De Morgen, 10 January 1998
INTERVIEW WITH REGINA LOUF, WITNESS XI AT NEUFCHATEAU
by Annemie Bulté and Douglas de Coninck

How did we approach her? We wrote to her at the beginning of November. The following morning, the phone rang: "Hello, this is XI." A clear voice, "I’m impressed that you’ve found me." Searching for the right tone, I said: "You seem to be cheerful, but perhaps you’re not." Laughter: "Ha, people prefer to imagine a victim as a little pile of misery who sits despairing in a corner and doesn’t dare to say a word. I’ve passed that stage. I keep going through my sense of humour. Is that allowed?" A few days later, the first of six meetings took place. Meetings that went on until the small hours, in which her cheerful poses would sometimes turn unexpectedly to waves of bitterness, anger or guilt. After each meeting, she slipped us a bundle of notes: the story of her life, in episodes. "At night I can’t get to sleep so I write constantly."

During our fourth conversation, it seemed that things weren’t running too smoothly at home. Her husband was off work and thought he would do her a favour by gathering up the mess in the dogs’ cage. She threw some cat litter at him. "Used cat litter," he pointed out. "I can’t do anything about it," she said. "If anyone interferes with my plans for the day, I get furious. He has to learn not to touch this mess." He laughed and pointed to his wife’s arms. She laughed, too: "And if nothing changes, I cut." Dogs, then. We could hear them, but we never got to count how many there are. We did manage to count the children, though. There are four. "I wanted to replace each child they took from me," she said with a meditative air. We had read this in the files, but it was different to hear it from her own mouth.

Except in the media, she prefers to be called Gini. She was born in January 1969 in Knokke. She had not yet learnt to speak when her grandmother, with whom she would spend most of her childhood, "initiated" her. Under her grandmother’s wing, she grew up as a child prostitute. She was lent to men who wanted her and rented a room in one of the hotels where her grandmother placed her. The group of clients remained relatively small, but that changed when she left Knokke at the age of ten to go and live with her mother in Ghent. She discovered that as a girl her mother had been through the same experience as her, and was now on the other side of the fence. Mum was close to a man called T., a procurer from Borgerhout. Gini knew him as someone who provided children for orgies. One day her mother told her that she had been sold to T. Later, she found out the price: 120,000 francs. T. introduced Gini into the circuit in Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp where things took a much more violent turn than in Knokke.

In the course of her testimony, Gini talked about snuff movies, the murder of children and even hunting parties during which naked children ran in a park and were shot with crossbows. She said that she had learnt what drove these clients to such extremes: a sort of addiction to power, the power to decide over pain, life and death. She spoke of businessmen, politicians – some of them well-known, others less so – magistrates, doctors and men with families. XI got to know a series of children who, like her, had been part of the network for years. Until they became too old and/or were thought to talk too much. Most of them, said XI, had to be profitable until the last breath.

"How did you manage to survive?

Husband: "Hum, hum."

XI (laughing): "Thanks to him."

Husband: "She is very stubborn."

XI: "From a very early age I developed a strong survival instinct. My father was a Canadian Indian and had landed in Knokke and then set off again. Perhaps it’s in my blood. I was small and hard, and had great resistance to pain. My wounds healed very quickly. That’s why, at the beginning of the eighties, I was worth a lot of money. I obviously got into the S/M branch. Scripts were written for films I had to act in.

"Every year I managed to survive by watching these people very carefully and trying to understand what made them tick. For example, T. came for me one evening and said: ‘We’re going to Frans’s, you know who Frans is?" "Yes," I said. For half an hour he said nothing. Then he stopped and gave me a real hiding. I can assure you that after that you would never say you knew who Frans was. You simply didn’t know Frans any more. Finally, one day in November 1984, T. said "When you’re sixteen you can come and live at my house." He didn’t have to explain any more. My turn would come. Of all the generation of young girls between 1982 and 1984, I was the only one still alive. I was a child prostitute, no-one would miss me. No-one would report my disappearance to the police, least of all my mother. So I began to think. I needed to find a lover as soon as possible and love him so intensely that he would miss me. And I had to be quick, I had no more than three months. I found him (she laughs). Look, he’s still here." Husband: "And I didn’t know anything about all this."

