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I don't know if it's possible to create a monster, but this is what happens. He had a difficult childhoods in a negative and viomence, but it is not enough to explain what he became twas a man who took pleasure to hurt everything around him. He in shot, causing pain to others. It was his way to take revenge on what he believed life had done to him. On top of that, yet no feeling whatsoever of other people. It was what they call a perfect psychopaths.
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.
Told have been the yen of it in nineteen and 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. The arrest of Mark de True and his accomplices led to the incredible rescue of Sabine Darden and Letitia d LEAs and the shocking discovery of the conditions of their captivity. An entire country was rocked by these crimes, but four young girls were still missing, their families desperate for answers.
This basement and the crimes committed here have made this house notorious. Every Belgian knows about Marked Truth's chamber of horrors, that they must come here and see.
What we knew at the time was only the tip of the iceberg of this unbelievable story. But who was Marked a True and how did he get away with kidnapping kids for so long? His story begins in Brussels, in a neighborhood I know well, less than two miles away from where I'm sitting today. Da Truth's parents hadn't been together very long, and his father later claimed that he thought Mark wasn't his biological son. Da True later described his father as an agitated and unstable man and
his mother as calculating, selfish, and devious. Both parents were teachers, and the family spent a short spell in a hours and what was called the Belgian Congo at the time. You may recall from episode one that I interviewed a profiler named Karen Hutzebau who established a profile of the type of person she believed police should be looking for after Julian Melissa disappeared. She had some fascinating things to
say about the Tru's life during that interview. What can you tell us about the Truth?
It's a narcisstic personality, that's first, okay, he was the first born, and he's even born in Congo, the colony of Belgium at the time.
A quick note to correct this small error. The True was actually born in Brussels, but moved to Congo shortly afterwards.
And I know people personally who were also in Congo at that time and who told me that the father of Mardu True. They called him Loma, the man with the big how do you say in English? He just jumped on everything that moved his father, his father, And when he came into the house of my witness, when he came in his mother to call her children and said stay here, all of you, everybody was terrified of the father.
Of the Truth.
On the other hand, the Truth Mark was over protected by his mother correct and already when they were back in Belgium, the Truth had become kind of the.
Leader of the tribe.
So you can make psychopaths in two ways by too much violence during childhood, physical violence, emotional violence, sexual violence, name it or and they are worse the children that are are overprotected because they will never ever take responsibility for their own wrongdoing.
It is always somebody else's fault.
These are the man when they are older and they rape a girl or they kill a girl, it was her fault.
It's always somebody else's.
Do you think that, because apparently, just from what I've read that Mark the True his father was violent.
That's part of it. He was mother overprotecting and mother was overproductive.
So when you talked about the formation of a psychopath, you said, you know, can go two ways. One is extreme violence and another is overprotection. Would you think that he had both? Do you think Mark the True had both? What is it that you think made him? Is it more the protection of his mother or the violence.
Combination of both, that's a combination of Yeah.
Probably each time he has been hit by his father or maybe raped who will tell he sought protection by his mother and she gave it to him.
Anyway, it is. It is very confusing upbringing.
It's not an excuse, but it explains that these people and their way of thinking of things and lacking humanity, how that comes. They say that children are born that way. That is not true. You know, I've seen too many criminals and child killers, and I do not judge them. I judge their acts. So I always have very good contact with him. Why did you?
I can be very harsh with them.
One of the offenders I have in treatment and I film this life and it starts explaining to me, Yeah, well, what happened?
You know the things that happened?
I say, what what are you saying?
We are the things that I said happened? No, no, I know, I know the things I did. Ah, now we're talking.
They really I get out of my mind if they use where it happened?
You know what happens.
A storm can happen, an earthquake can happen, you know, things of nature can happen. But this is nothing that is not something that happens. This is something you did, You decided to do, and you liked to do it. And all those psychchatter definitions of disorder. It's bullshit, they all tell me after six months of therapy.
I did it because I like to do it.
