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In August nineteen ninety five, just two months after Julie LeJean and Melissa Rousseau went missing in the east of Belgium, a group of teenagers who were part of the Harlequin Amateur Theater group gathered at one of their houses to put the final touches on their summer beach trip plans.

It was a big deal for most of the kids, who'd never been on a parent's free vacation before.

The meeting took place at Paul and Betty Marshaw's house, who, after much hesitation, decided to let their seventeen year old daughter Anne join the trip.

It was a nice group, responsible kids, so Paul and Betty went upstairs and let them plan their trip without helicoptering over them.

Their daughter Anne was so excited that she thought of nothing else in the days prior to leading for the coast.

The train ride from Hustle to their destination in west Inda on the Belgian coast was about two hundred kilometers.

They'd rented a bungalow there where ten of them would stay for a week.

Unfortunately, two of them would never return home.

Psychopaths is somebody who understands emotions.

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

Would have been the end of it in nineteen eighty six, but my god, 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.

It had been two months and the community of Liege and Belgium was still desperately searching for answers and the disappearance of eight year olds Julie Lejeanne and Melissa Russo.

Their disappearances were presumed to be an isolated incident, but on August twenty third, nineteen ninety five, on the Belgian seaside, two more girls would vanish while on a beach trip, seventeen year old Anne Marschal and eighteen year old Effie Lambricks.

Their disappearance would quickly make the local news.

He said that these.

Middle Anna, if you went missing, only about one hundred miles away from Liege, where Julian Melissa disappeared.

But the two places are worlds apart.

I'm originally from Texas, where you can drive for two straight days without much of a change in culture or scenery.

Belgium is the opposite of that.

You can drive less than one hundred miles and feel like you've been to three different countries.

The first two girls disappeared from Liege, a French speaking region where rolling hills covered with thick pine forests cut through river valleys.

It's where part of the Battle of the Bulge took place in World War II, as immortalized by the book and series Band of Brothers.

The Belgian coastal province of West Flanders is quite the opposite.

It's a Dutch speaking region and one of the flattest places I've ever seen.

It's next to where the famous evacuation and subsequent World War II Battle of Dunkirk took place.

It was there about twenty five miles up the beach from Dunkirk, where the group of teenagers including Anne Marschal and Effie Alambrichs had booked their beach trip.

There was an excited atmosphere when the teens checked into their bungalow at the Marina Park resort in West Inda.

It was about a fifteen minute walk to the beach and a short bike ride to the seaside town of Newport with its restaurants, cafes and attractions.

On Monday, some of them took a one hour trip by tram to the larger town of Blunkenberga to see a hypnotist show at the local casino.

It was a blast and two of them got free passes to the following night's show.

Anne Marshall originally planned to check out the show with her friend Linda, but she had gotten delayed, so another girl, Alambrics, took her place so Anne didn't have to go alone.

On Tuesday evening August twenty second, Ann and Ifia rode their bikes to the tram station in West India and boarded a tram for Blunkenberger.

I'll get us off Blanket back again.

They made their way to the Blunkenberger Casino and used their free tickets to get into the Rosty Rostelli hypnotist show.

The Rosty Rostelli show was a mix of magic and group hypnosis.

Rosti himself was a born entertainer, complete with wavy black hair and a flair for live stage performance, so who's going to be During the act, he would get about eighty volunteers up on the stage, where he would take them through a group hypnosis and then reselect about fifteen of them who appeared to be responding well to his spell.

We know that Anne and Efia made the cut that night because they were filmed on stage.

In the video, you can see Rosti on stage dressed in black.

First, you can see Efia smiling and giggling until Rosti gives her a light tap on the back of the head, and then she slumps forward in what looks like a state of hypnosis.

Next, you can see Anne facing Rosti as he tickles a small doll that seems to trigger her to start scratching her face.

She appears to be visibly annoyed and seems to tell him to stop.