XI: "It was a big gamble. I convinced T. that my friend was aware of everything. They put strong pressure on me to give him up. T. gave me a little horse, Tasja. I was mad about him. T. hadn’t bought Tasja to make me happy, only to increase his power over me. If I behaved, he wouldn’t be put down, he said. It was a heart-rending choice. Tasja or him. But I knew that if I wanted to survive I had to lose Tasja. And one day the stable was empty."

So it was thanks to him that you were able to leave the network?

XI: "Not immediately. We got married very quickly and I tried to get pregnant. I organised my life in such a way as to be with him as much as possible. But it wasn’t always possible. He still had to do his military service. I hoped they would leave me alone if they saw I had built a new life without putting them at risk. A terrible mistake! One day, I was alone at home with the baby, who was a few months old, and they were at the door, T. and Miche, and Nihoul. They had come to remind me of my duty to keep silent, and there was only one way of doing that: by making me an accomplice. I was an adult and I had to go with them, while a ‘guard-dog’ would stay with my baby. Nothing would happen to the child, they said, if I obeyed. ‘You know, new-born babies die more often than you think, and if it happens two or three times, they begin to ask questions about the mother.’ I was crazy. I couldn’t bear to lose another baby. After that, this went on for years. My mother told them when my husband was away, because he was working as a lorry-driver. When he came home, I would be cringing in a corner, paralysed with fear."

Husband: "I thought she was suffering from depression because of what she’d been through. But she never told me that these threats were continuing."

XI: "T. enrolled at the Free University of Brussels to study psychology. That shows to what extent they were concerned about their security system. It was a concentration camp. I knew girls who organised their own farewell parties without knowing it. I heard others say ‘They won’t get me, I’ll escape. But their power was infinite…"

When did all that stop for good?

XI: "In June 1995 I saw T. for the last time. In the following months, I was afraid he would come back. He didn’t phone any more. So gradually I began to realise that it was really over. I suppose there had been a change in the power structure within the network. The old procurers had trained new procurers. I couldn’t know these new people. This was exactly what I wanted! I was certain of one thing: I could finally begin to live and I would never, never speak!"

But you did speak in the end.

XI: "Yes, on the advice the my friend Tania. I could strangle her (she laughs). She knew the broad outlines of my story, but I had never mentioned any names – until 1996. It must have been 17 August. We were watching TV together. He appeared: Miche, on the steps of the court, booed by a band of young people. I cringed. Tania noticed that something was wrong. ‘Do you know him?’ I nodded. I didn’t even know his surname. I remember thinking to myself: Nihoul, that’s a perfect name for him.

"I was distressed by the constant attention on the Dutroux case. I have never believed in God, but when I saw the pictures of the liberation of Sabine and Laetitia, I rushed into the bathroom. Without really knowing what I was doing, I kneeled down in front of the mirror and began to pray: ‘Thank you, God, thank you! At last! At last they have freed two of them!’ The policemen who led Sabine and Laetitia into a car were the white knights I had dreamed of throughout all those years. They never came for me. Every time T. drove home completely drunk I hoped the police would stop him for a breath-test. Nowadays I hear about these things all the time, but they didn’t exist at the time."

"Tania and I talked all night. She thought I should go to Neufchâteau. I said she was mad. No-one would believe me. And I also felt as guilty as Miche. I could already see myself with a bullet-proof jacket on the steps at Neufchâteau. Tania insisted. In the end we reached a compromise. She would call Connerotte and tell him she knew someone who knew a lot about Nihoul. She would tell them everything. But only about Nihoul. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. On 4 September she phoned Connerotte. He sent Warrant Officer De Baets to her house. He didn’t believe any of her story. Tania tried to convince him and gave him a copy of the book I had written in 1993."

