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It was a cold day on December thirteenth, nineteen ninety five.

Julie and Melissa had been missing for almost seven months.

Inspector Rene Micheaux of the Gendarmerie, along with two colleagues and a locksmith, pulled up to de True's residence on one twenty eight Rue de philipp Fil and Marcinelles in the municipality of Charges.

They had the house to themselves, as Dedru was in jail for stealing a truck and kidnapping his accomplices.

The search was officially linked to the car theft scheme and should have been carried out by the municipal police, but the gendarmes.

Michaud managed to unsurp the warrant and carry out the search with his own team of gendarmes.

If you recall, the gendarmes were already secretly surveilling d Tru's house, as he was their main suspect in the disappearance of Julie LeJean and Melissa Rousso.

Michaud sent his colleagues upstairs to see what they con find and headed down to the basement with the locksmith.

The team upstairs found several suspicious items, including chloroform sedatives, vaginal ointment video cassettes, and a speculum used by gynecologists for vaginal examinations.

While searching the basement, the locksmith thought that he'd heard voices of che children, and he said to Michaud, listen, I hear voices quick.

Michaud also heard what he would later call quote whispers and abruptly shouted to his colleagues upstairs to shut up.

After Michau yelled shut up to quiet his colleagues, the voices stopped.

After a period of silence, Michaud said that it must have been voices playing in the street outside or something.

When the locksmith insisted about what he'd heard, Michaud turned to him and said, who's the cop here?

You or me sec rom After that, the search was over and the team left the house.

Julie and Melissa were in that hidden dungeon and alive, literally a few feet away.

Hums who understands emotions, And I told them it is a very exceptional that somebody abducts two children at the same time.

Should have been the yen of it in nineteen eighty six, but my god, it was just a beginning.

I think Belgium was a paralyzed for perforts in those days.

Welcome to la monstre.

I'm your host, Matt Graves.

The unsuccessful search of the Truce House where Julie and Melissa were suffering in silence, is a sickening tragedy.

It's crazy when you think about it that the John Darmes have been surveilling his house for four months already with their secret Operation Othello.

There were countless opportunities to get a search warrant during these four months, but the Gendarmerie kept it a secret and never informed the judge.

Also, they didn't want anyone else to search the house.

In fact, this failed search wasn't even supposed to be done by the Gendarmerie.

The warrant was to look for clues related to the stolen car case, but the Gendarmes pulled some strings and got the green light to do the search themselves.

You would think that this was a good outcome.

Rather than stolen cars.

They should have been focused on finding the girls.

But the locksmith who accompanied me show downstairs had no idea that they were looking for kidnap victims.

When later questioned under oath, this lockmuth said, I don't.

Know a single person who would have left the basement after what they heard if they knew they were searching for your girls.

I cannot conceive how they could stop searching after hearing such clear voices.

As mentioned, the gendarmes found several video cassettes and collected them as evidence.

One of the tapes was a recording of a television show dedicated to the disappearance of Julie and Melissa.

Another one was footage of de True himself building the dungeon in that very house.

If you're looking for Julian Melissa and you have reports of girls being seen in the house, these two tapes alone are a clear indication that you're on the right track.

But the incompetence of the gendarmerie can't be underestimated.

One of the gendarmes searching upstairs would later claim that he didn't even know they were looking for little girls.

To make matters worse, several of the tapes included pornographic material, including one of the True raping a miner.

The contents of these tapes supposedly weren't discovered until nineteen ninety nine because no one bothered to properly analyze them.

In fact, some of the tapes simply went missing, and several of them were actually returned to the True after he got out of jail for car theft in March nineteen ninety six, including the one featuring him raping a miner.

Is this level of incompetence even possible or with something else going on on that day, December sixteenth, nineteen ninety five.

Had the gendarmes done their job, Julian Melissa would have been rescued and reunited with their parents, leading to the possible rescue of Anne and Effia.

