![The Aftermath [11] - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/dATjKfru)
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This podcast also contains subject matter which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Michel Pirot, nightclub owner, promised to make revelations about Julian Melissa's kidnappings, murdered shortly afterwards in a parking lot. Jean Paul Tamigneaux, acquaintance of de True active in Charlewaugh Carr theft ring, told a friend he'd received important information about the kidnappings. Disappeared shortly afterwards in nineteen ninety five. His severed foot was found a year later in a river.
The rest of the body was never recovered. Bruno taglia Ferro, acquaintance of the True active in Charlewaiugh car theft ring wife, said he was asked to get rid of the car used to kidnap U Melissa and that he feared for his life. Died under mysterious circumstances. Body was exhumed on order of Judge Conrad for testing posthumous autopsy. Death declared as murdered by poisoning. Fabien jo Bards, wife of Bruno taglia Ferro, claimed to have found important documents related to
her husband's murder. Burned to death in a bed soaked in methanol. Declared a suicide. Ghi Gobel Gendarmes and Garsolonna, one of the very few gendarmes to obtain the confidence of the parents of Julian Melissa, found dead with a bullet in his head the day Operation Othello started. Declared
a suicide. These are just five of the over twenty mysterious deaths surrounding the the true affair, and additional reasons why many believe there are still powerful people involved who've never been brought to justice.
Champsychopats is somebody who understood emotions, and I told them it is very exceptional that somebody abducts two children at the same time.
Should 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 monstre. I'm your host. Matt Graves, after an investigation plagued by incompetence and cover ups, and a trial where the judge purposely avoided elements pointing to a larger conspiracy mark. The true was sentenced to life without parole, Michelle Martin to thirty years, l Lievre to twenty five years, and Michelle Nihul only got five years for criminal association and drug trafficking. The trial of the century was over,
but the country would never be the same. The Gendarmerie was discontinued as an institution and Belgian law enforcement was completely restructured as a direct result of this affair, basically the equivalent of shutting down the FBI in the United States. If you can imagine that several ministers, police officers, and magistrates either resigned, were fired, or quit their jobs, and millions of Belgians felt their country had covered up or
even participated in the worst crimes imaginable. The aftermath of the trial would provide little opportunity for healing, as the judicial system would continue to fail the victims and their families. Michel n Whoul, after serving just a third of his sentence for drug trafficking, was paroled in two thousand and five. In twenty twelve, Michen Martin was given early release as well, paroled after just serving sixteen years of a thirty year sentence.
Although the conditions of her parole were strict, the public was outraged, again, taking to the streets and protest. The victims' families were also stunned about her early release. The father of Anne, Paul.
Marschall, thirty year for me was thirty years. It was very difficult to accept. But now I have to accept sixteen years, so you can imagine what I am feeling.
Michelle Martin says that after years of psychiatric help, she is free of Mark d' true's influence. The crimes the pair committed made this country question itself and it is questioning itself again now as she enjoys freedom. Emma Murphy ITV News, Brussels.
In twenty nineteen, Michel Lalieva was released from prison despite appeals from victims families and a protest in Brussels dubbed the Black March. He served twenty three of his twenty five year sentence. After his release, he moved to a neighborhood in Brussels, where it didn't take long for him to get recognized. According to reports, he was beaten up
by a group of neighborhood kids. When Michele Martin was released in twenty twelve, the terms were that she would be confined to the Clarisse Convent in Malonne, near Namur in the south of Belgium. After serving ten years under strict supervision, she would be eligible for full release with no conditions. Just over a month ago, as the first episodes of La Monceau were published, Michele Martin was released from the monastery with all conditions lifted. She is a
completely free woman today. Jean Lambreck's the father of Eefia, said quote, it's clear that she's guilty of much more than what the official and public version wants us to believe. She actively participated in several rapes by drugging the victims. She had a serious rap sheet before she even committed these crimes, yet she was still released early. This situation is very depressing. Unquote. Mark the True, still serving a
life sentence, applied for conditional release in twenty twelve. It was rejected, but in twenty thirteen he appealed the decision. His mother, who hadn't been heard from since the trial, spoke up again, saying quote Mark is not ready to be released because he's still trying to blame others for what he did. I'm certain that he will start again. He has no sense of reality. He's a repeat offender in his soul, as he's already proven throughout his life unquote.
