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It was a beautiful day in June nineteen ninety five in the East of Belgium.

Eight year old Julie Lejeane arrived at her classmate Melissa's house at around three pm to practice their end of school year dance routine.

The girls were best of friends and excited about the upcoming summer break and beautiful weather.

After practice, they convinced Melissa's mom to let them walk to the overpass just down the street to wave at the cars below.

It sounds like a strange activity for eight year olds, but Melissa was used to doing this with her brother.

She must have been excited to show her best friend Julie how fun it was to get honks and waved from the cars racing by below.

But something evil was lurking near the bridge that day.

Julie and Melissa crossed its path and then disappeared.

It was as if they simply vanished in broad daylight from one minute to the next, from the time they were last seen by witnesses near the bridge to the moment Melissa's mother started looking for them, they were only unaccounted for for about fifteen minutes.

Unfortunately, in that small window of time, they were taken from that beautiful day into a very dark place.

A psychopath is somebody 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.

Yell 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 monstre.

I'm your host, Matt Graves.

In the summer of nineteen ninety five, I moved to Belgium and I've lived here ever since.

I'll never forget the fear and chaos unleashed that summer, and repercussions and questions that still reverberate to this day.

It all started right here on this bridge.

On June twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, a local man explains that eight year olds Julie Lejehn and Melissa Russo lived less than five hundred meters away.

This bridge is ground ero for one of the darkest chapters in the history of this country.

Over twenty five years ago, our story began.

A story of abomination, incompetence, and conspiracy that led to the demise of the entire institution of Belgian Federal Police and rattled the foundations of its government.

A story about a man whose accomplices, both known and unknown, are walking freely in the world today, a man so wicked that he simply become known as La Monstre.

Shortly after Julie Lejehn and Melissa Rousseau went missing, Melissa's mother, Karine Russeau, explained the disappearance in an interview.

It's in French, so these are her words, read in English by an interpreter.

I got on my bike and decided to go meet them so we could finish the walk altogether.

And I rode down to the bridge and back and didn't see them, And then took the same route back and forth three times, and I still didn't see them.

Around this time, Julie's mother arrived to pick up her daughter.

I arrived around six o'clock by car with my son.

When I got there, missus Strussel was on the lawn getting over her bike.

She came straight over and explained she.

Had let the girls take us twelve for thirty minutes, but she couldn't find them.

She had already made their wrong trip to the bridge three times looking for Julian Melissa, and she was worried because she couldn't find them, So we decided to go looking for them by car.

We searched the route they were supposed to take, as well as other three.

It's near where other friends lived, just in case the last track of time.

At this point, both mothers were getting worried, so they decided to call the police and ask for help.

Melissa's mother explained.

It was about six forty five and the girls were only forty five minutes late, but we were already very worried, worried enough to call the police.

I'd say the police arrived within about fifteen minutes.

They asked us some basic questions.

I'm not sure how long that lasted.

Julie's mother chimed.

In fifteen or twenty minutes.

I think they asked us for pictures of the girls and we gave them the ones we had at the time.

I admit that at one point at night I had some very bad thoughts that maybe they'd been picked up by a bad person would kill them, and that would find them somewhere nearby.

Everyone in the neighborhood was shocked about the disappearance.

A neighbor saw them that day from her window.

She explained that she saw them walking in the direction of the bridge, and that they seemed calm and normal.

A young couple walking back from that bridge were the last people to see them prior to their abduction.

Was it.

They explained that they had passed by two girls who were walking in the direction of the bridge.

The girl said hello and were smiling.

The couple said hello back and kept walking.

Julie and Melissa's parents did everything right when their girls disappeared, just like every kidnapping story you've ever heard.

The police didn't immediately file a missing person's report, but the parents knew that time was of the essence, and they immediately contacted an association that helps locate missing children.

Things moved quickly, and a massive missing person's poster campaign got underway.

I distinctly remember these posters on the left was a smiling Melissa in a red jumper, her soft features and big brown eyes, smiling and acute grin.

Julie's also smiling, with her hair pulled back by a headband, surely to show off her new little stud earrings.

These pictures are burned into the brains of almost anyone who lived through these times in Belgium.

When I first saw them, I was in my mid twenties, far removed from the worries of parenthood.

When I look at them now, as a middle aged man with two girls of my own, it's heartbreaking.

If I try to put myself in the parent's shoes, the feeling is unbearable.

The rush of anxiety is so dark and deep that I can't stand to hold the thought more than a few seconds.

I can't imagine living with that feeling day after day without being able to escape it.

I think it's something that only the parents of a missing child can really understand.

Shortly after the abduction, Melissa's mother appeared on the news with a message for her.

Daughter, Melissa.