The True and his accomplices would have been stopped before Sabine and Letitia were ever even abducted.

It's heartbreaking to know how close these parents were to avoiding such a horrible tragedy.

Nothing about the Operation Othello or the bungled search had come out to the public until after the Parliamentary Commission prided out of a Gendarmes under oath on live television, a camera was filming the faces of the parents as they listened to Inspector Micheau squirm on the hot seat.

You can see the wary face of Julie's father, Jean de ni Le Jeanne, as he digests what he was hearing.

He's a stoic man, still loved by millions of people in this country, a working class man of the people who labored in a factory, paid his taxes and raised a modest family.

He maintained his composure, but couldn't hold back the tears from streaming down his face.

To add insult to injury, the parents learned that Inspector Micheaux even returned to d Tru's house for a second search of the property again on December nineteenth.

He was just steps away from Julia and Melissa for a second time and still found nothing.

When the Parliamentary Commission started, none of the parents knew anything about the fact that the true had been the gendarmes number one suspect.

Shortly after their girls actually disappeared.

The girls disappeared the twenty fourth of June and from the seventh of July they had marked the two as their top suspect.

I spoke to Karine Russeau, the mother of Melissa.

They were all aware of Operational Othello, and that they were supposed to surveil the activities of Dureux.

And it dragged on and on, and the fiasco of Operation Othello was never understood by us nor by the Parliamentary Commission.

I asked her if she thought that Inspector Micheaux was just stupid or was it something else, because his level of incoonfidence was just so unbelievable.

It's complicated because his incompetence is incomprehensible.

When I saw him at the Commission, I had the impression I was in front of a man who was afraid.

The gendarmes seemed like okay, guys who wanted to find the girls, but at the same time they seemed like they were afraid of everything.

The failure of the Gendarmerie to question the true and to properly search his property, it's really hard to square.

The Parliamentary Commission did a good job of exposing the incompetence of the Gendarmeriy, no matter how hard they tried to hide it.

The official conclusion of this commission is that what the gendarmes did and failed to do was indeed a fiasco, but that nothing concrete could be found to prove that the true was somehow protected.

I have a strong distaste for conspiracy theories, but as I study the facts, I'm starting to have doubts about the official line.

While reading cariin Rousseau's memoirs, I stumbled across an odd anecdote about something that happened in December nineteen ninety five, around the same timeframe of the failed search of Dtru's house.

She wrote about a visit they received at the time from a gendarme named Valert Martin.

According to Karine's account, he came to their house in early December claiming that one of the girls had been located.

After having read almost everything on this case, this was detail I'd never heard about.

The true affair is full of rabbit holes, and when I read this, I thought this must have just been something that was misinterpreted or perhaps overplayed.

I had to hear it straight from Karin directly and really understand how it played out, because if true, it flies in the face of the conclusions of the Parliamentary Commission, the Trial of the Truth and the majority of the Belgian press.

Today.

It was the Gendarmes Valle Martin, a field officer working on the investigation of the disappearance of Julian and Melissa.

It was with him that we had the most contact.

He was the investigator that came not every day, but at least every week.

He stayed in contact with us to see if we had any news on our side, and we asked him for news, but he never had any.

So he came by at the beginning of December, but I can't remember the exact date, and at that time he told us that there was an operation under way and that we might be able to open Champagne by Christmas because we might have the girls back by then.

He said we had to keep it on the down low and sit tight, but there was hope, and he said the problem was that they couldn't do anything for the moment because they had located one of the girls but not both of them, and if they undertook an operation for just one of the girls, because they knew where she was, they could put the other girl at risk.

So they had located one of the girls, but they needed to wait to know where the other one was before making a move.

That's what he said.

That was what he explained to us at that time.

I didn't want to offend Kareem, but this is a huge statement with serious implications.

I had to ask her if there were others who had witnessed this conversation.

At the time.

Jean Denis and Luisa Lege and my husband and I were here.