After the show, both Anne and Effia were captured on security cameras walking towards the exit of the casino before midnight.

They were supposed to catch the tram at eleven forty five that would take them all the way back to West ind but they didn't get on that tram.

Instead, they took the last tram at twelve forty four am, which terminated at the station in Ostenda, about halfway to their destination.

The tram driver confirmed that Anne and Effie were on this tram when it stopped for end of service at one eighteen am and Ostenda.

Another employee recalled seeing them at around one twenty am at the station, and finally, the last person to see them was a taxi driver parked outside who reported seeing them exit the station just after one twenty am.

The girls never made it back to the bungalow that morning.

I spoke to the father of Anne, Paul Marshal.

His memories of the disappearance are so painful that he didn't want to have to go through a recorded interview.

I can only imagine the heartache that Paul, his wife Betty, and their whole family must feel.

Their lives were turned upside down that summer, and still now twenty five years later, the memories and the pain are still vivid.

Paul agreed to have his words read by an interpreter.

What you'll hear now, this.

Was Anne's first time on holiday without any parents.

My wife Betty and I were initially hesitant about the idea.

I remember Anne said, Dad, I'm almost eighteen, and after thinking on it, we decided to let her take the trip.

Anne was very responsible and she was so excited about this trip with her friends.

On the day she left, I dropped her off at the train station with her bike.

And huge backpack.

She was so happy.

I'll never forget the pure joy radiating from her face that day.

A few days later, I got all around nine forty five at night from one of her friends.

The friend explained that Anne and another girl, Afia, hadn't returned home after attending a show the previous evening.

All of the kids were worried sick because it wasn't like Anne or Afia to just decide to stay out all night and the next day.

They had tried to report it to the police in west Enda, but they weren't taken seriously, so finally they decided to call the parents.

I was really calm and lucid at the time.

It surprised me.

I called the mother of the other missing girl and we reported the disappearance to the local police in our town.

After filling out the report, we drove to the coast, leaving it around three o'clock in the morning.

I think we arrived at the bungalow around five am.

I remember feeling like an intruder, but the other kids were happy to see us.

They were all really worried.

There wasn't really much to say.

Anne and Afia had left to go see a show and simply didn't return.

I took a break to lie down on Anne's bed in the bungalow to gather my thoughts.

I found Anne's cherished little stuff Snoopy on the pillow.

She'd had it since she was a little girl and still brought it with her everywhere.

The little ribbon around Snoopy's neck was still there.

It had a note attached in her handwriting, offering a reward of one hundred francs for Snoopy's safe return in casey went missing.

It was at that moment that it really hit me.

Something terrible must have happened to Anne.

That evening, we visited the casino where the girls went to the show.

Security cameras had captured images of the girls after the show in the casino lobby.

It was very hard to look.

At these last images, Anne looked really vacant and she was holding her hands strangely.

It didn't make sense for them to be in the lobby at this point.

Most people use a different exit when shows are over, and the direction that they were walking in was the opposite direction of the trend that they were supposed to catch.

The actual show itself was also filmed, and later I watched the whole thing.

It was very upsetting Anne.

And if you are on stage and they appear to be hypnotized, at one point they're eating lemons that they've been told were peaches.

I realized this must have been why Anne was holding her hands strangely in the security camera video, as if she were holding the lemon from the show.

In the last images of Anne during the show, you can see her reacting to the magician tickling a little doll.

She was rubbing her face and yelled stop.

She looked confused and upset.

I couldn't help but think that the hypnosis had messed them up somehow, or maybe they weren't properly woken up from their hypnotic state.

Imagine the confusion the parents must have been going through.

Suddenly they get a call that their daughters have been missing for more than twenty four hours.

The last images they see are of their daughters being hypnotized and then meandering around a casino lobby near midnight, looking confused.

Paul wondered if their disappearance was related to the hypnosis.