Shortly after her statement, the tru's appeal was rejected. In twenty nineteen, he again applied for conditional release, which required an examination by a psychiatrists. When the psychiatric report concluded that the True remained dangerous and had a psychopathic profile, his lawyer, Bruno Dallier dropped the parole request, saying quote, I must postpone my plans because proposing a credible reclassification plan with this diagnosis, I really don't see who will accept.
Dallier also made it clear that he would not give up on his efforts to free the True, as I continued to investigate the loose ends of the de True affair. The decades long saga has reached the present day and were now breaking new ground. A listener of La Monstre in Switzerland reached out to tell me about a woman named Annika Lucas who shared her experiences with child sex trafficking in Belgium in a book published just a few months ago. I was able to interview her when she
came to Europe recently. Annika explained to me that she left Belgium in the nineteen eighties to go to the United States to escape a child trafficking network. She claims that this network involved Michel Nihoul. I've been able to confirm some parts of her story. I know that she's indeed from Belgium, and that she was certainly sexually abused as a child, and that she escaped to America, where she's been living since the nineteen eighties.
Yes, I was born in Belgium, in Brussels, and my mother was single, and when I was three she married someone in Flanders. Now she abused me from childhood. I started first with the and her husband, who had been taking me on little outings.
There were always other children there.
They took me the first time into what was an orgy, and that was a horrific experience. I was also that same night very graphically threatened to make sure I would never speak up.
I wanted to speak to Anika because she claims to have direct experience with Michelle, who way back in the nineteen seventies.
The boss of the network.
He gifted me to an international networker and that man ended up taking an interest in me and taking me with him to train me. So I was nine years old when this happened, and taken him to different places in on the East Coast in the United States to learn about that world. That year s nineteen seventy two, taken to different places, especially Germany. But still even though I was gone the entire summer of nineteen seventy two, I still would come back and go to school.
I was from then on used in the.
Network by Belgian network, mostly for the VIP guests that would come from then on. So nineteen seventy two to nineteen seventy four, when I was rescued by someone from the inside, it was really a last minute decision on his part.
It wasn't meant to happen.
I was in fact taken away to be tortured. That the torture was led by the person I knew as the middleman for a lot of the orgies, someone who was very happy, the brown nose with the VIPs the network, Michelle, who was in charge.
I was given to him. He was the middleman, so he was rather new.
He probably I started seeing him maybe nineteen seventy two, nineteen seventy three. Around then he started showing up, but very quickly he became sort of indispensable as the middleman that he dealt with the pimps. He dealt with the parents sometimes if they were pimps, he dealt with the children. He arranged everything for the VIPs.
He had no qualms.
I got by, tried to survive a little bit by connecting to the human inside and the man, well not not with me whole.
It wasn't possible. It was not that there's no human there, but it was. He was so.
Flat and his jokes were beyond cruel, you know, they were so empty. But oh about the w h most horrific things imaginable, So no way to get through.
I couldn't get through to him, to have him as a person.
Was he also involved in the abuse.
So I saw him more like a business person, arranging everything until.
For punishment the who has me.
I'm the one who's being punished, But other children are there as well, and so he is basically terrorizing us children beyond the imaginable, in order to make sure that we will never ask the clients and quotes anything the perpetrators that we will never express any need of our own, that we will just be there and just shut up and just do what, you know, what we're meant to do for them.
In nineteen seventy three, ni who would have been thirty two years old, Anika described a horrifying experience that she says she suffered at his hands. What you're about to hear is extremely disturbing.
And Nihu grabbed my arm like that and twisted it, and then he put a cigarette out on my arm, which is this scar right here. And I want to show you because when you see it like this, it's circular because he had my arm like that. But when you stretch the arm out, as you can see, it's not. It's a line stretches out. I was taken away into a separate little room, a secret room, I think, and tortured, and four I think four children who were also like myself in this network were taken.
Also and had to torture me.
So I was laid out and strapped down, and then he who forced those children to torture me with various There was a crate underneath this very large butcher's block very old underneath was it like a crate, an apple crate or something which which had various you know, he gave a fish hook to one child, he gave a screwdriver to another child, he gave a penknife to another child.
He gave well various things along during the time that I was there, and you know, forced them to to torture me, but clearly they did not want to do yes, and he of course participated.