They were almost always here at the house, and also my brother and sister in law were here at the time.

They were practically living here to help us with everything.

And we asked him which of the girls it was, and he didn't want to answer because it was too hard, and we understood in a way, we didn't even want to know which of the girls it was, because imagine if we had learned, for example, that they found Melissa but they couldn't save her because they hadn't found Julie, or the other way around.

It's really hard.

I think we didn't even want to know.

But my brother took him aside and asked which girl it was, and the gendarmes told him that the girl they had located was Melissa, and he told me afterwards.

This moment was a tipping point for me.

There I was sitting with Karine Rousseau on her back porch, less than a mile from where this whole tragedy started.

I had assumed that this story was some sort of rumor, but she was absolutely adamant.

And it wasn't just her who'd witnessed this event, but her husband, brother and sister in law, and the mother and father of Julie Lejeanne.

But I don't know, because there was never any follow up on this because after this we never saw the gendarme again.

From the beginning of January, they told us that the investigators couldn't contact us anymore, and that we couldn't have contact with the Gendarme Marie any longer.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing and maybe overstep the boundaries of the interview by asking how they didn't just grab him by the neck and force the details out of him.

What did he know?

Did he really have something?

We had confidence in them, We had so much hope, and what he was telling us was that the thread that we were holding on to.

So we respected what they said and what they asked of us.

They said, to stay discreete, don't do anything.

Something's going to happen.

So we were holding on so tightly to that thread of hope that we did whatever they asked of us.

And after when we realized during the Parliamentary Commission, when we discovered Operation Othello and the search of Dutru's house and that he'd been arrested in December, etc.

We realized that this happened exactly at the same time of the searches of Dutruz house in Marsinel by the gendarmes from Charlois, So it happened at that time.

So was there at that time an operation planned to save the girls that failed.

I asked her if she ever followed up with this gendarme after everything came out.

After the girls were found, we went to see him at his house during the month of September nineteen ninety six, and we asked him for answers because he sent us a letter where he wrote, quote, I will never excuse those who prevented me from working.

Yeah, And so we found him and said, now you're going to have to explain who were the people who prevented you from working?

Who are they and what happened?

And he was in tears, and his wife was in tears, and she was begging us, saying, no, don't try to find out.

We're going to lose everything.

You don't understand what it's like for gendarmes in the genre, Marie, you can't talk.

She was explaining this and asking us to leave and saying that they'd lose everything.

And I said, no, we lost everything.

We lost our girl, and now your tears and your story aren't going to make me cry.

But he never said anything.

And when the Parliamentary Commission happened, a deputy relayed our question.

He asked him about this very directly in public, and he said, quote, I don't remember.

I tried to track down the former gendarmes Valerire Martin and even his wife, but they've both since passed away.

I spoke to an ex colleague of his who's still an active duty police officer in Liege, but he wouldn't say a word about it.

In fact, he said he'd never even heard of this story and was quote stunned by what I was telling him.

But I know that's not true.

As he was at the Parliamentary Commission When this question was asked directly to Valer Martin, so I decided it wasn't worth continuing the discussion.

He clearly wasn't being frank with me.

The practical consequence of this are significant.

If the Gendarmerie had located one of the girls in December of nineteen ninety five, it changes everything.

Simply put, it would mean that the explanation of the Gendarmery, confirmed by the Parliamentary Commission in nineteen ninety seven and the Court of Appeals in two thousand and four, is a lie.

You shouldn't underestimate that the gen Armerie was a military structure, so they think strategically, they accept collateral damage.

It was not a police force as you or me probably would think of a police force.

It was a power mechanism.

This is the voice of Jan Fermont, one of the lawyers who represented Letitia Dalles during the trial of the true in two thousand and four.

Several notable journalists, as well as victim's family members, suggest that he could provide insight into various aspects of the case.

The geen Armie had an internal system where there was an indication that the gendarme was involved in criminal activity was an internal ban on communication to the prosecutor.