I'm here for you.

Everyone's here for you at home.

I don't know if there's something you can do to come home, whether you can do something or not.

I don't know, but we're here, my love, waiting for you.

We're doing everything everything we can do to find you.

The tireless work of Julian Melissa's family started to generate publicity, and national news channels cover the disappearance.

Several volunteers helped them search all of the field nearby and anywhere else the girls could have possibly gone.

When no trace was found, the parents became convinced they'd been kidnapped.

On one hand, they were happy not to have found their bodies, but a sinking sense of dread began to set in.

They were absolutely convinced that Julie and Melissa were alive, and they refused to give up searching.

This is a message to the kidnappers.

We are still without any news of our girls, Julie and Melissa, for two weeks now.

We've been waiting in anxiety.

We can no longer take this situation.

Whoever you are and wherever you are, we beg you for the return of our children.

Please send us proof that they are alive and okay.

Telephone lea.

Investigators in Liege received their first interesting tip.

Seventy one year old Mary Louise Henrote lived close to the bridge where Julian Melissa disappeared.

Marie Louise lived a quiet, elderly existence and didn't read newspapers or watch TV.

She was a creature of habit who followed the same routine every day.

June twenty fourth was a beautiful day for her usual routine.

She climbed the stairs to her room at around four pm before going to bed.

At around six pm.

She liked to sit by the window for an hour or so, taking in the end of her day.

From the window, Marie Louise can see the highway as well as the side roads in an open field.

At around five pm, she said she saw two girls walking along a small access road leading to the bridge.

Apart from the cars racing down the highway, there's not much to see, so she watched the girls as they walked by, going towards the bridge.

As she sat up to close the curtains, she noticed a dark colored car pulled over on the right hand side of the road next to the girls.

A man got out of the car and opened one of the back doors.

The girls got into the car.

There didn't appear to be a struggle, and she assumed the girls knew the driver.

He was a normal looking man with thick dark hair wearing black pants.

She wasn't a car buff but settled on it possibly being at push O two to five when inspectors helped her narrow down the possibilities.

Other leads trickled in about different sightings.

A man reported seeing two girls on the bridge as he drove under them on his motorcycle on June twenty fourth, after five pm.

He also recalled seeing a red car stopped in the emergency lane near the bridge.

He remembered it because he was in the right lane and had swerved leftward to keep a safe distance.

Four other separate witnesses reported seeing a red car stopped on the side of the highway near the bridge on June twenty fourth.

Some of them thought it was a Ford Fiesta.

Two of these witnesses also reported seeing a van further along in the emergency lane.

One of them was a doctor from Liege who sent a letter to police saying he'd seen a red car and a van stopped in the emergency lane near the bridge.

He had slowed down for safety and noticed the van had French license plates and the red car had Belgian plates.

And even remembered the first three letters of the Belgian license plate as n k V or envy K.

Finally, a woman in Liege who lived roughly six miles from where Julian Melissa disappeared, reported an attempted kidnapping of her daughter and friend, ages seven and eight earlier.

On the same day that Julian Melissa disappeared.

She contacted police and reported that at approximately twelve fifteen p m.

On June twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, a man dressed in a blue and green striped shirt and dark trousers tried to tempt the girls into his car with candy.

One of the girls testified that he had one hand on the steering wheel and in the other hand he held a handkerchief that seemed to be moist and gave off a weird smell.

Luckily, the mother spotted what was going on and ran over to intervene.

When the man saw her, he hit the gas and his tires screeched as he accelerated away.

She formally identified the vehicle as a red Ford Fiesta.

She reported this to police two days later on the following Monday.

Here's what she said in an affidavit these are her words, not her voice.

Earlier in the year, in both March and May, a man driving a red car offered to take the girls for a ride.

On June twenty fourth, nineteen ninety five, at noon, the girls were playing outside.

I saw my daughter moving away from the car.

It was a red Ford fiesta.

I saw that my daughter was afraid.

I got closer and saw that my daughter's friend, Diana, was sitting in the passenger seat of the car.

I literally ripped her out of the car.

The driver tried to keep her from getting out, and then took off.

I got a good look at he looked to be around one meter seventy tall, five foot eight, thin, with short, dark hair parted on the right, brown eyes, wearing a blue and green striped shirt with dark trousers.

I tried to reach the woman who made this statement, but couldn't find her.

I did, however, track down one of the girls, Diana.

She didn't want to speak with me directly, but we had a series of texts and she confirmed that this actually did happen.

Overall, six separate leads came in about the day that Julian Melissa disappeared.

There was an elderly woman who claimed that she saw the girls get into what looked like a dark colored Pugeau on the access road next to the highway.