You’ve written a book?

XI: "Yes, I sent the manuscript to Acco in Leuven in 1993. They rejected it, which is understandable. So that evening Tania called me. She told me, cagily, that she had talked a bit more than she should have. ‘The BSR man is still here,’ she said. ‘He wants to talk to you. And another thing, I’ve given him your manuscript.’ I was furious. ‘You damn fool, don’t you remember that I signed your copy?’ I had this De Baets a moment on the phone, and without really thinking about it I agreed to meet him. After that I began to reflect. What had I got myself into? I panicked and phoned to call it off. I wouldn’t testify, no way. But it continued to gnaw at me. I realised that the BSR had my name and that they would obviously look further. And if they kept Nihoul, sooner or later they would get to me. So I phoned all the same."

How did the investigators react? Did they believe you?

XI: "I remember that during the first session of questioning a member of the BSR rushed out into the corridor and I heard him shout ‘The bastards!’. He’ll get over it, said his colleagues. And yet I had been quite vague, the first time. I had only explained in broad terms how a network like that was structured. After that, it became more difficult. They wanted concrete details, names, places. It was distressing. All my life I had learned to keep quiet. Every time you do something that the torturers don’t like, you are punished. Not straight away, because it takes days or weeks. But the punishment comes. Often it’s not you who are punished, but a friend or an animal you love. I lived with brakes inside me holding me back. Every time I mentioned names during the questioning sessions, the next few days were awful."

"In fact I told them a lot more than I wanted to. Partly because of the stubbornness of De Baets and the first team of investigators. For the first time in my life, I had the impression that my story was being taken seriously. Sometimes, however, they treated me harshly. When they questioned me on the subject of certain names, I always wanted to know why. In general I gave very short answers. That’s why they had to ask a lot of questions. Now this is interpreted as ‘leading questions’, but that wasn’t the case. I wanted to know where they wanted to get to, partly out of anxiety. I wasn’t willing to get just anyone into trouble. I knew people who, at one party or another, were made to get drunk and then led into a bedroom where a 16-year-old girl would be waiting for them. I didn’t want to destroy the lives of people like that. Then there were some people I wanted to avoid because I knew that what I had to say would be completely unbelievable."

"I was awkward, I know. But when I read the papers now, I realise that it is impossible, following the procedures used in Belgium, to question a victim of sexual abuse. They don’t know how to do it in an appropriate way. The first BSR team tried at least. They got the first concrete testimonies and they thought they would get somewhere with them. That’s what they thought."

Do you want to talk about the murder of Christine Van Hees in the old Champignonnière in Auderghem?

XI: "Yes. They organised parties to which we had to invite friends. They were tested. They played little games, watched how the girls reacted, went a bit further and were easily able to pick out their victims. What they preferred was children who had problems with their parents. That way their disappearance would be passed off as running away from home. These girls ended up in the hard core. That’s what happened with Christine. She was one of Nihoul’s girls. He was able to do that: take a girl like her to some bar or other and listen to her talk about her problems for hours on end, with a serious, understanding manner. He would give them little presents and create a secret world between them."

You have stated that both Marc Dutroux and Michel Nihoul were involved in the murder. So they already knew each other well in 1984?

XI: "I certainly didn’t consider them as an established duo. I saw them together occasionally. Miche was clearly a few ranks higher. I was astonished when I saw what Dutroux had become. This calm, second-string figure. I had never seen him as a deadly threat. At that time he was just a little jerk who might participate from time to time. I try to imagine what might have happened to him. Perhaps he thought: I’m going to strike out on my own."

"Miche was a brutal type. Nothing would stop him. I still feel distress when I think of him. I must say I was astonished when I heard that he was involved in the kidnap of Laetitia. It wasn’t his style. He wasn’t the sort who was willing to get his hands dirty. And I was even more surprised when I heard that his alibi consisted in saying that he was doing up a flat with Michel Vanderelst (she pulls a face). A flat! Nihoul and Vanderelst busy with brushes, wallpaper, and hammers. Come off it! I have only seen him hammering a nail once, and that wasn’t in a wall (she bursts out laughing). Sorry, that’s not funny."