It had to go up the hierarchy first, and only with the authorization of the hierarchy it could go to the prosecution.

So this was a culture and that has led, for example to the fact that the National Drug Bureau of the Belgian Gian dal Marie, who was working very closely together with the DEA at that time, actually became one of the main drug dealers on the Belgian market because and the gendarme who found out that actually the cocaine was his bosses.

If he ran into that by chance, after going ten times up the hierarchy and saying we have a problem.

There are kilos of cocaine passing and my bosses involved in that, he actually at some point said the law says that I should go to the prosecutor, went out of its own initiative to the prosecute, and the next day he was removed from the job.

That guy ended up, after forty years of career as an investigator as a specialized investigator, ended up washing cars in the garage of the Jean Darmerie.

And there are many, many actually incredible stories in which the Jean Armerie got involved in that period, members of the Jean Deremerie putting a bomb in the car of another member of the Geen Deremebrie which happened here in Brussels, trying to kill with the machine gun fire another member of the Geen Eremerie, which happened to Majere Vernaye.

It's rather heavy stuff and all this is the eighties and the nineties.

We are in the middle of a period where all kinds of stuff is happening in the Geen Armerie, which is outrageou, which is far beyond what any normal person would expect or would believe that it's all reality.

I asked him about this gendarme named Valeris Martin, who at one point told Julie in Melissa's families that one of the girls had been located.

And he told me an interesting story about a scene that played out at trial in two thousand and four.

You'll hear him mention the name Lisage.

Lossage was valers Martin's boss at the Gendarmerie.

He was called to testify at the trial along with Valeris Martin and another gendarmes.

So the next day, when we come into the courtroom.

Somebody comes to me and says, do you know that Losage and his two other colleagues received a long briefing yesterday from their former superior in geen Armerie what they should say and what they shouldn't say.

And this former Colonel de Geen Darmodi, drove them in his car here and will be present in the room.

So the three gendarmes were subpoenaed at the core case.

Strangely, their former boss, a high ranking officer in the Gendarmerie, spent the days before briefing them and then actually drove them to the hearings.

You see this guy leaning against the door in the back with a leather jacket, and this is Colonel such and so.

So there are, one by one the three called Lussage comes in before anything else.

Lage is nothing to say.

The President tells him, maybe please wait a second, because at least I want to ask you your name.

Of course, after some time some questions are asked.

And the other thing that I said, I'm nothing, I know nothing to say, which I think is an absolutely intolerable attitude because he is on the road.

I mean, you're a policeman you're working with the money of the taxpayers to solve the case.

And then when the court asks you to ask to respond to a question, you say, I don't want to talk to you.

Nothing.

The second member of the team comes in and plays a piece of theater.

Yeah yeah, Julia, Melissa, Yeah, yeah, I remember.

No, I don't know.

I don't remember that.

No, no, I I know I worked on this case, but no, no, no, it's a long time ago.

Then the turtm and I think that was what I comes in and so he comes in.

Instead of going to the witness stand, he comes to the bench where I say, I'm sitting next to jan.

This policeman even doesn't greet the court.

He immediately comes to gen I and he says, cause you come, prete Tooma.

I understood everything.

Now says yeah, but please go to the witness stand and tell the court, because if you know anything, please take the stand and say what you know.

And then nothing.

So I got a little bit angry because you can't ask directly questions.

So as a civil party, you have to go through the court.

Say please, mister president, could you ask the witness such and such information.

Then the president decides whether yes, or no you'll ask question.

So I said, could you please ask the last witness why he is crying?

Why he is doing this?

No answer?

Could you ask the witness if maybe he is scared of somebody?

Is he maybe scared of this gentleman standing against leaning against the door?

Who is Colonel such and so from the gean armerie who brought these three people yesterday in his personal car to this place, who gave them a briefing the day before yesterday about what they could say, what they could not say?

