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The True was a secondary figure.

He was responsible for bringing drugs and girls at the parties.

Nihoul was the boss.

The True is more on the side.

These are the words of Regina Loof read by a translator.

When de True was arrested, she said that she recognized his face on the news.

She also recognized Michel Niehul, who was also arrested on suspicion of involvement.

Regina Loof claimed that she had been abused by Nihoul as a young teenager and had witnessed terrible abuse of others at his hands.

From the age of twelve.

My grandmother forced me to be a prostitute.

I was brought to orgies.

Everyone was drinking a lot of alcohol.

There are sometimes other children there.

Nihul was very often there with his wife.

I remember Jean michel Nut as a very cruel man.

He abused children in a very sadistic way.

Sometimes during these parties, they would put us outside a large garden.

The adults would chase us, and whoever cut one of us could do whatever they wanted.

I'm psychobat with somebody who understands emotions.

And I told them it is very exceptional that somebody abducts two children at the same time.

Nineteen eighty six.

But my gods, it was just a beginning.

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

Welcome to La Monstra.

I'm your host, Matt Graves.

You'll recall that after the initial arrest of d True, his wife Michelle Martin, and accomplice Michel Lelievre, there is another arrest of a man named Michel Nihoul.

The arrest of Nihoul was the beginning of two narratives in this country which still persist today, one in which the True and his accomplices were an isolated groove, and another in which the True was part of something much larger, a child's sex trafficking network.

The isolated group narrative was widely accepted by Belgian law enforcement and the mainstream media.

However, there are several disturbing facts that point to the narrative of a larger child trafficking network with powerful connections.

Michel Niehul, with all of his power and influence, lies at the heart of this second narrative.

You recall that telephone records showed that Nihoul had a flurry of phone calls with both d'true and his accomplice le Lievre leading up to the last disappearance of Letitia de LEAs, and that he gave them about fifteen thousand dollars worth of ecstasy pills on the day after she was kidnapped.

During early interrogations, da True and le Lievre spoke a lot about Nihoul.

They said he was a hustler with a lot of influence who organized orgies.

Dtrue said that Nihoul told him that sadomasochist orgies were the most profitable, and that Nihoul was a fervent satamassachist himself.

It was an open secret that Nihoul regularly organized orgies, even people close to him, and in fact, his own lawyer admitted that Nihoul frequently participated in secret sex parties.

He described himself as a man of all seasons and was the consummate networker involved in both business and politics.

From various business ventures to public relations to political campaign consulting, Nihoul was a man of influence, with connections across the spectrum.

He even had his own radio show in Brussels.

Several people close to Nihouol described him as an excellent salesman and a show off who liked to spin big and drink and party excessively.

With several bankruptcies to his name, Nihoul also had a rap sheet with convictions for fraud, bad checks and breach of trust based on records showing frequent telephone conversations between De True, l Lievre and Nihoul leading up to the kidnapping of Letitia and the early testimony of d True and the Lievre about Nihoul's possible involvement.

He was arrested and his face was plastered all over the media.

Regina Loof, the girl whose words you heard the start of this episode, had a friend who contacted police to explain that she knew someone who had concrete information about the True and the corrupt businessman Michelle Nihul.

The friend she was referring to was Regina Loof.

Regina didn't initially want to testify, but she was eventually convinced to speak with police on record.

What the reaction was, what we've seen the True that's bad.

It's like two four six kids that were adducted forward dead too were still found back alive.

That was terrible for Belgium.

But if what Regina was saying was even half of it true, it would be ten times worse.

This is the voice of Rudy Hoskins, who was the investigative lead on the team signed to interview Regina Loofod.

Hoskins is currently a partner at one of the prestigious Big four global accounting and consulting firms, where he's a confidence leader in forensic services.

Earlier in his career, Rudy was a Belgian federal police officer or gendarme for sixteen years.

In nineteen ninety six, he and his colleagues Amey Bill, Patrick de Batts and Philippe Uppe were assigned by Judge Conrad to interview anonymous witnesses who had come forward after seeing the arrests of the True and Nihoul on television.

To protect the identities of witnesses, the police called them X one, X two, X three and so on.

X one was Regina aloof who claimed she had been abused by the true and Nihoul.

Then we had that first interview and now we sat together.

Okay, what's we're going to do with that?

This lady is completely crazy?

That was her first assessment.

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

And also the names she was clothing were people of of high society.

Yeah, politicians, heads of captains of industry, magistrates, police people.

So this cannot be true.

This is too much.

Right.

That was a bit the first feeling, I think.

And when did you start to believe her?

When we started finding the first I would say, the first evidence is what we said that we could confirm that in the field or through public records or to whatever.

The story of Regina Luf is both perplexing and tragic.