In your account of the murder of Christine Van Hees, there are some curious elements. After other murders, the bodies were hidden professionally. Here attention was attracted immediately by the fire.

XI: "I’ll tell you something I still haven’t told the investigators. To give you an idea of the feeling of impunity they had. They had made a bet. They bet to know who they would set up for this murder. They knew that some punks hung about in these ruins and they knew they would be arrested. It was a game. Making a body disappear had become so simple that for once they wanted to do something more spectacular. That’s how it worked. More and more tension, more and more adrenaline. To go beyond the limits…"

How do you know things like that? They wouldn’t tell that to a victim?

XI: "My survival instinct. When you’ve been inside so long, you behave like a little dog who follows his master, even if he beats you. What else could I have done? I saw my friends disappear all the time. I couldn’t get attached to them because I might lose them from one day to the next. The only stable values were my torturers. So I turned towards them. They were my gods. They decided over my pain, my life and my death. I could only survive if I took my place by their side. So that’s what I did. During their conversations they forgot I was there. I was like a house dog, I had become invisible. I acted as if I didn’t understand French. I hardly speak the language, but I understand it only too well. So I learned a lot. I learned to survive. Sometimes it was just non-verbal language, like in the hunting parties. The children were in a row, and had to choose a hunter themselves. I always acted as if ‘I’m one of you’. I always stood next to the ones who laughed. The ones who laughed were the most nervous. They were doing it for the first time and they had been drinking. So they shot wide."

Do you feel guilty?

XI (coldly): "What do you think? Try to put yourself in my shoes. Imagine that you have to choose between your two best friends. To really choose. One of them is going to die. I had to do that several times. That’s why I never sleep more than two hours a night. I could easily say ‘I was the most cunning’, but in my life I’ve done nothing but choose. All those people I knew pass before me every night. Choose, Gini, this one or that one?

"Obviously I feel guilty. Clo, Christine, the other girls stayed behind me. They could have done much more with their lives than me. Why me? Take Christine. I admit that at the beginning, like the other experienced girls, I took a dislike to her. I was worried about her naive and loving behaviour. Her and her Miche. How could she be so stupid? I thought: wait, my girl, until you really get to know him. The second time I saw her, she was already less enthusiastic. I was chosen to train her. This meant I had to pay when the new girl wasn’t ‘liberated’ enough. Christine caused me a lot of worries. The victims did not show solidarity with each other. There was a lot of jealousy.

"One evening I felt sorry for her. I saw her sitting in a corner of the bathroom. It had been hard for her again and she was crying. We started talking. Our procurers were busy on a binge and were paying no attention to us. She said she couldn’t stand it anymore, that she was going to kill herself. I tried to talk her out of it. Wasn’t there anyone she could trust? Someone she could tell that she had fallen in love with an older man who was asking her to do things she couldn’t accept and that she was scared? She kept a secret diary, she told me, that she had put in a hiding-place. There wasn’t anything much in the diary, just that she had met an older man, that it was getting out of hand, all very vague. ‘Do your parents love you?’ I asked her. Yes, she said. ‘Then tell them about it,’ I said. She promised me that she would. A few days later, I was with Mieke, who had also been in the network a long time. She was angry with Christine because she had been punished because of her. I whispered that it wouldn’t last much longer. I told her about my conversation with Christine. Mieke panicked. She told Miche everything. From that moment, it was decided that Christine would die, and in a way we would remember for a long time. Because of a stupid remark made by me, that girl suffered and died as a martyr. God, what sort of world were we living in? We were stupid teenagers. I can still hear Mieke say that Christine had become dangerous and that she didn’t feel like ending up in the hospital herself. A few months later she was killed, too."

