De
Morgen, 8 January 1998
THE
GIRL WHO GAVE BIRTH IN SECRET
by Annemie
Bulté and Douglas de Coninck
The body of Carine Dellaert
was found on 24 September 1985 in a septic tank
in Ghent. According to XI, the young girl had
lived secretly inside a network for a year after
her disappearance. The autopsy report and the
investigation carried out at the time confirm
XI’s story on several crucial points. The
old investigation has been reopened, but how long
it will stay open is still uncertain.
Early in the morning a
workman drove his bulldozer into the backyard of
"Le Neptune", an old café once
frequented by sailors. The café, situated along
the Ghent-Terneuzen canal, had been abandoned for
years and was to be demolished that day, 24
September 1985. The work had just begun when the
workman lost control of the vehicle. The back
wheel sank into a hole by the side of the old
toilets. When some Rhône-Poulenc workers rushed
over to help to right the bulldozer, the lid of
the tank caved in. They scrutinised the bottom
out of curiosity. "We saw something float to
the surface," one of them recalls. "It
was a knee." A few hours later, Quai Kuhlman
was swarming with nervous policemen. The remains
of an unidentified young girl had been found in
the tank. The body was in foetal position, bound
with white electric wire, the feet and hands
tied. "The body was in a very advanced state
of decomposition," says another policeman.
"We had to take the skeleton to the lab in
fragments." Not much remained of the young
girl’s clothes. A gold ankle chain and a
pearl necklace had been preserved. The jewellery
set off a signal in the mind of the Ghent deputy
public prosecutor Nicole De Rouck. She thought
immediately of Carine Dellaert.
It was a strange case. She
had disappeared on 30 August 1982. Unexpectedly.
Her older sister was ill in bed, her brother was
playing in the street, her mother was at work.
Her father, Emile Dellaert, had left home at 2
p.m. When her mother got home, Carine had left.
There was no trace of a struggle, no farewell
letters. Nothing. A week went by before Emile
Dellaert reported his daughter as missing, on 7
September. This is why he was immediately
regarded as a suspect. Hardly any searches were
made. The child protection unit of the public
prosecutor’s department followed the most
plausible hypothesis, that Carine had run away
due to conflict in the family . For there had
been conflict. Her parents would get divorced
soon after. In December 1983, the Ghent
investigating magistrate Pieters opened a
criminal investigation against Emile Dellaert. He
was arrested and spent two months in prison. In
January 1986, he was released through lack of
evidence. In 1989 he was considered free of all
suspicion. The file was closed.
XI recognises Clo, her best
friend.
At the end of 1996, some
strange things went on in the financial section
(3rd Criminal Research Section) of the
Brussels BSR. Investigators from the Neufchâteau
unit questioned witnesses until late into the
night. Occasionally the officers saw their
colleagues leave the room pale-faced.
The main cause of the
trouble was witness XI. The young woman claimed
to have been the victim of a network that raped,
tortured and killed children in the seventies and
eighties. "Many girls, like myself, never
knew anything different," she explained.
"We grew up with it. We lived in a sort of
concentration camp." XI rejected the term
‘paedophiles’. "The men who raped
us weren’t particularly attracted by
children. The only thing they were interested in
was to go beyond all limits from a sexual point
of view. And children were perfect for that. They
kept quiet and did what was asked of them."
One of the girls XI got to
know in the network was Clo. XI mentioned her
name during the first session of questioning, on
20 September 1996. Clo, she explained, was no
older than herself and also came from Ghent. She
was her best friend and comfort in this secret
world. Just like XI, Clo led a double life. She
went to school normally, and couldn’t speak
to anyone about the places she was taken to
during the weekends. XI met Clo regularly during
orgies in Ghent and sometimes in Brussels. XI
couldn’t say much more about Clo, except the
name of her school.
During the fourth session
of questioning, on 25 October, XI recounted that
the young girl had died thirteen years ago. XI
gave a detailed description of a scene she would
have preferred to forget, but that will mark her
for the rest of her days. She situated the events
between June and December 1983. Clo was very
heavily pregnant, she stated. XI met her from
time to time at a "party", but always
at a certain distance. None of the girls could
have any contact with her.
On 25 October, in statement
no. 116.018, XI said: "One day my procurer
came for me and blindfolded me to take me to a
house near Ghent. There were three other people
in the house (XI gave the names of her procurer,
T.; a lawyer from Brussels and a Flemish
burgomaster). T. left me in a room where Clo was
lying on a bed in the middle of labour. I had to
help her to give birth. She was bleeding a lot
and suffering terribly. I panicked because I was
alone with no-one to help me. The baby was only
born a few hours later. It was a boy. I cut the
umbilical cord and placed the baby on Clo’s
belly. At that moment, T. returned to the room
and took the baby, while I stayed with Clo. She
was losing a lot of blood."
XI can only guess what
happened then to Clo, because she had to leave
the house. Some men who had been in the back of
the house all evening took her to a Chinese
restaurant in Bruges. XI thinks that her friend
died in her arms but she cannot be sure that she
didn’t live a little longer and that the
horrific scene did not continue.
Thanks to research carried
out at "Clo’s" school, the BSR
investigators managed to guess who she was. After
that, BSR officers Patrick De Baets and Philippe
Hupez showed XI a series of class photos from the
year 1981-82. XI not only pointed to the photos
of Carine Dellaert, but also to another photo.
According to XI, it was V. (she gave her first
name). She added: "They killed her, too. Clo
told me that she was called V."
During questioning on 25
October, statement no. 116.018, XI said:
"This happened in a house in Ghent. Clo was
there, too […] They tortured her with knives
and scissors. Someone broke a bottle and rubbed
the fragments into her vagina. Then they cut her
in various places with razor-blades."
