poor Alabaman sharecroppers, took part in a supposed treatment for "bad blood" which would cure them of illness. They were never told that their illness was syphilis and that – except at the beginning of the study – they were receiving no treatment at all. What was in fact happening was that doctors were studying the ravages of the untreated disease and waiting for them to die so that they could perform autopsies on the corpses. The supposed aim of the experiment was to find out more about the disease and to determine whether it affected black people differently to whites. However, at the end of the study, which continued over several decades, it was suggested that no important knowledge had been yielded. Meanwhile, many men had met their deaths, after terrible illnesses whose symptoms included paralysis, blindness, heart disease, tumours and insanity. Not only this, many of the men's wives had become infected and their children born with congenital syphilis.

"S
PECIAL FREE TREATMENT
"
The study was started at the Tuskegee Institute, under the auspices of the United States Public Health Service. Its initial aim was to study a group of black men with untreated syphilis for a period of months and then treat the disease. However, several of the doctors wanted to continue the programme for a longer period and fearing that the men would not want to co-operate if they knew the truth – that they were being studied to see how long it took them to die of the disease – the doctors began to misrepresent what was going on. They began to write to their "patients" advertising "special free treatment", when all they were doing was performing diagnostic tests. These included painful and dangerous lumbar punctures, from which the patients derived absolutely no medical benefits at all.

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HAMEFUL ETHICS
Penicillin became the standard treatment for syphilis in 1947 and there were government initiatives to treat the population in as rapid a manner as possible. Nationwide campaigns invited citizens to attend treatment centres and men who were called up into the army were screened for the disease and given treatment. The subjects of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, however, were excluded from the programme but they accepted the story that they were being treated already. In this way, syphilitic men were prevented from gaining treatment that would have saved their lives.

It was not until 1966 that the story broke in the national press. Peter Buxtun, who worked for the Public Health Service in San Francisco as a venereal disease investigator, became aware of the experiment and wrote to his superiors to inform them of what was going on. However, he was told that the experiment needed to go ahead and that it would not be curtailed until all the subjects had died and the autopsies had been performed. Frustrated by this brush-off, Buxtun went to the newspapers and in 1972 several national newspapers ran stories on the experiment. The experiment was quickly brought to a halt as a result of the adverse publicity and the surviving subjects and their families compensated and promised free medical treatment in the future.

Two years later, legislation was put into effect to regulate medical experiments involving human beings. However, it was not until 1997 that a public apology was made by the President of the United States. In the presence of the five remaining survivors of the study (only eight were left in total) President Clinton formally apologized for the behaviour of the United States government and called it "shameful".