Some investigators say you gathered together information from old newspapers and filled in the rest of the story at random.

XI: "I am beginning to know what I’m accused of. Of course I made some mistakes. Hell, I could no longer tell the difference between day and night! That same weekend, they killed my little boy Tiu. It was a bloody orgy. In the end they took me home – not even to the doorstep, just to a motorway exit. I staggered the rest of the way. For weeks I didn’t utter a word. All I wanted was one thing: to be with Tiu, to die. Now I’m expected to describe that evening calmly as if I were talking about what I ate yesterday. Well I’m not capable. Sorry. I have trouble with the order of events, I know. I mix facts up and put them together in the wrong order. But what I said they did to Christine was checked and it seems to correspond. My account of the events is even more precise than the old police file: the nail, the tampax, the electric wire, the house, the people who did it. It seems that’s not enough. Well it’s a pity. I can’t do any better. I didn’t know that this affair had caused so much fuss in Brussels over the years. I had never heard of the champignonnière. I only remember those big wooden boxes. It was a shock to see all those pictures on TV suddenly. It all came back (long silence)."

Husband: "It’s like Gino Russo said, it wasn’t so long ago. Even if only a tenth of all that is true, it’s still horrible."

XI (getting angry): "Hell, that’s what everyone says! If only a tenth of what I say were true!"

Recently you sent a fax to the BSR in which you talk of the murders of seventy children.

XI: "That’s the truth. I would like to continue to testify. Now that I’ve crossed the line, it would be better to carry on. I am certain that they could open other files apart from those of Christine Van Hees and Carine Dellaert. I know what happened to another child who disappeared more than five years ago. But if no-one is interested anymore, there’s nothing I can do about it. The only thing I hope to prove through my testimony is that the networks really existed. I see that I’ve achieved exactly the opposite. A TV programme ("Au Nom de la Loi", ed.) was enough for the media and the politicians to claim that it wasn’t as serious as people feared. And the people swallow that. Nobody reacts. So the networks don’t exist? Ah, what a relief.

"For me it’s not so serious. I don’t need to get revenge on my torturers. On the contrary. It seems strange, but by denouncing them I have given up a part of my family. At the beginning I didn’t want to name names, because the idea that they are in prison is still painful for me. But for the little victims today there is no way out. When I was able to leave the network for good, I saw kids of four or five years old. Where are they now? I did it for them. If the networks get through the Dutroux case, we’ve had it for ever. The torturers will be safer than they could ever have hoped. And the victims will learn that in future they’d better keep quiet."

What did you think when you saw the country full of posters of Julie and Mélissa, An and Eefje?

XI: "For me there was no doubt that they’d ended up in a network. I thought: it must be the last cry. No more pleasure with a kidnapped child. What really astonished me was the parents. I thought: what are this stubborn couple doing? This Paul Marchal, this Gino Russo. At one point I wondered whether they weren’t just pretending. But it was true. They were really looking for their children. That seemed so unreal to me. I had grown up with the idea that normal parents sell their children."

Are you still helping with the investigation?

XI: "I would like to, but is there still an investigation? And if there is, against who? After De Baets’ team was dismissed, the new investigators got in touch. One of them made it clear that I would no longer be heard as a victim or as a witness. Had I suddenly become an offender or something like that? He replied that he didn’t want to answer that question and that he couldn’t believe I had never felt ‘pleasure’. I had to bite my tongue. I am used to prejudices, but this… They also insisted on talking about my ‘lovers’, while I was living under the illusion that they were looking for my rapists.

"A serious investigation? I fear that they won’t be able to carry out any surprise searches any more. (Mocking) Do you think there are any cassettes left at T.’s house? For six months nothing has happened. They dismiss their best men. They leave their files lying around in the back of their cars, where they just happen to be stolen (she laughs). That was the moment I thought about contacting the press again. Where are these files now? All my statements are in them, with the names of the offenders. Is my name in them? If I ask my current questioners that, they get embarrassed. Let’s get it straight, they really don’t want all those murders of children in the eighties to be solved.