She was sexually abused by adults as a young girl and into her teenage years.

For obvious reasons, this affected her psychologically, and she showed clear signs of mental instability during her interviews.

Yeah, and Nancy started talking about cases where she was not only abused, but where she also witnessed.

Although I would say friends or children that were abused and even murdered and then when we hurt murders are Okay, that's interesting, because if there's a murder, there must have been a body.

There must be a cold case somewhere, so talk to us about that.

She described two horrifying experiences where she had witnessed the abuse and murder of other young girls.

Hoskins and his colleagues drilled into her accounts of these experiences in a series of long and grueling interviews, while Hoskins gathered details and investigated possible links to unsolved cases.

Because the timeline and description aligned with an unsolved abuse and murder case.

To understand this cold case, we have to go back to nineteen eighty four, twelve years before the bodies of Julie, Melissa, Anne and Efia were found murdered on the properties of Mark de True.

Those comed up.

Okay, it happened less than two miles from where I live today.

A young journalist, Jean Savigna, is helping me with this part of the project.

We wanted to see where this crime was committed almost forty years ago in nineteen eighty four.

This was the side of a place known as La Champignnere, which means mushroom.

Farm in French.

You can see if you look at the pictures, actually you can might that could be that true.

Yeah, I love scary place.

Yeah yeah, these pictures.

You really scary.

For Give me the chill.

The mushroom farm had been abandoned in nineteen seventy three.

The only pictures left of this place are black and white, and they have a sinister feel to them.

Maybe it's just because I know what happened here.

It was cold and dark on the evening of February thirteenth, nineteen eighty four, when a local passerby noticed smoke coming from the abandoned mushroom farm in the commune of Odigem in Brussels.

The passerby called the fire department to report the smoke in case there was a fire that needed to be put out.

When fire crews arrived, they determined the smoke was coming from one of the old basements of the mushroom farm.

It was a routine call and it didn't appear that anyone was in danger, so they sent a small team to go check out the source of the fire.

After weaving through a labyrinth of underground hallways, they arrived in a basement where they found a heap of crates and trash on fire and proceeded to extinguish it.

When the flames were put out, they started to separate the debris to make sure everything was extinguished.

One of the firemen noticed a string object under the debris that didn't look like it belonged there.

It looked distinctly human, but was twisted into an odd shape.

To their horror, they realized it was indeed a partially burned and mutilated body.

The victim's arms and feet had been tied behind their back and looped around their neck into an arching position with metal wire.

The hands were missing and the legs were damaged.

Initial responders said that they saw a nail planted into one of the severed hands.

It was declared a crime scene, and investigators quickly determined that it was likely a teenage girl.

As they sifted through the scene, they found jewelry and a partially burned school notebook that enabled them to identify the victim.

It was sixteen year old Christine van His.

Only hours before.

Her parents had called the police to declare her missing when she didn't return home from school the same day.

The autopsy determined that she died prior to when the fire was set, and that she had been tortured and raped before being strangled to death with electric wires.

Again the former gendarme Rudy Hoskins.

Yeah, the things she told us, she couldn't have known without having been there or witnessed it.

Regina loose account of the abuse and murder of a girl named Christine was strikingly similar to the circumstances of the infamous murder of Christine van Has at the Champagnoniere.

And now we said, okay, shit, this girl is really talking.

And then we went more in depth, asking for more details like the championnaires to described the house, how she went in there, and even also details for example, if you go into a house, okay, normally in the house you go stairs up and then you go in.

In that case, you went like stairs down and then you go in.

So it was like specific things we could check.

So we found all the pictures of the house where you see the stairs going down.

For example, we went to get the file out of the Justice Pallace and Brussels where we went to look for the pictures.

How did it look like internally?

There were a lot of pictures taken because there was a body that was burned inside, and how the body was killed, and how it was like with the kind of iron.

I don't remember the details anymore, but with iron and stuff at certain places in the body.

And if you looked at the pictures from the it was not the corpse anymore, it was burnt.

You saw these irons.

At that specific points in time.

Rudy Hoskins and his team became increasingly convinced that Regina Loof had witnessed the gruesome murder of Christine van Has.

All of our testimony was witnessed by several officers and even magistrates, and it was meticulously recorded.

Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a Freedom of Information Act request for such material in Belgium, but I was able to get my hands on the transcripts.

What you're about to hear is a reading from transcripts of Regina Loose's testimony.

Warning this is extremely disturbing.

There was a drawing of names to decide, for example, which one of the two girls were going to suffer.

Who was the second girl, Christine?

What happened to Christine?

She was sacrificed.

She streamed so much for someone.

To hear her what made her scream the true.

Nihol and his wife.

They tortured her.

They tied her up and spread her legs on the table.

She couldn't even defend herself.

They put something inside of her.