That they weren't properly woken up from their hypnotic state, but is that possible.

I spoke to one of the world's leading experts in hypnosis, Doctor David Spiegel, studied medicine at Harvard and as a professor and chair at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

He also actively practices psychiatry at Stanford Healthcare.

Andy created a digital hypnosis program and app called Reverie Health.

Hypnosis is just a state of highly focused attention.

It's something like getting so caught up in a good movie or a play that you forget you're watching the movie or the play, and you enter the imagined world.

It's been called believed in imagination.

And we know from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies that when people go into a state of hypnosis, they turn down activity in a part of the brain that is called the salience network.

That part of the brain that causes you to worry should I be thinking about this rather than that?

And instead you allow yourself to just immerse yourself in whatever it is you're focusing on.

If you're in that state of hypnosis, as you just explained, are you aware of yourself or are you not aware of yourself?

Usually, well, that's an interesting question, Matt.

We found also that the part of the brain that is thinking and planning is relatively disconnected from the part of the brain that is self aware.

We call that dissociation.

So you're doing it, but you're not necessarily aware of yourself doing it.

You're not monitoring yourself.

You're just experiencing it, and that allows you to experience it more thoroughly.

That's what good actors and actresses do, is that they lose themselves in the part.

They become the other person and set aside their own personal identity.

Can hypnosis be dangerous?

Well, you know, anything that has the power to help has the power to hurt.

It can help people take on a new point of view, give up old ideas.

The fact that you're setting aside your salience, your view of what might be a problem or dangerous means, and in a sense in hypnosis, you're more gullible, You're more willing to take on the instruction of someone who is conducting the hypnosis if they are, and less likely to judge and evaluate it.

So if somebody is doing something that is irresponsible or even dangerous, you're more likely to go along with it.

What about group hypnosis or hypnosis shows where you have a hypnotist to claims or attempts to hypnotize a large group audience at the same time.

What do you think about that?

In general?

I'm not a big fan of hypnosis shows.

I think it can be used dangerously.

I've known of situations where people were left in a hypnotic state and were somewhat confused or upset.

And there's one trick that all of the stage hypnotists use that the people don't realize.

They'll start out running a series of people through the initial steps, and what they're doing is screening for the fifteen to twenty percent of the population who are extremely hypnotizable, and those are the ones they keep up on the stage for all the fancy tricks, and they excuse the other people who are less hypnotizable.

I don't want people to think that by and large, hypnosis is dangerous and you get stuck in a hypnotic state and never come out.

I've never lost a patient in a state of self hypnosis, and I've used it about seven thousand people in my career.

However, there are situations, especially for highly hypnotizable people, if they are not helped to exit the state, and if they're not familiar with it, they may wind up in a hypnotic like state for some period of time, normally till they go to bed and go to sleep, and in that state they may be less critical, less likely to evaluate, for example, evaluate the potential of danger than they would ordinarily.

So Anne and Ifia were certainly in the highly hypnotizable category he describes, because we know that they were selected in the smaller group of people to be part of the main act.

According to doctor Spiegel, it is possible that Anne and Efia could have been in a more vulnerable state than normal after the show.

It might help to explain their erratic movements between when the show ended at eleven fifteen pm and when they were last seen more than two hours later, around one thirty am.

We'll get into this in a moment but first let's hear from the family of the other girl who went me, Effia Lambres.

Jean Lombrex is Efia's father.

His partner, Else Schures agreed to speak with me about what John was going through around the time of the disappearance.

Else is an impressive woman who speaks four languages and carries herself with class and dignity.

I asked her about Jean Lambres at the time his daughter Efia went missing.

You see, at that time, jeh was forty seven years old on the twenty third, So the day after, Jean received a phone call from If his mother.

You need to know that John and If his mother, they had divorced seven years prior to this event.

So If his mother called Jean and she told him that if you had not returned to the bungalow the day before after having visited a show in Blankenberge.

