Dutroux child captive wrote home of ordeal

15 April 2004

BRUSSELS – The harrowing contents of letters from a 12 year-old girl written to her parents describing her regular rape and torture at the hands of convicted Belgian paedophile and alleged serial child killer Marc Dutroux were read out at his trial Thursday.

Sabine Dardenne, who is due to appear in person to give evidence at the trial on Monday, was held for 80 days with another girl, Laetitia Delhez, in an underground dungeon in Doutroux’s house.

“I think I will never see you again,” she wrote to her family in July 1996, one and a half months into her ordeal.

Dardenne and Delhez escaped after the arrest of Dutroux, who is charged with the kidnappings and rapes of six girls, and the murders of two of them.

Three other defendants – his former wife and two other men – are appearing alongside Dutroux at the trial in the Belgian town of Arlon, accused of helping him in the series of kidnaps, rapes and murders of girls in the mid-1990s..

Dutroux, who admits kidnapping Dardenne, holding her hostage and raping her, had told the captive girl that he was in contact with her family.

Her four letters by were kept by Dutroux and never sent to her family. They were later found by investigators searching one of his homes, situated in Marcinelle.

Adding that “I will no doubt never return, save for a miracle,” the 12 year-old bequeathed her personal posessions to members of her family.

She wrote of her regrets at having been too selfish and of how she would have liked to have been a better person. She wrote of how she wanted to offer her mother flowers, a bouquet of freesias.

Dardenne described in detail the repeated rapes and sexual abuse Dutroux inflicted upon her in what she called “the room of suffering”.

She preferred to stroke the convicted rapist’s dog rather than touch its owner, she recounted.

The case continues.

Subject: Belgian news