They were hurting her and raping her, and they burn her.

They what they burn her.

Police were astounded by what they were hearing.

She hadn't made a direct connection to the Christine van Hanes case, but her descriptions of the circumstances of this terrifying experience were strikingly similar to the infamous cold case.

What made this difficult for police was that Regina Loof had herself been a victim and she was dealing with her own trauma at the time.

The horrible things that happened to her over the years made questioning her very difficult.

There were many long pauses where she would just shut down.

Sometimes these bouts of silence could last as long as an hour.

She must have read it somewhere.

Yeah, she must have had access to the judicial file, or she must have known a lawyer, or she must have been there.

That was not clear for us.

So what we did is we did a house search in our house to find because We also thought, hey, guys seem to have read that somewhere or had contact with somebody.

So we did out search.

We went to every page, to every book.

Is there something in a book, in a newspaper and old magazine where she could have read it.

We didn't find anything, but still there were a lot of things that we could check and prove, and at a certain point in time, I would say we started believing.

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 murdered.

It was a sort of bondage, so her legs and her hands and her throat were connected with the same rope, and when she moved, she strangled herself.

Yeah.

By the time of these interrogations, the old mushroom farm and adjoining house had been demolished, so investigators reached out to the family who had lived there beforehand.

A man and his brother who had grown up there were convinced that Regina Loof must have been there before based on her description the property.

These are his words, not his voice.

It was two houses that had been combined into a single dwelling, with the unique passage of stairs and hallways.

No one could describe it unless they had been there.

There was a hallway joining two houses, and she drew a picture of the doors inside.

They were antique doors, and she drew the moldings.

She described the wallpaper and the front step.

I don't know who could have described it so accurately if they hadn't been there.

I don't know Regine Aloof, I've never met her.

All I know is that based on her description of the mushroom farm and the house, I'm sure that she had to have been there.

My brother and I both agree on this.

We're absolutely sure and certain that she had to have been there to describe it as she did.

I was able to track down another one of the ex chend armes named Emme Bille, who worked on the team investigating this case.

Aimee is now writen hired and based in the south of France.

Prior to working on the case, he had a stellar reputation as a heavy lifter with extreme attention to detail.

Here's a translation of the key points from our.

Interview Cavoil do champion eh.

If you look at the old case file for the murder at the Mushroom Farm, you'll see that way back in nineteen eighty seven, before Regina Loof's testimony, an informant told the police that if they wanted to solve the case, they should look at a bar called the Dolo.

The Dolo was an infamous bar frequented by the mafia, politicians, police, and above all Nioul, who was known as a regular customer there before it was closed down and the owners were charged with facilitating prostitution.

There were other things in the file that pointed towards Nioul and du True.

For one, we know that Christine van Hayes was a regular visitor to the ice skating Rinkquey Mark Dudru was hanging out in the eighties, and that one of hers testified that she had a relationship with someone named Mark from chall Arois.

This same friend later said that she recognized two old photos of de True from the early nineteen eighties as someone she had seen in the presence of Christine.

Christine also frequented the swimming pool in Etterbake, in the same building where Niehul's radio station was based.

At the time, police were very focused on a group of punk rockers who sometimes hung out at the Mushroom Farm.

The initial tip pointing towards these punk rockers actually came from a colleague of Niehouls at the radio station, so that's how the whole investigation into the punk started.

The judge responsible for the Champagnonire case and also responsible for closing down our investigation around Regina Loof, had once represented Niel's wife as a lawyer, and his sister was the godmother of Niel's child.

So we have an informant pointing to a place where Niels spent all most every evening.

We know the victim was spending a lot of time and places where Nihul and du True also spend time, and the person who led police to investigate the punks was actually an associate of Nieuls.

When you combine all this with Regina Luf's testimony, it looks very suspicious for Nieu.

If Regina Luf was telling the truth, Mark d' true was involved with Michelle Nihul in abducting, abusing, and murdering children in the mid nineteen eighties.

We know that d tru was indeed actively abducting young girls at this time, but Nihoul is an important element here because he was never convicted of involvement with D'truz crimes.

The official story from Belgian authorities is that Mark D True was an isolated predator who abducted children for his own perverted reasons, using only low level accomplices.

But I interviewed another ex gendarmes with shocking revelations that fly in the face of the idea that the True was acting alone.

Jean Pierre Adon was a gendarmes assigned to the the True task force.

Just after Mark d Trux was arrested in nineteen ninety six, my co producer Thomas and I once again found ourselves driving down to the south of Belgium to discuss some of the loose ends of this case.

I think it's over here, number number three.

We saw number five, so this has got to be it.

But there's two houses here, so I don't know which one it is.

Here we are again in the Ardennes.

Believe or not.

To their next see.