Upon their return from the Congo that the True family settled in the gritty working class region around the city of Charlware in Belgium. Charlottlah is a difficult place to explain to people who haven't been there. It flourished economically during the Industrial Revolution, with a huge build up of steel and mining industries and an influx of migrants from across Europe. After the nineteen fifties, it went from boomtown
to gloomtown, and factories were shuttered and unemployment skyrocketed. Its nickname became Lepaignoire, or the Black Country. With the gloomy remnants of industrial decay, the regions parked marked with shuttered mines, mills, and spoiltips polluting the landscape. Crime flourished in the sixties and seventies, and the name Charlevaugh soon became synonymous with
organized crime and corruption. Marke de True grew up as a child of the sixties in this region, not the flowery sixties of peace and love, but a much darker existence his grade school teachers described him as undisciplined and intolerable. He got caught stealing from one of his schools, from which he was expelled, and was later kicked out of
another school for selling pornographic pictures to other students. His mother said he was always trying to profit from something and described him as quote dominating people with less personality and never expressing any feelings whatsoever unquote. In nineteen seventy one, his parents divorced, and at some point after that, his mother started seeing a young man who had apparently been
one of her students. You'll remember from the last episode that I was able to interview the True's lawyer, Ronnie Bodwin. I asked him to share what he could about where things started to go wrong with Mark Detrue when he was young.
I think that, you know, the main turning point in his youthful life was at the time that he must have been like fifteen years old and his mother started a relationship with one of her students who was like seventeen, okay, And he is always returning to that point as could not accept first of all, that his parents were going to split up. Secondly, he then got confronted with some kind of stepdad who was barely older than he was
at that time. And that's also why he explains that, for instance, he is different than his younger brothers and sisters because they were younger. The age difference between those brothers and sisters was bigger towards the student with whom his mother was supposed to have relationship, and therefore they didn't live that the same way. Yes, there was a new man in the house, and that new man should have been him, and it was somebody else who was barely older than he was.
This was obviously an important turning point into True's life, which ended up with him leaving home at the age of sixteen. We don't know a whole lot about this time of his life. It's rumored that he lived for a while with an older pedophile and that he got involved with male prostitution. He worked on and off as a mechanic while developing his skills as a small time criminal. In nineteen seventy nine, he was convicted of theft and
spent three months in prison. His favorite hobby was ice skating. In the early eighties, he started to spend more and more time at ice rinks On several occasions, he was kicked out of rinks for purposely causing girls to fall down and then fondling them while helping them up. At the age of twenty, he met a seventeen year old orphan named Francoise Dubois, and the two got married. They had two children together, but the relationship was troubled from
the start, and Francoise accused Mark of beating her. While his wife was pregnant, Mark continued to hang out at ice rinks, where he met a young woman named Michel Martin. He divorced his first wife in nineteen eighty three, and then Michele moved in with him and they had a boy together in nineteen eighty four. All the while he got deeper in the crime, from stealing cars to shaking down elderly women. He also started traveling to Slovakia for
various shady dealings. While there, he was accused of raping two teenage girls and also brought young Slovakian girls with him back to Belgium. His wife, Michelle Martin, was aware of these rapes and even assisted Mark in tricking victims and filming the crimes.
To me the moment he met Michelle Martin, she was like, I don't know whether I pronounced it right. By the catalisator. You know, for instance, if you want to put a piece of sugar on fire, you will not succeed. But if you put some ashes which has already burned on the piece of sugar and you put your match to it, it will take fire. And that's exactly what happened. Those two met and by themselves they were a potential danger most probably, but it's only by meeting and coming together
that suddenly the danger really got out. Indeed, people forget or tend to forget that she was taking the pictures, that she was filming it on camera and stuff like that. She was involved right from the very first moment. So it's not like she was an innocent bystander. I know.
I've studied the file and I've studied, amongst other things, I've studied the relationship between them both, and I'm sure that at that time it was possible for him to do that because he had found literally but also in a figure of speech, a partner in crime.
Right.
Do you think she was a psychopath?
Absolutely, I'm personally convinced that she is. First of all, to do those things what happened, you have to be a psychopath. And especially also the way in which those things were done. Don't forget that. For instance, they also went to Slovakia, and there is all so a list of Slovokian girls that got raped and stuff like that. Eh, I mean, this was not something they did just once. That was a way of life almost.
It was nineteen eighty five and Mark and his second wife, Michelle Martin, were living in marginal existence in the shadows of Charlevois. They befriended a man named Jean van Pettigam, who was a drifter looking for a place to live. Jean van Pettigam left the army in the spring of nineteen eighty five to marry his sweetheart and settle down in the working class region of Charlewas. The marriage only lasted a week, and Jean soon found himself penniless and
looking for a place to live. His new friend, Mark the True, agreed to let him live in a run down caravan parked in the yard of his house. Jean was a perfect mark for the True. Young, broke and not very clever, he was soon doing his bidding in the market underworld of Charlevois. Although educated as an electrician, da True preferred stealing for a living, and he and his new protegee, Jean, were learning the ropes in the world of petty crime, from stealing cars to raiding work sites.