"Recently I’ve read and heard a lot of nonsense about me. ‘XI is a mythomaniac. She looks much too well for someone who is supposed to have experienced all those horrible things.’ Have you heard the latest? At one time I worked as a volunteer for a project run by "Tegen Haar Wil", an organisation that defends victims of rape. With the support of Miet Smet, we had created an aid kit and a brochure to help the police in their relations with the victims of sexual abuse. When they found out at the BSR, they jumped for joy! She has experience of the victims’ side! We’ve unmasked her! This is the current climate. Oh, and then they also say that I know X4 very well and that we supposedly agreed on our versions."

Yesterday we received a call from X4. She wanted to know if she can get in touch with you.

XI: "It’s inconceivable! They want to catch me out on the slightest detail. They say that the girl I called ‘Clo’ in my first statements can’t be Carine Dellaert because I didn’t know her real name. But that’s the way it was. Each girl had a nickname. I was Reggi, she was Clo. No-one knew the real names of the other girls. One question completely threw me: what colour were Clo’s eyes? I didn’t know. It’s serious that I can’t remember. But just try with your own grandfather who died ten years ago. It’s difficult, you know. And then their most stupid question: did Clo play a musical instrument? As if we had nothing better to do than talk about musical instruments. When we had time to talk, we swapped information about clients. How you should approach this one, what you absolutely shouldn’t do with that one, and how you could avoid being punished. Yes, I did feel solidarity towards Clo. That’s why her death upset me so much."

We’ve been talking for a long time and the word Satanism still hasn’t come up.

XI: "An amusing subject at last! (She poses as a ‘governess’). Alright then, Satanism. Put yourself in the torturers’ shoes. When they received new victims into their network, it was extremely important that they shouldn’t speak to anyone about what had happened to them. That’s why they organised ‘ceremonies’. They took the victim to a heavily guarded house and convinced her that it was ‘her’ party. There would then be a great performance with masks, candles, inverted crosses, swords and animals. Rabbits were disembowelled, the blood was poured on naked girls, and some men and women worshipped the devil. We, the experienced girls, were doubled up with laughter when we saw them busy with their carnival masks. ‘They’ve got their vampire costumes on again,’ we would say. I don’t think the torturers got much pleasure out of it. They preferred to be completely naked rather than going round in latex costumes. The only aim of these rituals was to totally disorient the victims. They plagued these kids with a load of nonsense - ‘Now you are the wife of Satan’ – and also gave them coke, LSD or heroin. I can assure you that after that you feel completely outside the real world. That was the aim – that the victim herself should begin to doubt the fact that all this had really happened. The result was that the victims didn’t dare speak to anyone."

Was your procurer a paedophile?

XI: "He was about as much a paedophile as I was clear-minded. I find the expression ‘paedophile network’ misleading. For me paedophiles are those men who go to playgrounds or swimming-pools, priests. After the Dutroux case, it has become the latest fashion: to search the bishop’s palace. I certainly don’t want to exonerate them, but I would rather have paedophiles than the types we were involved with. There were men who never touched the children. Whether you were five, ten, or fifteen didn’t matter. What mattered to them was sex, power, experience. To do things they would never have tried with their own wives. Among them there were some real sadists. Or some who you had to sleep with and it all seemed alright. When it was over, he would sit on the side of the bed and drink some cognac. Then he exploded and beat you up. There were also homosexuals who cut a girl first for hours, which excited them a lot, and then went with a boy.

"Don’t get me wrong. I took part in a lot of murderous orgies, but more often in orgies that had no aim except blackmail. The ‘hard core’ consisted of about forty people, at most. There were a few hundred blackmail victims, perhaps thousands. What I find most serious is that these people have kept quiet. What did they do that was so bad? They slept a few times with a 15- or 16-year-old girl – sometimes not even consciously – and they know that there are photos. Why don’t they speak? Why don’t they help?"