Is he maybe afraid of making statement because this gentleman is watching what he is saying?

Nothing, I'd answer to the presentic is really impossibly.

And then the President of the court turned to me and said, I understand your frustration.

I understand we are all frustrated.

But what do you want me to do?

Torture is not allowed, and that's approximately the only thing I see what I can do to make them speak.

He was right, he comes forced them to speak.

The attitude of keeping the information to themselves, not sharing it, trying to keep as many people out of the discussion as they could actually went even on during the trial, and they organized it.

Obviously the three of them playing some kind of game, not to get involved in real questioning.

It was an organized thing.

I mean, I think it's an indication of how keen they were, or how worried the were about being transparent and open about what actually happens.

The month of December nineteen ninety five was a pivotal time in this affair.

On the sixth of December, the true was detained for car theft and kidnapping of adults.

On the thirteenth and nineteenth of December, Inspector Micheaud of the Gendarmeriy executed searches of the house where Julian Melissa were hidden without finding them, And right around this same time, a gendarmes told the families of Julian Melissa that one of the girls had been located and that they were waiting to locate both of the girls before making any moves.

When the parents never heard back from Valerer Martin, they of course agitated with the Gendarmerie to get more information.

Valer Martin was censured by his superiors after word got out about what he'd said.

I've seen a copy of this century which is in the case file, and it ends with the following sentence quote, I remind you that no details of any kind, including new information, verifications carried out, or any information about the investigation, can be communicated to the parents, even for reasons of humanity unquote.

The hopeful news about locating the girls was followed by a wall of silence, the silence that Karen wrote about in her journal entry on December twenty seventh, nineteen ninety five.

The silence of your disappearance, silence of the legal system, silence of the powerful, scandalous silence, accomplice of crime and misfortunes.

Christmas had come and gone, and there is no Champagne celebration of finding the girls as promised.

The desperation of Karine's journal entries at this time is excruciating.

At one point, her despair drove her to run out of the house at night into the dark, windswept field next to where Julian Melissa disappeared and screamed helplessly into oblivion.

Pourquois or why hoo goa woo whi.

While the true was imprisoned for auto theft and adult kidnapping, his wife and partner in crime, Michel Martin, was living at their house in Sarcee Labuisiere, and Julian and Melissa were alone in the dungeon in Marcinelle.

Michel Martin later testified that she went to the house in Marcinelle every few days to feed their two German shepherds, but that she was afraid to go into the basement.

She fed the dogs, but not the two eight year old girls.

Again, according to their own testimony, the true ordered his wife to enter the dungeon to give the girls provisions and empty the buckets he'd placed there for the girls to use the toilet.

It wasn't until mid January that she claimed to have gone down to the basement.

The house was cold and dark, and it stank from neglect.

As the hungry dogs were barking.

The two police searchers had left the unkept dump into more disarray than usual.

Michel Martin later explained to the court what happened.

These are her words, not her voice.

I went down the basement and I was shaking like a leaf.

When I reached the door to the dungeon, I was faced with the dilemma.

I wanted to open it, but at the same time I refused to do it.

I was afraid of those children.

In my mind, there was an image of lions of ferocious animals that would attack me.

Nonetheless, she stated that she overcame her fear of these ferocious eight year old girls and shoved some provisions through the door and then quickly closed it.

From then on, she returned every few days to feed the dogs, but never went down to the basement again.

On March twentieth, nineteen ninety five, the true was finally released from jail, just after four months of being charged for car theft and adult kidnapping.

He had been condemned for other kidnappings years earlier.

Then he was paroled, then he kidnapped our girls.

Then he was arrested for car theft and kidnapping, and he was already on parole for kidnapping, and then after four months he's released.

A guy who's on parole keeps kidnapping people gets released from his current sentence for kidnapping.

And the reason I swear to you this is documented in the file humanitarian reasons.

That's the way it's written for humanitarian reasons.

