World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (34 page)

It was the marks of his teeth – experts confirmed his identity from these – on the body of a Tallahassee student killed when Bundy was on the run that finally undid Bundy. After numerous, lengthy appeals, he was electrocuted on 24 January 1989, protesting his innocence.

Ted Bundy always protested his innocence, right up to his execution.

Trail of Destruction

Every serial killer leaves a trail of destruction, not only of victims whose lives are destroyed, but also of whole networks of families, friends and loved ones. In the case of the Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux, however, the havoc he wrought had even wider repercussions. His crimes traumatized the entire nation, provoked the biggest demonstrations ever seen in the country and caused the resignations of several government ministers. For not only was Dutroux a paedophile and a murderer, but he was linked to a paedophile ring that included many people in positions of authority.

Homosexual Prostitute

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; Marc later claimed that they frequently beat him. However, Dutroux’s statements on this or any other matter must be regarded with extreme caution. What we do know is that the couple split 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.

By the time he was twenty, Dutroux had found a trade as an electrician. He 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 had extra-marital affairs was Michele Martin, who later became his second wife. She evidently shared his darker sexual predilections.

In 1989, the pair were both convicted of child abuse, jointly abducting five girls for Dutroux to rape. Dutroux was sentenced to thirteen years in prison but was released for good behaviour after serving only three years inside. This was despite Dutroux’s mother writing to the prison authorities at the time to say that, during supervised outings from prison to visit his grandmother, Dutroux had terrified the old lady by making an inventory of her possessions. The prison authorities had never replied to Madame Dutroux’s letters.

Prior to going to prison, Dutroux had become involved in various criminal enterprises ranging from mugging to drug dealing. On his release, he made no effort to find 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 to be used not only for the abuse of children but also to film that abuse; the videos would be sold to paedophiles who would pay vast sums of money for this material.

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

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

Starved To Death

Meanwhile the two children were still alive in the Charleroi dungeon. The police received a tip-off about Dutroux, and called at the house; however, during their search they failed to notice the dungeon, even though they had been specifically told of its existence. Then, in December 1995, Dutroux was sentenced to four months in prison for car theft. When he left for prison 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 to feed the girls. They starved to death.

When Dutroux came out of prison he found their dead bodies, put them in a freezer for a while, and then buried them in the garden of another of his houses, in Sars-la-Buissiere. On 28 May, he kidnapped Sabine Dardenne, aged fourteen, and took her to the dungeon. He told her that he was rescuing her from a paedophile gang that was responsible for kidnapping her and was awaiting a ransom from her family. As she recorded in her diary, he then raped her around twenty times. After seventy-two days in the dungeon, on 9 August, she was joined by Dutroux’s latest victim, Laetitia Delhez, aged twelve.

This time, however, a witness 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-la-Buissiere. Two days later, they raided the Charleroi house and found the dungeon. They brought out Dardenne and Delhez alive. Over the next few weeks, Dutroux insisted that he was merely a pawn in a much wider conspiracy. As the nation looked on in horror, he led the police to the bodies of his five victims.

That horror turned to anger as the prosecution of the case dragged on endlessly, fuelling speculation that it was being deliberately sabotaged by paedophiles in the higher echelons of Belgian society. The lead prosecutor in the case was then suddenly removed from his job. The Belgian people responded by mounting a huge demonstration, complaining at the authorities’ corruption.

Two years later, Dutroux briefly escaped custody, further angering the public. This episode forced the resignation of two government ministers. Even so, it was another six years before the case at last came to trial, in March 2004. Dutroux tried to blame his accomplices for everything, but the testimony of the surviving victims, particularly Sabine Dardenne, incriminated him utterly.

In June 2004 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 girls starve to death.

The Unabomber

Ted Kaczynski, also known as ‘The Unabomber’, was a highly intelligent, educated man who nevertheless organized a series of crude bombings that killed and maimed a number of people. He apparently carried out the crimes in the belief that he was helping to cause the downfall of civilized society and halt the progress of technology; but it also emerged that, although he had a brilliant academic mind, he was mentally unbalanced.

He was born Theodore John Kaczynski in Chicago on 22 May 1942. He grew up in Evergreen Park, a working-class area in the suburbs of Chicago. While still a baby, he had a strong allergic reaction to some medicine he was given, and had to be taken to hospital. He was kept there for several weeks, separated from his parents, who were only allowed to visit occasionally.