Because your will be as oca.

Jean Pierre told us about a curious visit he received from Jean de Nis le Jean a few months after his daughter Julie LeJean was found murdered at the Truz property.

I got a visit from who came to provide a statement with his cousin, A restaurant owner from Challowis named Michel Pirout called them several times.

He wanted to organize a benefit dinner in his restaurant near and all of the prophets would go to the Julian Melissa Association that was formed after the tru's rest.

On the last call he made to them, Pierrot said that on the day of the dinner he would reveal information about the true and the girls.

He would make public revelations, but he didn't want to say anything about him before a few days later, the Lea Johne family was watching TV and they saw a news bulletin about a restaurant owner from Challoois murdered in a parking lot.

So they gave me sworn statement and the prosecutor Boulet, asked me to investigate the murder case in Challois and there I interviewed witnesses who said that Pierrot was going to make revelations about the true affair, and that Piau was not the kind of guy to whim power and that if he said it, he'd do it.

So after threatening to go public with big revelations Piraut was murdered in a parking lot.

That's certainly suspicious in and of itself, but it gets more interesting when you hear about this man.

Michelle Pirout's link to another lead tied to the disappearance of Julie and Melissa.

Michelle Pierrout Okay, Michelle Piau was a close friend of Roget Dupris, and Rochet Dupris was the owner of Le Carre Blanc, a nightclub in Chalais, and there was a whitness who reported seeing Julie and Melissa on the sidewalk next to the car with a young man after they disappeared.

The witness said she crossed paths with the two girls and a young man and she said to herself that those are the girls she'd seen pictures off everywhere, and then when she turned around, they were gone, and it was just in front of the nightclub the car, And when de tru was arrested, she made the connection and she called the police eight hundred number, and she confirmed all of this to me in a sworn statement.

It's not clear as to why the witness didn't immediately contact police when she recognized the girls outside of the club, but when she heard of Datru's arrest, she made the connection because d' tru'z house in charle Wa with the dungeon, was very close to this nightclub where she thought she saw the girls.

In fact, it's less than half a mile away.

So not only was Michel Pierreau suspiciously murdered, there was also a report that Julian Melissa were seen in front of a nightclub called the Cariban.

This club owner, Roge Duprix, was a very rich underworld figure.

Could Pierraut have been planning to reveal something about these sightings and the club before he was murdered.

The connections go even deeper again.

Jean Pierre adon.

Llo's so Fiol and it happens that another nightclub owner named Jean Claude Mass lost his nightclub in a fire.

Everything burned down, and directly afterwards, Roge Duprix came to see him.

Instead, he had an apartment above his Carrivelon nightclub and that Jean Claude could stay there free while rebuilding his own club, and in exchange he could help out managing the carrey Blanc.

And so he moved with his two kids and his wife into the apartment, and one day the kids went up into the attic.

While playing, they broke through a thin wall and they noticed that there was a room behind the wall.

So the father arrived and saw a mattress and some tissues with blood on them, and a little window with bars on it, exactly as if someone had been hidden there.

I went to interview this mister mass with his kids.

I interviewed all of them.

They even drew a map showing how to access this hiding place.

Could all of this just be attributed to coincidence?

Julie and Melissa are reportedly spotted at a club less than a half a mile from De Dru's dungeon, and inside that club there's a hidden room with bars on the window and a mattress.

We know that the True moved many of his victims around magically, so this does fit with his pattern.

Jean Pierre Radon followed up internally about these claims.

I of course requested a warrant to search the hiding place, and the judge came to me and said he wouldn't grant the warrant.

He said it wasn't up to him to attack the mafia of shallow wa A search with the forensic team to analyze all of the hairs and blood and so on would have probably found the DNA of Sile and Melissa, 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.

It certainly appears more than plausible that the True was involved with a wider human trafficking network.

While circumstantial, the evidence and connections are overwhelming.

If this narrative is true, it would mean that there are other accomplices, either directly or indirectly involved with kidnapping, abuse, and murder of several young girls, and most of those accomplices were never brought to justice and are likely walking freely in the world today.

Meanwhile, while Inspector Jean Pierradon continued to investigate the case, something happened that took everyone by surprise.

Mark the True, the most reviled criminal in Belgian history, escaped.

Las Stupid vac solon de la champ ala ans la nouvelle delive as you said up committee.

To Mars du the Lompixon into a position.

Lule Monstra 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 iHeart Radio with producer Trevor Young.

Original music by Jay Ragsdale, Sound design by Cooper Skinner and Thomas Resimont, mixed and mastered by Cooper Skinner.

Cover design by Trevor Eiler.

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

Special things thanks to Backmedia and marketing Station sixteen, Jean Savigna and the teams at iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV.

Find us on social media at Monster Underscore pod.

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