Belgium destroys house where child killer Dutroux buried victims

BRUSSELS – Demolition crews have begun tearing down a second home used by notorious Belgian child killer Marc Dutroux to clean the stain of his crimes, local officials said on Tuesday.

Dutroux’s “House of Horrors”, in which he held kidnapped girls in a Charleroi suburb, has already been destroyed.

Now a second piece of land in the village of Sars-la-Buissiere, where two bodies were found, is to be demolished and landscaped.

“Everything is being destroyed, reduced to rubble, leaving no trace,” the mayor of the municipality of Lobbes, Lucien Bauduin, told AFP.

The house had been sealed off by the judicial authorities during the investigation and has now been purchased by the municipality.

Under the Sars-la-Buissiere estate, under several meters of earth, the bodies of eight-year-old Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo were found in 1996, a year after their disappearance.

Dutroux, now 66, was arrested a few days before the discovery and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004 for kidnapping six young girls, raping them and killing four of them.