He of course was doing it too.
And I understand that people don't believe me, and I don't take well. I understand it because I think that if you allow this in, it's going to challenge your worldview potentially very strongly. You're going to say the world is absolutely not what I thought it was, and you may sink into despair or a depression from allowing this reality in. So ultimately people have to do their own work in order to accept that.
This is true and it is not.
It may seem really hopeless when you allow it in, but it really is for the betterment of humanity to go through that phase yourself and to allow that pain in.
Anaka's point about allowing this reality into one's worldview resonates with me. Facing the reality of child's sex abuse is so horrific and disturbing that most of us tend to just block it out of our thought plane. However, it happens every single day, and ignoring it only helps to perpetuate this awful perversion. Michelle Nihull's name has continued to pop up over and over again in this affair from
several different accusers. To dig deeper, I spoke with one of the key journalists who initially investigated his possible involvement with Regina Loof and the other ex witnesses, Marie Jeanne van Hayswick.
We realized quite quickly that Nil was involved with a lot of fraud before he was arrested in ninety six. It was a big surprise that he had never been judged for the cases in the eighties. It wasn't until he was arrested in ninety six that he was actually convicted for these past fraud cases.
When who was arrested in nineteen ninety six under suspicion of involvement with the Truth crimes, it was discovered that he had been investigated for a fraud case in nineteen eighty nine, but that charges had never been brought.
Some people said, why is it that Nil has stopped being judged in those cases? That's very strange. So we discovered but later that the judge for those cases was Jean Marchvanespin. Is this the explanation because we discover later that the Jean Marchvanespin has a lot of things with n Michelle Hue and his ex wife. Abut the sister of the judge is the godmother of Niel's son. That's very strange. The cases had been placed at the bottom
of a trower and inure by Judge van Aspin. If he had not been arrested, Nil would never be judged for those case.
Marie Jeanne is pointing out that the judge van Espin was in a difficult position from the start, as it could appear that he didn't pursue charges that should have already been brought against Mihul for fraud. This is the same judge who was originally responsible for the infamous Champaignner cold case. So when Regina Loof's interrogation pointed investigators back to this case, it went back to Judge van Espin,
who quickly moved to try to shut it down. The ex gendarme Amy Bill, who was taken off of the Regina Loof case, still insists to this day that Judge Van Espen closed them down to protect Michelle Nihul.
So when the case of the Champaigner was open again, Sean McVan spent so immediately that new and BUTI were named by Regina Luche And I suppose he was in danger because if those links were discovered by the the gendarme, why didn't he tell those things sooner? So I think it was difficult for him to admit. I published a paper who proved that he was the lawyer of Anibouti in the year eighty three, and a few days later he decided to resign.
I was able to track down the award winning journalist Alanka Frankiel, who made a documentary about Belgium's X files for the BBC and wrote incisively about the affair in the Guardian newspaper. During her reporting, she actually met with me who interviewed him well.
I initially was sent over just after nine to eleven to have a look into this bizarre story. Then the BBC decided to commission the film, so one needed to be very very careful not to get distracted from the main core of the story, which was to determine whether it was true as the authorities claimed that Dutrue was acting alone, or whether he was part of a network which was being protected or covered up by those authorities.
And pretty early on the evidence brought me to the associates of Dutrue, which included Weinstein, who by then I think was dead, Liliev, who I think by then at that time was.
In jail, and.
Michelle Nihoul, who was regarded as possibly the fixer and the person who had commissioned to true to kidnap girls for others to use. So we interviewed various survivors and victims, one of whom mentioned Nihul. He'd been in trouble for various crimes. He'd spent some time in jail, but when I invited him us to meet me, it took a while, as far as I remember, but he agreed and we met in a restaurant and he walked in on crutches.
He'd had some kind of I think medical treatment. He was a smallish, fat man, rather sweaty, but very enthusiastic to meet me and my team, my producer, and he bustled in and wrought I am the monster of Belgium. It was a kind of a joke, I think he thought, and he was sort of enjoying the fact that we had sought him because of that, that he was the
monster of Belgium. He was quite happy to say that, of course, he denied any involvement in the crimes, but he also said that he didn't think he would ever come to court, no jury would ever be asked to decide whether he was guilty or innocent, because he claimed that if that happened, he would name names, and too many important people would be exposed, so that the entire establishment in Belgium would ensure that he was never brought
to trial. After he'd told me all this, I had asked whether he would consider doing an interview with us on camera, and he started to sort of be a bit playful and flirtatious and started to tickle me and started to push me over, and I've suddenly found myself sort of struggling to stay upright because he was pretty well on top of me in the booth in the restaurant where we were, and I had to push him off.