Now that was a very strange message, and obviously Jean I immediately knew that something was very very wrong.

He knew his daughter If he had a very good understanding with both of her parents.

They trusted one another, that was no problem.

He was overwhelmed actually with grief, but also with fear because you need to know that several years prior to this, he also lost a baby's son, a two year old son who died from a disease.

I wasn't aware that John Lombricks had also lost a son when I started this project.

We all encounter a misfortune in life, but some people really get more than their fair share of tragedy.

A friend of mine lost his child at a young age and then went through a divorce.

He was never the same and eventually ended up taking his own life.

Most of us will, thankfully never understand what it's like to lose al.

To lose a second child is an especially cruel twist of fate.

Jean has gone through some incredibly dark tunnels in his life.

I'm happy that he's met such a great and positive person else.

She's really helped me to explore some of the darker edges of this case.

I asked her if she thought there were aspects of the disappearance that weren't completely followed up.

Yes, in my opinions, certainly there are leads that would have needed more investigation.

For instance, a few days before she disappeared, it was early morning hours of Sunday, A group of the friends went to Newport, a little town a bit further.

They went there by bicycle.

They had a few drinks at a terrace, and then the bar owner of that terrace suggested they'd go out and have some more drinks other bars.

The minimum drinking age in Belgium is only sixteen, so it wasn't unusual for a group of teenagers to hit the bars.

Okay, if he and two of her friends joined this adult, this bar owner and a friend of his, and they visited a few more bars, had some drinks, and afterwards the bar owner took the girls in his jeep.

He took them back to their bungalow.

Okay, he put them back home, and when they said goodbye, he even gave them a few bottles of I don't remember what it was, a liqua anyway, alcoholic drinks.

Okay.

Then Sunday nothing happened.

But on Monday night, if you went for a walk with a friend, and they walked through the dunes, and then again, all of a sudden, she saw this man that she had met in Newport, and I was she felt very strange about it.

This man, again in his jeep, had drinks.

He offered them drinks to Afia to her friend, and actually he wanted if his friend to drink a lot of alcohol, okay, and if he was very, very upset about what was happening.

In the end, he agreed to drive them back to their bungalow again on Monday night.

But if he told her friends that she was not confident.

She was upset.

She was actually scared of this man who acted weirdly.

He was trying to impose himself on her.

He was harassing between brackets her and she did not at all feel comfortable about it.

Was this man a grown man or was he.

A Yes, certainly he was a grown man.

He was the tenant of this bar in Newport where they had their first drinks, okay.

And then actually the police investigated this Newport guy.

They questioned him, they even observed him, but they came to the conclusion that there was a mistake and that he was not the man that Avia and her friend had met on Monday night in the dunes during their walk.

So that was it.

The investigation stopped there.

And what about the friends that uh were there and heard if you talk about this man were what did they think?

Did they believe that the police were wrong about that and that this had to be the guy.

Or of course, I mean when she returned to the bungalow, if you had told her friends, many of her friends, what had happened, and that she was upset about it, so the friends could come to no other conclusion that she really had met this Newport guy in the Junes.

Again, Yeah, that's right.

And of course she was out with him quite a long time the previous night, so it's hard to believe that she could mistaken this person for a whole nother person.

It seems strange to me.

I think.

I think it is absolutely impossible that she was mistaken.

There's one more element.

She was very much interested in cars.

If so, she described the car, and she would never ever have been wrong in describing a car because she was very interested in cars.

She knew everything about it, so that was apart from the person that she ad met.

She also described the car mentioned it to her friends.

So in my humble opinion, there can be no doubt about the fact that if you had met this Newport guy in the.

Tunes, it does seem very suspicious that just before disappearing, if you got bad vibes from a man who was hanging out with these younger kids and trying to get them drunk.

Else continues, she tells me about another lead.

It may sound similar, but this lead involves another bar and man who's a hotel owner in Blunkenberg.