The two would hustle any angle to make a buck. We know a lot about Jean van Pettigem's experience with D'true from statements he later made to police and journalists. On June seventh, nineteen eighty five, Jean van Pettigam stumbled out of his caravan and joined de True and his wife, Michelle Martin for dinner. In their kitchen, De True was animated that evening and suggested, quote, let's go out and
have some fun. His wife, Michelle Martin, knew exactly what that meant and protested that she didn't want him to take her car for that kind of fun. But Detrue wasn't the kind of guy to let a woman tell him.
What to do.
Soon, they were cruising the streets of Charlevois, and Detruz spotted a young girl outside a municipal pool and suggested they pick her up. Isn't she a bit young, said Jean, Just my type. Replied De Drue. Jean said he didn't want to do it, but was indebted to the True, so he followed orders and jumped out and grabbed eleven year old Sylvia by the waist with one hand over her mouth, and threw her into the back passenger seat.
Although this scene played out eleven years before the kidnapping of Letitia de Les in Bertrie, it was strikingly similar. A young girl on her way home from a swimming pool was brutally snatched by markd True in a lackey accomplice. This probably wasn't his first rodeo, and we certainly know it wasn't his last, but at twenty nine, De True still hadn't perfected his technique. It wasn't until years later that he would decide to change his approach and never
let his victims go again. To True, his wife, Michele and Jean Vanpettigin would go on to kidnap an assault several more girls and young women in nineteen eighty five. Out of respect for the victims, I will only refer to them by their first names. On the seventeenth of October nineteen eighty five, nineteen year old Maria was walking to the store near the town of Bansh. Jean waited on the sidewalk until she walked by, and then pushed
her into De tru'z pugeat van. There were two other accomplices in the van that day who's still never been identified. One of them was described by Maria as a balding man in his fifties. They took her to a house and raped her several times before letting her go to Truth threatened to kill her if she ever talked. A few months later, on the fourteenth of December, a University of Brussels medical student named Aksel traveled home for the weekend to the town of Naileen, just south of s Charlewois.
She left Brussels on Saturday afternoon by train to Charlerois, where she boarded a bus to her hometown of neelim Axcel exited the bus just after seven pm and started walking home when she noticed a dirty white van that seemed to be following her. Michel Martin was at the wheel, while Mark sat in the back of the van and Jean got out. As she passed by them, the back doors of the van flew open. Jean pushed her into the van while Mark pulled her in from the inside.
They immediately put masking tape over her eyes and took her to a house where she was forced to undress in front of all three of them. Axcel was locked up in that house for almost twenty four hours and repeatedly raped. Blowing Sunday, they dropped her off near her parents' home in Neilin, but not before stealing her cash and her pencil case. Just four days later, the trio struck again. Fifteen year old Elizabeth was riding her bike to school
on a cold December morning. In an almost identical abduction to what would happen ten years later to Sabine Darden. Elizabeth was ripped off of her bike and thrown into a dirty van. The story to True told her was also very similar to what he would tell Sabine several years later, that her kidnapping and rape was vengeance for something her father had done. Unlike Sabine, however, they let her go twelve hours later, a miscalculation that to True
would later correct. As I mentioned in the beginning, Jean van Pettign wasn't the cleverest man. He had given so many details about himself during his conversation with victims that police were able to piece it together and figure out who he was. They arrested him on February third, nineteen eighty six, and Van Petticum confessed to the police that he was one of Excel's three kidnappers. There was no point in denying it because investigators had found the girl's
pencil case during a search of his house. Under pressure from police, Jean spilled the beans and admitted to carrying out the kidnappings and rape with Detru and his wife Martin. He confessed to the abductions and rapes of Sylvia, Maria, Axcel, Elizabeth, and a fifth victim named Catherine, who was kidnapped and raped under similar circumstances. The True and Martin were also arrested. Martin first denied everything, then confessed, and then later retracted
her confession. Under pressure from de True, he denied everything, and when they later convicted him, he declared himself a victim and complained about a grave miscarriage of justice between the arrest and the hearing. The True also came under suspicion for another crime that involved the brutal robbery of a fifty eight year old woman who was tortured for three hours by de Truan two companions in her house
until she told them where the money was. On April twenty sixth, nineteen eighty nine, the True was sentenced to thirteen and a half years of prison. Van Petticum got six and a half years and Martage got five years. The True sentence was longer because he was also convicted of the brutal robbery of the woman. I was able to track down one of Mark d' true's former cellmates from his time in prison. This man's name is Danielle
de Jas. Danielle is soft spoken and articulate. He looks nothing like a man who's been to prison three times. He was a drug addict for twenty years and found himself often the same prison as the True in the late eighties, after getting busted for robbing a pharmacy in Charlehaugh, I asked him to explain how he meant the True in prison.