Four different witnesses reported seeing a red car parked in the emergency lane on the side of the highway around the time of the disappearance, and another woman claimed that a man in a red car on two occasions tried to abduct her, her daughter, and her daughter's friend just six miles away from the bridge where the girls went missing.

Shortly after the disappearance, a criminologist named Karine houts About created a description of the profile of the suspect she believed Plice should be looking for.

Karine studied victimology and psychopathology in Paris and at the Washington College of Law in DC, and she participated in the profiling program at FBI headquarters in Quantico.

She's a criminal profiling expert who works directly with victims, judicial authorities, and perpetrators all over the world.

My co producer Thomas and I drove to her house on the outskirts of Ghent to meet her.

So we're walking to Korene's house and this is a really cute little place.

It's kind of a medieval cobblestone village, barely even fit a car in this road.

The roughly one hour drive from Brussels, we arrive at a charming little village where Karine works.

She's got a moat.

Wow, so we're crossing a little moat bridge.

It's a peaceful little haven nestled into the Flemish countryside.

It looks like something you'd see in a Brugal or Rembrandt painting.

This is beautiful.

Hello, Hello, KARMI.

Nice to meet you.

Meet.

Karine is warm and welcoming, but underneath that warmth you can sense a warrior.

She spent her life fighting for the rights of abused and confronting dangerous predators head on.

After some pleasant small talk, we settled into a quaint room with a wood burning furnace and I asked her some questions about the disappearances of Julie and Melissa.

It was June nineteen ninety five.

I was in the United States at that moment in Washington, DC because I had practice placement at the FBI National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Now, while I was there, I started having faxes.

At the time, it wear faxes.

We're talking about twenty five years ago asking my help because two little girls disappeared in Grassolonna in Belgium.

You'll hear the name Grassolonia quite a bit in the story.

It's the name of the municipality in Liege where the girls disappeared.

It were Julie and Melissa.

There was the twenty fourth of June.

Then I think it was somewhere in July.

I was back in Belgium and I was approached by a detective, which in the United States is quite normal to have a private detective, which in Europe is really They find this ridiculous.

He said, well, listen, you have to help these parents.

It is two weeks now, the children are missing and nothing is happening.

Private detectives are rarely a welcome site for police investigators.

In the nineties in Europe, they were nowhere near as common as they are today.

So when Karin and a detective showed up in Barcelonia to investigate the crime scene, police were less than thrilled to see them.

They started by going to the bridge and then Karen asked the detective to bring her to the closest exit.

I then asked him, okay, if he comes from there he saw the children.

Where can he get off the highway?

So we searched for that first, and it was very nearby.

And then he could come back, pick up the children and drive again, you know, by the bridge going over the highway.

He could just take them away.

It could go easily.

Then I saw that the weeds were cut, which.

Was not the case.

She's talking about wheat fields around the area.

By the time she visited the scene in mid July, the wheat was cut, but she surmised that it wouldn't have yet been cut on the twenty fourth of June, making it hard to see two small girls from one of the side roads.

But from there you could not see these children because the wheats were too high.

So I said, okay, he saund them from the highway.

And on a highway you're not on foot or.

With your bicycle.

So he has a car.

If he has a car, he has more tendency to a methodical type.

Karine explained that there are two types of kidnapper profiles, the methodical type, someone who premeditates his crimes, versus the impulsive type, who acts on the spur of the moment.

In this case, she was convinced they were dealing with a methodical profile.

And then we went to the parents and there Geen Darmerie was already waiting for me inside, very very hostile.

You know, I can't believe the I mean, so when you showed up.

You showed up at Julian Melissa's yes of Melissa.

Melissa and the mother of Julie was there, and Gino Rissau was there too.

He was very very nervous.

Gino Rousseau is Melissa's father.

He was really upset.

And I said to these two policemen, I said, I saw people going in and out the room of Melissa, and I said, did you preserve DNA from Melissa?

They hadn't preserved the DNA.

It had been more than two weeks since the disappearance, and parents were getting frustrated by the lack of urgency from the Jean Dear Marie, which is the name of the Belgian Federal police.

Karin tried to offer the police some advice.

I said, you need to take some hair from a hair brush, or you know, a swimming suit or something.

And then I said you have to look for somebody who has been in prison for abduction.

Torture and sequestration.

And this policeman told me listen to missus Hutzbel.

We are not in the United States here, you know.

Then I said, okay, I'm going.

So I wanted to leave.

I've had it with these people.

The situation was getting tense at the Rousseau house.

Melissa's father, Gino, was becoming increasingly angry with police.

And then Gino he threw his car piece on the table and he said get out, get out, and he throwed the two policemen out.