There is another very very worrying connection, and that is the fact that the girls were seen on the night of their disappearance.

They were seen very close to and even in front of a so called Hotel Brazil in Blankenberger.

They had just assisted a show in the casino, they left the casino and then they were seen by several witnesses in front of this hotel, so called Hotel Brazil, which in fact was not a hotel, a regular hotel.

It was actually a bar, some kind of a brothel.

And the owner of this bar was known to the police.

He was known for human trafficking, he was known for prostitution, he was known for keeping illegal arms, so he was very much into criminal affairs.

Okay, now, what happened.

We're talking about the twenty second of August.

But as you know, two months prior to that, two little girls disappeared in Grassologne in the Liege area, and one witness in this case wrote a letter to the police saying that he had seen at the spot where the girls presumably were taken a red car, and he also mentioned the license plate.

Now, the fact is that this license plate belonged to a friend of this bar owner in Blankenberger, the owner of Hotel Brazil.

But moreover, this friend of his with a license plate that was seen in Grasslona also stayed at the Hotel Brazil during the summer of nineteen ninety five.

So eventually this bar owner he was questioned by the police.

He was questioned the first time on the first of October nineteen ninety six, and then one time or a second time on the sixteenth of October.

But after that he actually vanished from the earth.

So he left.

He left Blankemberger.

He announced to the local authorities that he would go to Germany, but in Germany there was no trace of him left.

So in Belgium the detectives could take no further action.

He was not involved in the investigation anymore.

Remember that mysterious red car in episode one.

Could it be a coincidence that the license plate number reported by the doctor and liege after the disappearance of Julian Melissa is almost an exact match to a license plate that leads right to one of the last places Anne and Efia were seen alive.

It's a bit confusing, so let's summarize the facts.

At this point.

More than one witness claims to have seen Anne and Effia after the hypnotist show in front of the Hotel Brazil or nearby in the same street in Blankenbega.

The owner of this hotel and bar had previously been charged with engaging in prostitution and human trafficking.

A friend of the hotel and bar owner, who is staying at the Hotel Brazil when Anne and Efi went missing, owns a car with a license plate that's almost in a exact match to a license plate identified by a witness of a suspicious car in Grasselogna under the bridge where Julian Melissa disappeared.

After the owner of the Hotel Brazil was questioned by police, he disappeared from Belgium and was never seen again, despite police searches in Belgium and Germany, where he said he was relocating.

To this day, there are still questions about this man's potential involvement.

One of the witnesses who claimed to have seen Anne an Effia in front of the Hotel Brazil.

Was a butcher named Eric van Dam who had his shop and home right next to the hotel.

I wanted to speak with him, but unfortunately he passed away since but I was actually able to track down his son, Dirk van Dam, who agreed to speak with me.

This is the first time he's ever been recorded speaking about this.

Dirk is a jovial man in his early fifties.

He has red hair and a sturdy build and speaks with the sort of earnest directness that you often find in the Dutch speaking region of Flanders.

He had a lot to say about the Hotel Brazil and its owner.

At this point, I don't want to accuse or implicate anyone without deeper investigation, so I've bleeped out the name of the man he's talking about.

It's somebody who left a very deep psychological imprint to me in my life.

As you know, or my father was a butcher at his own butcher shop in Blankenberg at the time of the disappearing of an an Athia.

My father thought that he had seen on an Athia at the Hotel Brazil, which was next door the butcher shop and the house where my father lived.

The hotel Brazil at the time was owned by and my father came in conflicts with this person us At a certain time, he found a young woman outside of his front door, because the two entrances of the houses were next to each other, literally next to each other, and he found outside the front door of his house, he found a young woman, a Brazilian woman, crying and who had been beaten, and my father took the woman inside, and it turned out that this woman had been fetched from Brazil by whose wife I recall I think was Brazilian, and she had been brought to Belgium with the expectation that she would have work, but in reality it was meant for prostitution, and mister had taken all documents, passport so that he controlled this woman.