His mother attests that, having been a happy baby before the incident, he then became withdrawn and turned away from human contact. It is thought that this separation may have caused him mental health problems later in life.

Mathematics Genius

Despite this early setback, Ted showed very high intelligence as a young child, and was clearly very gifted. However, he entirely lacked social skills, and was disinclined to play with other children or to engage with adults. He did well academically, graduating from high school early after skipping several grades. He went on to study mathematics at Harvard, earning his degree there, and then gaining a master’s degree and a Ph.D. from Ann Arbor University, Michigan.

He astounded his professors with his ability to solve problems they could not, and in a short time reached a level in the subject that only a handful of people in the country would have been able to comprehend. Not surprisingly, he was offered a fellowship and teaching work, and spent three years as a lecturer in Michigan. He went on to publish a number of papers on mathematics in several learned journals.

Kaczynski was then offered a post at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent two years there as an assistant professor in mathematics, before abruptly resigning from the job in 1969. It was unclear why such a brilliant mathematician, who could have reached the top of his profession in a very short time, suddenly quit the academic scene.

Killer Mail Bombs

Kaczynski no longer had a source of income, other than the occasional odd jobs he did locally. His family also helped him out, lending him money. However, he was now very poor, and lived in a cabin in the countryside, isolated from the community and becoming more and more eccentric.

In the late 1970s, Kaczynski began to send bombs through the mail. His first target was a university professor who became suspicious and had the package opened by a campus police officer. It exploded, but fortunately the officer was only slightly injured. Next, Kaczynski began to target airlines, sending bombs designed to explode in airports and on aeroplanes. The bombs were home-made, and not very efficient, so initially little damage was done.

However, Kaczynski then stepped up his campaign with bombs that, while still primitive, were now lethal. In 1985, he sent one to the University of California, which resulted in a student losing four of his fingers and the sight in one eye. In the same year, Kaczynski began to target computer stores, leaving nail bombs in the parking lots outside these stores. In one case, the store owner was killed outright.

The Unabomber Manifesto

After this atrocity, Kaczynski’s activities ceased for a while. However, in 1993 his next target was a computer science professor at Yale University, David Gelernter, who survived the bomb Kaczynski mailed to him. Another academic, geneticist Charles Epstein, was not so lucky. He was maimed by one of Kaczynski’s bombs in the same year. In 1994, Kaczynski targeted an advertising executive, and the year after, the president of the California Forestry Association.

Kaczynski now began to write letters to the papers, and in some cases to his former victims, claiming responsibility for the attacks, on behalf of his ‘anarchist group’ Freedom Club (FC). He demanded that a manifesto he had written be printed in one of the US’s major newspapers and claimed that he would then end his bombing campaign. In order to try to resolve the situation, The
New York Times
printed it, which became known as ‘The Unabomber Manifesto’. A great deal of controversy surrounded this decision; in some quarters, it was felt that this was pandering to the murderer. However, the newspaper argued that printing the manifesto might help to solve the mystery of who the Unabomber was, and track the culprit down.

The manifesto was a rant, though at times an intelligent and informed one, against the evils of modern technology. It argued that human beings suffer from the ‘progress’ of technology, which harms the majority of people on the planet and causes immense environmental damage. Its author believed that the only way forward was through halting technological progress, and returning to the simple life, living close to nature. Kaczynski also criticized ‘leftists’ for allowing an advanced, complex society to develop to the detriment of humanity.

Closing In On Kaczynski

When the manifesto was published, Kaczynski’s brother David recognized it as putting forward Ted’s ideas in the writing style he knew only too well. At one time, David had admired his brother greatly, and followed his ideas. In fact, he had bought a plot of land with Ted outside Lincoln in western Montana. Ted now lived there, in a 10 x 12-foot cabin without electricity or running water. He led a reclusive life, rarely going out, as his neighbours later reported, except to buy food that he could not grow in his garden.

David had baled out from this way of life early on and decided to join the mainstream. When he realized that his brother must be responsible for the bombings, he contacted the police and told them where Ted could be found. Officers arrested Ted Kaczynski at his cabin in Montana in April 1996.

The FBI had assured David that they would not tell his brother who had turned him in, but unfortunately, his identity was later leaked. David used the reward money he received to pay his brother’s legal expenses, but also to recompense the families of his brother’s victims.