Gino Rousseau later testified that police had warned him that Karen Whot's about was some sort of quote witch in training and that he shouldn't listen to her.

And I could understand this disarrayed these people, two little girls of eight years of age, and they were doing nothing at all, So I understand them.

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

Eighty seven percent of this kind of crimes are pre planned because this is a methodical type, and methodical types organized on beforehand.

Where are they going to get rid of the children?

They're victims?

And if you don't find the killer, you won't find the victims.

After the police left, Karen stayed with the parents.

She had some advice.

She said that they should appeal to the Ministry of Justice and ask that a multidisciplinary team of crime experts be put on the case.

The parents followed up and the ministry agreed.

At the time, the Minister of Justice was Stefan de Clerk.

He agreed to assign an investigation unit to the case, what Karen refers to in this interview as a cell.

The cleric sent me two officers of the Gendarmerie Major de Krana, and I helped them for two days to put together a cell to help these investigations.

Now he's afraid of me because he knows what I'm saying is right.

He was the most stupid man I've ever seen in my life, and he's the head of the cell.

Right And later on when the case explode that I heard that there were five people in this cell structure, from whom three were.

Not even aware they were in it.

Okay, so they made they made they made a missing child unit to help find the disappeared girls and other cases.

But they didn't really know what they were doing.

It sounds like and the guy who was heading it up wasn't You didn't think it was very.

No, and it was not it that is desert thing.

After years you realize that they didn't have the intention to look for children.

It just took peace the population.

But we have all That was the argument I had with my husband all the time.

We paid the police to do that, okay, but they don't do it.

I already had the child uh Gevre Kavas in eighty six.

She's referring to a case in the mid eighties where a young boy disappeared in broad daylight on his way to play soccer with his brother.

The boys family and victims' advocates were highly critical of the lack of follow up from police.

Six years old disappears in the middle of Brussels, is still missing.

And I had a friend who was at the jam DARMERI and I asked him, what are you doing to find this child back?

And he said, we are waiting.

I said, waiting for what stop the world from turning?

You have to find a job where we're waiting for people who give us some clues.

A six year old little boy.

I couldn't stand, so, you know, I thought, this is another empty box.

Now after twenty five years, you can see that it's all trembling down.

And what I said twenty five to thirty years ago is true.

They give us the impression it's so there.

They have no training, they are not interested, they don't give a shit.

Excuse me the expression if your child is gone.

Karine is seething at the memories of this time.

She's a fierce woman who says exactly what she thinks right to your face.

The Belgian Federal Police or Jean Darmerie, was founded in eighteen thirty, but it wasn't until nineteen ninety two that they had their first female officer.

They wore special uniforms and carried themselves with an air of authority.

I'm sure these officers didn't appreciate Karne's second guessing their work without pulling any punches.

In the end, the profile established for the possible kidnapper was quite detailed.

It said that they should be looking for a white French speaking male between the age of thirty five and forty five, with a rap sheet of sexual offenses on miners, having already spent time in prison, with a history of violent behavior, with a psychiatric file, probably married with children, and of above average intelligence.

Belgium is a small country that had a total population of around ten million people at the time.

You can roughly cut that by about sixty percent if you're focusing on French speaking suspects, as the majority of the country is Flemish speaking, So if you think about it, we're talking about a pool roughly the size of a large US city like Houston or Chicago.

When you start to further narrow it down by gender, age, and previous convictions for sexual offenses on miners, it narrowed very quickly.

With this relatively small suspect pool, Locating the kidnapper of Julian Melissa shouldn't have been an impossible task unless something else was at play.

No one knew it at the time, but the disappearances of Julie Lejehanne and Melissa Russo marked the beginning of a series of disappearances that would completely upend the country.

This season on the Monstra with the investigation plagued by accusations of incompetence, high level corruption and cover ups, thousands would pour into the streets from massive protests across the country, demanding answers from a government that failed to protect its most vulnerable.

This basement and the crimes committed here have made this house notorious.

Every Belgium knows about Mark the True's Chamber of horrors.

He was a guy, known criminal who's been convicted of raping and kidnapping children, and he somehow gets sort of prison early.

What happened after he got out of prison is just beyond belief.

We'll hear from key players from the center of the investigation who agreed to be interviewed.

I still remember driving home every evening and asking myself are we followed or not?

But still I slept with my gun on my pillow every night.

Really, could you ask the witness if maybe he is scared of somebody?

Is he maybe afraid of making statement?

Because this gentleman is watching what he is.

A and an astonishing witness who have ended the investigation.

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.

And we'll hear from people who didn't want to speak.

Explicated gues.

To join us on this journey.

Take a second right now to follow or subscribe in your podcast app to get the latest updates and new episodes.

Le 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 eilerl 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.