Belgian woman in child-sex case enters convent
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Brussels –
A woman who let two 8-year-old girls starve in a cellar and helped her pedophile husband carry out horrific abuse of other girls went from prison to a convent Tuesday, outraging Belgians who opposed the early release of one of the country’s most despised criminals.
The nation’s highest court approved Michelle Martin’s release after serving 16 years of a 30-year prison term for her role in the mid-1990s kidnappings, rapes and killings by her then-husband, Marc Dutroux….
The Dutroux case horrified the nation and led to widespread changes in Belgian police procedures. Police had visited the home twice in the mid-1990s and didn’t find the kidnapped girls, although they heard voices, and ignored a letter from Dutroux’s mother that expressed concern her son was abusing young girls.
Dutroux, an unemployed electrician and convicted pedophile on parole at the time of the crimes, was arrested in 1996 and convicted eight years later of abducting, imprisoning and raping six girls between the summers of 1995 and 1996. He was also found guilty of murdering two of the six girls, who ranged in age from 8 to 19 years old. He is serving a life sentence.
The last two of Dutroux’s kidnap victims were found alive in his basement a few days after his arrest.
Martin was accused of conspiracy in the kidnappings and imprisonment leading to the deaths of the two starved girls, who were held in a secret dungeon specially built in a cellar. Martin said she had been too scared to go into the cellar to feed them while Dutroux was serving a four-month jail term for car theft.
One year after they were kidnapped, the bodies of the two were found in the garden of a house that Dutroux owned.
Martin has depicted herself as a passive culprit of the psychopath Dutroux, but was blamed for aiding her husband and letting the young girls die.
http://www.sfgate.com/world/article/Belgian-woman-in-child-sex-case-enters-convent-3822915.php
for more information on the Dutroux case:
http://ritualabuse.us/2008/10/issue-56-may-2004/
http://ritualabuse.us/2008/10/issue-57-july-2004/