My father then contacted the police and the police went inside the house, found another woman and also found weapons in the house, and as a result of that was put to jail for a certain time.

Afterwards, we had a lot of problems with the man.

If we went outside, if we showed our faces at each time, we were stocked.

Everybody came to our house was stocked because of that was the situation with the Brazilian woman.

What can you tell me about him as a person?

For me, it was a psychopaths.

I think that's the correct description of the man, because a psychopath is somebody who understands emotions, who manipulates.

So it's very good at manipulating people.

But it's really inside is a old hearted man.

And I think that's the best way to describe this man, because he could be friendly to people and at the same time, or in a split second, be very aggressive to me or to somebody else, enjoying the fear that he spreads when he did those things.

Did he actually you talk about stalking?

Did he ever attack you or your father?

Yes, yes, yes, yes yes.

For instance, we had a garage at the other side of the street where we parked the car.

It was very simple.

I only had to go to the garage, and he often came across the street with somebody else to physically attack me.

So he attacked you physically more than one time?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes all the time.

And with other people too, or yeah.

Yeah it happened with other people.

It also happened one time that my father drove out of the garage, and my father wasn't a big man.

He was one meter seventy that a very big man, a German Man opened the door, smiled and said he took my father by the just and said he shoffered us, I will do that, which showed the intention of harming my father a grave dangerous way.

His whole being was.

It was a really in deep and evil man.

Really, what was this relationship with his Brazilian wife?

Will I won't say this from who I know it, matt I will I will tell you in another time, but from good source that his wife was very scared of him, so that she feared him as well.

And when you heard that he left the country very suddenly after all of this came out, did you think that he could be the kind of guy who would be involved and you know, abduct children or something like that.

I have no doubt, no doubt at all that he might be involved, no doubts about that.

So who is this mysterious man and what can we find out about him?

Is he alive?

If so, it doesn't appear he's in Belgium.

Maybe he's in Germany or Brazil.

If he is alive, it'd be interesting to find him and question him about his friend with the red car and the girl's disappearance.

At the time, no one thought that the two disappearances in these vastly different regions of Belgium were related.

One thing is for sure, even to this day, twenty five years later, the families of Anne and Effia would like to know what happened between the time the Hypnotist show ended and their girls were last seen.

The show ended at around eleven to fifteen pm, so they would have had plenty of time catch the last tram at eleven forty four pm.

Their friends who had previously attended the show specifically warned them not to miss this tram because it was the last one that went all the way back to Westenda where they were staying.

Maybe they just missed it, but you'd have expected them to take the next tram leaving at twelve fourteen am.

But they didn't take that one either.

They took the last one, leaving at twelve forty four am that ended service at Ostenda at one eighteen am, where they were last seen by a taxi driver outside the station.

What we're in in ef youa doing in the two hours between when the show ended and they were last seen and what happened to them in Ostenda before they vanished.

Now there were four sets of parents desperately looking for their children in two very different parts of the country.

Unfortunately, more parents would soon join this list.

Next time, on La Montre.

The other at around nine am, the phone rang and Captain Ballar informed me that a fourteen year old girl went missing the previous evening in the village of Bear Tree.

A colleague of mine, Fred vor Nambussa, and all the journalists.

He published a book in those days.

The title was young Girls Don't Disappear just like that, and it was a perfect way of expressing what we all felt because every summer there were young girls getting killed or disappeared, right, and there was a very strange and difference among the people, but among the police as well.

Really neat, I brought together the parents and the authorities who have been criticizing face to face.

You have to note that the judge appointed you oversee the investigation left for a five week vacation a few days after being appointed, as luck.

Would have it, by a young man who had given us information on Monday.

I thought he remembered part of a license plate number.

LEA.

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 iHeartRadio 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 La.

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

Special 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.

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