After this session of
questioning, they no longer knew where they were
at the 3rd Criminal Research Section.
From a series of twenty photos, XI had managed to
pick out two girls who had died shortly
afterwards. After further research, the
investigators not only came across the old file
on the murder of Carine Dellaert, but also
information concerning the second young girl. She
was, in fact, called V., and had died in the
middle of 1983 in Ghent. As regards the list of
people present according to XI, some of the
details were remarkable. As well as Michel Nihoul
and a woman who was arrested in the Dutroux case,
XI named her procurer T., the lawyer and the
burgomaster mentioned above, and a businessman
from western Flanders and his son. XI could not
establish any links between all these people,
except the fact that she had met them on various
occasions at orgies. The investigators carried
out research which showed that all the people
present had professional links of one sort or
another, links that were not apparent at first
sight. The name of the man she indicated as
Clo’s "procurer" was also
remarkable. He had already appeared as a suspect
in the old file at the Ghent Public
prosecutor’s department. The man was known
to the police for a series of sexual crimes.
The Timperman report
When politicians today make
comments and observations about the split between
"believers" and
"non-believers", they are reviving a
debate that was born at the end of October 1996
within the 3rd Criminal Research
Section. XI’s story triggered reactions that
were far from being rational. The public
prosecutor Michel Bourlet invited the
investigators not to stop at the matter of
whether they believed the story or not, but to
carry out their work in an objective manner.
According XI’s statement, it seemed that
Carine Dellaert had lived one year after her
disappearance, pregnant and hidden away. This
must be provable in one way or another. One
detail is disturbing. Carine Dellaert disappeared
the day before the end of the school holidays in
1982. To "place" a girl in a network,
this seems to be an ideal time.
If the search for the
murderers of Carine Dellaert didn’t lead to
very much at the time, it certainly wasn’t
because of Dr. Timperman. In his 40-page autopsy
report, he listed all the details of his findings
regarding the remains of the body. He was unable,
due to the state of the body, to estimate the
date of death. One of the details he noted
initially caused some doubts about the identity
of the victim. The girl in the tank was much
heavier than Carine Dellaert. She was wearing a
90 cm. cup bra – a few sizes bigger than
Carine. Dr. Timperman found an explanation for
this anomaly. The following extract is taken from
his report of 24 September 1985:
- "At the level of
the pelvis there is a small piece of
soft, woody tissue. It is a piece of
"crayon laminaire", an old
medical instrument used to dilate the
neck of the womb in order to facilitate
the delivery of a baby. This instrument
is now rarely used because it causes
great pain for the mother."
- "Presence in the
bra of a small square of gauze, which
indicates a swelling of the breasts and a
loss of liquid. This is frequent in women
who are pregnant for the first
time."
Everything pointed to the
fact that the young girl lived another eight or
nine months after her disappearance. Timperman
also described the objects found in the tank.
There were a total of nineteen objects, mainly
coins and pieces of jewellery. But there were
also:
- "Two Gillette
razor-blades."
When the BSR officers
received the Timperman report at the end of 1996,
they immediately analysed what the press had
written on the subject of the discovery of the
body of Carine Dellaert in 1985. Not a word about
her pregnancy. Not even in the shortest paragraph
after Carine’s disappearance in 1982. No-one
had mentioned a pregnancy.
XI had spoken of
razor-blades in her testimony about V., but not
on the subject of Carine Dellaert. It is worth
pointing out that long before the Timperman
report landed at the 3rd Criminal
Research Section, XI had described other sadistic
scenes in which razor-blades were mentioned as
the customary modus operandi. "For some of
them, it was clearly their favourite toy."
The death of V.
XI also described a series
of addresses where she and Clo had been raped at
the beginning of the eighties. On 29 September
1996, during the second of her seventeen
hearings, she described a bar in
Drongensesteenweg, very near the home of the
Dellaert family. The bar no longer exists. The
investigators found a list of the owners. Later,
XI named a house in Waarschot as the place where
Clo died. Nothing indicates that fifteen years
later a firm occupies this address. Whether it is
a coincidence or not, among the partners is the
name of one of the owners of the bar in
Drongensesteenweg.
At the end of 1996, the
Dellaert file was reopened by the public
prosecutor’s department of Ghent. Meanwhile
the death certificate of V., the second girl, had
been found. It states that the girl died as the
result of a tumour. The C3 form was filled in by
two neurologists accused by XI of being part of
the network. While watching T., XI’s
procurer, the investigators noticed that he is in
contact with the father of V.
On 28 October 1996, the
investigators applied for authorisation to exhume
the body of V. This authorisation would never be
given. At the beginning of the summer holidays,
the public prosecutor’s department of Ghent
received some news from Brussels. Investigating
magistrate Van Espen and Gendarmerie Commander
Duterme had expressed serious doubts about the
manner in which XI had been questioned. The Ghent
public prosecutor Soenens was informed of the
matter, and launched an appeal for calm. He
wanted to see the credibility of XI confirmed,
for example through the further development of
the Van Hees case. The wait began. The Ghent
public prosecutor’s department transferred
the case to the Ghent BSR, but two camps quickly
formed there and the rumours about XI began to
fly. The announcement of the article in De Morgen
caused a stir within the Ghent public
prosecutor’s department. Public Prosecutor
Soenens has assured us that "the
investigation duties have been drawn up" and
that for the end of January a "co-ordination
meeting is planned" for all the public
prosecutor’s departments where inquiries
have been opened on the basis of the testimony of
XI.
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