Because the heat was off at his wife, Madame Martine's house, and she needed him to repair the heating.

He's freed because his old lady is cold.

It's what's written.

We thought, how could this be possible.

If someone told you, you'd say no, it can't be like that, But when you see it, it's what's written.

The world is full of stories of nutjobs getting out of prison too early, but this one is particularly egregious.

Remember De True was still on parole from his previous early release for kidnapping and raping five girls when he again got busted for theft and kidnapping, but they still released him without baild True later claimed that when he got back to the house in March, Julie wasn't responding and Melissa was alive but struggling.

He said that he tried to nurse them back to health, but that it was too late, and that both of them died in March.

One thing we know for sure about Mark de True is that he's a liar.

Careine Rousseau, her husband, and the parents of Julie don't believe his story about the end of Julie in Melissa's life.

The condition of the girls for three and a half months locked in a dungeon like that to survive by themselves is completely improbable.

You can't survive in conditions like that for three and a half months.

It's physically impossible.

And a nutritionist who testified at the trial did a calculation of what they could have received in terms of water, etc.

And she said that it didn't make any sense.

So the nutritionist at the trial concluded that it wasn't possible.

And nonetheless, they left the conclusion like that they died following their incarceration by Dutroux and Martin was unable to save them, and voila.

And this is the legal truth that they gave us, whereas we're not convinced that they stayed there the whole time.

We don't know, oh, if they were there for three and a half months, or if they were taken somewhere else and then brought back there.

I've read the reports from the nutritionist who concluded that it was impossible for Julian Melissa to survive over three and a half months without expiring from dehydration.

In the report, she wrote, survival for one hundred and three days would not be possible without at least one hundred and fifty liters of water per child, the amount of water purported to have been supplied by Michelle Martin in the middle of January was not sufficient for survival for another seven weeks.

Julian Melissa's parents believed that Marked a true wasn't acting alone and that he was receiving help from people who've never been identified, people with the power to pull strings.

This brings us to the most crucial question of this entire affair.

Was Marked a true and isolated predator who only got help from low level accomplices like his wife Michelle Martin, Lackey accomplice michel Lelievre, and known criminal Bernard Weinstein.

Or were others like the corrupt businessman Michelle Lee, who involved in a more sophisticated, high level human sex trafficking ring.

This question divides politicians, magistrates, journalists, and even victims in their families still to this day.

We will explore this question further as witnesses come forward with accusations of conspiracy, abuse and murder on the next episode of La Monstre.

Next time on La Monstre.

I remember it like it's a film in my head.

I can close my eyes and see every little details of that house where.

She was murdering.

The search with the forensic team to analyze all of the hairs in London and so on, so would have probably you found the DNA of Shile and Melissa Bloody and and I still affirm today that the reason they didn't grant me a warrant is that they were afraid to open the door to a possible wider network.

For this lady is completely crazy.

That was her first assessment.

Right.

But all the things he is telling us this is not possible, cannot be true.

And also the names he was quoting were people of of high society, politicians, heads of captains of industry, magistrates, police people.

So this cannot be true.

This is too much.

Right, That was a bit of first feeling.

I think, when did you start to believe?

The Monster is a production of Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Radio, hosted and executive produced by me Matt Graves, produced by Thomas Resimont of Bubble Sound.

Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay are executive producers on the behalf of Tenderfoot TV with producer Makeup and Vanity Set.

Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on the behalf of iHeartRadio with producer Trevor Young.

Original music by Jay Ragsdale.

Sound design by Cooper Skinner and Thomas Resimo, mixed and mastered by Cooper Skinner.

Cover design by Trevor Eiler.

La Monstra includes archival audio from SONYMA, RTBF Archives and CNN Archives.

Special thanks to Back Media and Marketing Station sixteen, Jean Savigna, and the teams at iHeart Radio and tenderfoot TV.

Find us on social media at Monster Underscore pod.

For more podcasts from iHeart Radio or Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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