I had to appeal to my colleague to help me get him off me, and that once they'd done that, he announced that, yes, you were doing an interview, but for one thousand pounds I think it was, and I had to decline because we don't pay for interviews, and to be honest, I was pretty pleased to say goodbye.
I think one of the most confusing aspects of this film and this story was that there was a lot of circumstantial evidence, a lot of horror, a lot of emotion attached to the events that had taken place, not just the killing of the young children or the killing of the older girls, the discovery of the two girls who were discovered alive, but also the number of people somehow circulating around this story who met their deaths very early in a mysterious way. I think, whether nine or
ten people. And of course it's a very difficult thing. You can't prove those links. But it felt extremely suspicious that so many people associated with the case were being wiped out. So wherever you went, nothing squared. But the problem with it was that there was a lot that was inconclusive, and therefore, when you obviously finish filming after your time is up and you don't have an open
and shutcase. It's quite frustrating, and it's interesting that all these years later, this case is still in a sense unresolved.
There's another interesting detail again, linking Nicoll with a horrifying champignonair case from the eighties. It's something almost no one knows about, even people with deep knowledge of the case. After the gruesome murder of Christine Vanez, police found letters she had exchanged with a man named Pascal la Marque, who she'd met on a train shortly before her murder. Marie Jeanne explains Pascal.
La Marque is another strange character in the entourage of Christine Vanis, the victim of the murder of the Champignie. It seems that they met on the train. It was in the fall of eighty three, a few months before Christine's death. At that time, Lamarque was under a conviction that sent him to prison. So it changes a dozen letters they only met one time.
It seems much attention was paid to these letters between Christine and Pascal Lamarque because he was a known criminal with a long rap sheet. In the letters, Christine writes about having a difficult time and that she was going to leave and change her life, and she wrote, quote, I beg you please don't ask me where I'm going, why I'm going, and why I won't be able to write you anymore unquote. Pascal Lamarque was in prison at the time she was murdered, so he was ruled out as a suspect.
But what do we discover then? Pascal Lamarck was in fact a relation of Michelle Nioul. His name appears in a confidential Belgian state security document which exposes the connections of Michelle Newell and Anibouti. And the criminal record of Pascal lamarch is the longest of all the people mentioned in this list. Eleven conviction for theft with violence, rape
of miners and so on. So we had some exchange with Pascal Lamarck in the the years ninety eight, and he said, of course, he said he has nothing to do with Christine's death. He was in prison, and he said he remembered maybe Christine matt Nihull in the radio radioactivity where new work at the time.
Altho only who evaded justice for his presumed role in the True Affair and other sex trafficking accusations. I would have liked to question him directly about all this, but unfortunately he died in twenty nineteen of natural causes at the age of seventy eight years old. Examining Nihul's possible involvement with this affair is nonetheless still important because, as I've said many times by now, he represents a potential
link to a wider network. If the testimonies of Regina aloof Ana Calucas and several other ex witnesses are true, he was a mid level broker in something much larger. Although a larger cover up and conspiracy may never be proven, there are definitely lower level accomplices that have never been brought to justice. The balding man in his fifties who participated with Detrue in the rape of the university student
from Brussels back in the nineteen eighties. The mystery surrounding the driver of the Redford Fiesta and the owner of the Hotel Brazil who vanished and hasn't been seen in decades. After researching and reporting on this case for over two two years, like many other people who studied this affair,
I simply cannot accept the official narrative. Where there's smoke, there's fire, and there's way too much smoke surrounding this affair to chalk it up to police and competence and a large group of witnesses all supposedly lying about similar things. On the season finale of La Monstre, I'll dig into what can still be done as we make efforts to tie up loose ends.
So in the two case, there is a police report stating the fact that twenty six unknown DNA profiles were established, and.
I'll travel from Belgium to Brazil to Germany to track down a suspect who didn't want to be found explicate I guess.
Bob Malon.
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 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. 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, rag Radio or Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,