The place is associated with unspeakable crimes that shocked an entire country.
• Also read: 25 years after the Dutroux affair, the “House of Horrors” was destroyed
On Tuesday, a memorial garden honoring the victims of Marc Dutroux was inaugurated in Charleroi, Belgium, on the site of the house where he kidnapped several little girls and teenagers.
On the corner of the narrow street where the “House of Horrors” stood, in the suburb of Marcinelle, a hanging garden was created, rising two meters above the sidewalk and framed by two high gables of immaculate white houses.
The monument, entitled “Between Earth and Sky,” has reproduced on one of these enameled brick walls a fresco depicting a child holding a kite that he sees whirling in the sky.
Photo AFP
This drawing was visible for years on a wooden plaque attached to Dutroux’s abandoned house, which had become a well-known place of meditation throughout Belgium. The families wanted it to be preserved, the community explained.
The inauguration, punctuated by a minute’s silence, took place in the presence of the fathers of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo. These two 8-year-old girls were raped and kidnapped in this house in 1995-96 before their bodies were found buried in the garden of another of the criminal’s properties.
“Thank you for doing a great job preserving the memory of the little ones,” welcomed Jean-Denis Lejeune, emphasizing “how important it is to leave a trace” of the torment that the captive girls had to endure there.
Photo AFP
“We have to remember that it existed and that it still exists,” this father added about child crime.
Paul Magnette, mayor of Charleroi, traced the history of an “extremely complicated” architectural project.
Dutroux’s modest red brick house was purchased by the city through judicial expropriation in the 2000s, before the idea of a monument with “scale and volume” visible from major neighboring streets emerged.
The project also required the destruction of the neighboring house.
“For eternity”
“There is not a Belgian who has not heard about this disappearance. “It is a drama of such universal scope that it must be recorded for eternity,” explained Paul Magnette.
In June 1995, Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were kidnapped in the Liège region (east).
They were found dead in Sars-la-Buissière (south) in August 1996, in the garden of a property that was also destroyed the previous summer.
The investigation revealed that the two girls had been held and raped in the basement of Marcinelle’s home for many months before being deprived of all care and food until they lost their lives.
The place broke into all Belgian homes when, on August 15, 1996, it was seen on television how the criminal took the police there to take two more kidnapped teenage girls, Laetitia Delhez and Sabine Dardenne, from their hiding place.
Marc Dutroux, now 66, sentenced to life in prison in 2004, was found guilty of kidnapping, kidnapping and raping six girls and young women in 1995-96. Sabine and Laetitia, who were found two days after his arrest, are the only two of his victims to survive.
Gino Russo, Mélissa’s father, thanked the city on Tuesday for honoring his “explicit desire” to protect the cellars of the house, which in his eyes are emblematic of the unexplored paths and the mistakes of education twenty or five years ago be.
“It is a key in the investigative file that maintains the hypothesis that the girls remained for four months” in “a water tank set up as a hiding place, a little less than 2 by 1.30 m,” argued Mr. Russo.
This wounded father believes it is “impossible” that Mélissa and Julie lived in such a shed for “106 days” between December 1995 and March 1996.
“My outrage is unbroken, there is no appeasement,” he told AFP.