During free time, he would walk around the prison yard with a chessboard. That's how we met, and we probably played chess in the yard and he asked me to be a cell mate, and that's how I ended up with him. Afterwards, he turned out not to be easy at all to live with, because everything had to be exactly has. He decided, for example, to play chess when he wanted, even if I didn't feel like playing. And another thing at the time, I still smoked, and Marc
Dueto said he couldn't stand cigarette smoke. One time, he was coming back from the shower and I was smoking at the window, and he grabbed a table leg and threw it at my head, really violently, only missing me by a couple of centimeters. He completely denied kidnapping and
raping the young girls, but apparently it was filmed. I don't know if he filmed it or an accomplice, but he insisted that he had nothing to do with it and that he had only seen video during questioning, and he said that it showed a girl who had been forced to get undressed and was blindfolded standing up on a sofa, and the poor girl, blindfolded while standing on the sofa, lost her balance and fell on her face. And while he was telling me this, he was laughing,
like yayena, he thought it was so hilarious. It wasn't funny at all, you know. It was a scene that provoked compassion and pity to see the spoor girl to be forcibly undressed and falling on her face. But he thought it was irresistibly. And it was that sort of thing that convinced me he was guilty, because his personality fits so well with what he was accused of doing. At one point, he told me he wanted to build
a hiding place, extremely well built and discreet. And he explained what he actually did a few years later, and he told me he needed help to build it. I said, listen, I'm not interested. Why would I help you to do that? And he said, well, you can hide your drugs there. And at that point I clicked and said you want to build that to hide girls? And he didn't answer.
And then I'll.
Remember clearly when I saw on television years later that it was marked du true, I thought, oh my god, he did.
It while in prison, the true one about positioning himself as a model in me. He even attended AA meetings despite never having been a serious dress His good behavior earned him several temporary releases, where, accompanied by a guardian, he visited his ailing grandmother. She was incoherent and didn't even know he was in prison at the time, he introduced the guardian as a friend, and the latter was
impressed with Detrue's devotion and generosity. Of course, Mark de True knew that this guardian also sat on the parole board. Never want to miss an opportunity, he was also using these visits to sow the seeds that would help him fleece his grandmother out of her pension and house after prison. In nineteen ninety one, Mark's mother, Jeanine Lawance, wrote several letters to the prison pleading for them not to let her son out. In one of her letters, she wrote, quote,
I know his stubbornness to achieve whatever he wants. What I don't know, and what everyone who knows him fears is what he has in mind for the future unquote nonetheless. On the sixth of April nineteen nine, Mark was released on parole, only three years after being convicted in eighty nine. How could a man who violently kidnapped and raped five children and young women be let out of prison after serving less than half a sentence that seemed too short in the first place.
What the truth is in the eighties is really awful stuff. It's so strageous that he spends such a small time in prison for this.
This is the voice of Bruno Denis, who you also heard the start of this episode. Bruno's of Belgian with two daughters who lived through these times. I thought it would be interesting to give voice to a normal Belgian citizen.
I mean, it's not just one girl he kidnapped and raped, but five of them.
We're talking about girls as young as eleven years old, addicted in the streets and then raped and abused and threatened with the lives, and all of this before she and Merissa were even born.
Should have been the Jenoviti in nineteen eighty six, but my god, it was just a beginning.
What happens after he got out of prison is just beyond belief.
Next time, on La Mansa, we saw two.
Young girls walking along the street and he said, do you want to earn one hundred and fifty thousand Belgian francs And I said sure, but how? And then he said we had to kidnap the girls first. And then he showed me she wanted me to bring her Jeli la jeanne, and I thought, wait a minute, Jeli la jean I was convinced he made a Freudian slip. Jealie La Jean had gone missing way before Sabine was kidnapped. I knew at this point that we were onto something.
Nilissa Mimi not did fill Melissa.
Mimi, my little girl. I call you in the empty house, just to hear my voice resonate with your name like before, and to hope for a tenth of a second that you'll answer. But alas, I only hit a wall of silence.
So 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 resimo Mixed and mastered
by Cooper Skinner. Cover design by Trevor Eiler. La Monstra includes archival audio from Sonuma, RTBF Archives and CNN Archives. Special thanks to back Media 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.