August 23, 2022 • 37 mins
Less than 2 months after the disappearance of Julie and Melissa, two more girls go missing after attending a magic show. 17-year-old An Marchal and 18-year-old Eefje Lambrecks were last seen in the coastal town of Ostend. Police again are slow to react. No connection is made between the disappearances.
For more info visit www.monster-podcast.com
Archival audio for this series provided by Sonuma RTBF Archives and CNN Archives.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 contained subject matter which may
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
In August nineteen ninety five, just two months after Julie
LeJean and Melissa Rousseau went missing in the east of Belgium,
a group of teenagers who were part of the Harlequin
Amateur Theater group gathered at one of their houses to
put the final touches on their summer beach trip plans.
It was a big deal for most of the kids,
who'd never been on a parent's free vacation before. The
(00:49):
meeting took place at Paul and Betty Marshaw's house, who,
after much hesitation, decided to let their seventeen year old
daughter Anne join the trip. It was a nice group,
responsible kids, so Paul and Betty went upstairs and let
them plan their trip without helicoptering over them. Their daughter
Anne was so excited that she thought of nothing else
(01:11):
in the days prior to leading for the coast. The
train ride from Hustle to their destination in west Inda
on the Belgian coast was about two hundred kilometers. They'd
rented a bungalow there where ten of them would stay
(01:33):
for a week. Unfortunately, two of them would never return home.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Psychopaths is somebody who understands emotions.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
And I told them it is very exceptional that somebody
abducts two children at the same time.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Would have been the end of it in nineteen eighty six,
but my god, it was just a beginning.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
I think Belgium was a paralyzed for perverts in those days.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Welcome to La Monstra. I'm your host, Matt Graves. It
had been two months and the community of Liege and
Belgium was still desperately searching for answers and the disappearance
of eight year olds Julie Lejeanne and Melissa Russo. Their
disappearances were presumed to be an isolated incident, but on
(02:42):
August twenty third, nineteen ninety five, on the Belgian seaside,
two more girls would vanish while on a beach trip,
seventeen year old Anne Marschal and eighteen year old Effie Lambricks.
Their disappearance would quickly make the local news.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
He said that these.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Middle Anna, if you went missing, only about one hundred
miles away from Liege, where Julian Melissa disappeared. But the
two places are worlds apart. I'm originally from Texas, where
you can drive for two straight days without much of
a change in culture or scenery. Belgium is the opposite
(03:24):
of that. You can drive less than one hundred miles
and feel like you've been to three different countries. The
first two girls disappeared from Liege, a French speaking region
where rolling hills covered with thick pine forests cut through
river valleys. It's where part of the Battle of the
Bulge took place in World War II, as immortalized by
the book and series Band of Brothers. The Belgian coastal
(03:47):
province of West Flanders is quite the opposite. It's a
Dutch speaking region and one of the flattest places I've
ever seen. It's next to where the famous evacuation and
subsequent World War II Battle of Dunkirk took place. It
was there about twenty five miles up the beach from Dunkirk,
where the group of teenagers including Anne Marschal and Effie
Alambrichs had booked their beach trip. There was an excited
(04:12):
atmosphere when the teens checked into their bungalow at the
Marina Park resort in West Inda. It was about a
fifteen minute walk to the beach and a short bike
ride to the seaside town of Newport with its restaurants,
cafes and attractions. On Monday, some of them took a
(04:34):
one hour trip by tram to the larger town of
Blunkenberga to see a hypnotist show at the local casino.
It was a blast and two of them got free
passes to the following night's show. Anne Marshall originally planned
(04:55):
to check out the show with her friend Linda, but
she had gotten delayed, so another girl, Alambrics, took her
place so Anne didn't have to go alone. On Tuesday
evening August twenty second, Ann and Ifia rode their bikes
to the tram station in West India and boarded a
tram for Blunkenberger.
Speaker 6 (05:16):
I'll get us off Blanket back again.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
They made their way to the Blunkenberger Casino and used
their free tickets to get into the Rosty Rostelli hypnotist show.
The Rosty Rostelli show was a mix of magic and
group hypnosis. Rosti himself was a born entertainer, complete with
(05:40):
wavy black hair and a flair for live stage performance,
so who's going to be During the act, he would
get about eighty volunteers up on the stage, where he
would take them through a group hypnosis and then reselect
about fifteen of them who appeared to be responding well
to his spell. We know that Anne and Efia made
(06:02):
the cut that night because they were filmed on stage.
In the video, you can see Rosti on stage dressed
in black. First, you can see Efia smiling and giggling
until Rosti gives her a light tap on the back
of the head, and then she slumps forward in what
looks like a state of hypnosis. Next, you can see
(06:27):
Anne facing Rosti as he tickles a small doll that
seems to trigger her to start scratching her face. She
appears to be visibly annoyed and seems to tell him
to stop. After the show, both Anne and Effia were
captured on security cameras walking towards the exit of the
(06:49):
casino before midnight. They were supposed to catch the tram
at eleven forty five that would take them all the
way back to West ind but they didn't get on
that tram. Instead, they took the last tram at twelve
forty four am, which terminated at the station in Ostenda,
(07:10):
about halfway to their destination. The tram driver confirmed that
Anne and Effie were on this tram when it stopped
for end of service at one eighteen am and Ostenda.
Another employee recalled seeing them at around one twenty am
(07:31):
at the station, and finally, the last person to see
them was a taxi driver parked outside who reported seeing
them exit the station just after one twenty am. The
girls never made it back to the bungalow that morning.
I spoke to the father of Anne, Paul Marshal. His
(07:53):
memories of the disappearance are so painful that he didn't
want to have to go through a recorded interview. I
can only imagine the heartache that Paul, his wife Betty,
and their whole family must feel. Their lives were turned
upside down that summer, and still now twenty five years later,
(08:14):
the memories and the pain are still vivid. Paul agreed
to have his words read by an interpreter. What you'll
hear now, this.
Speaker 7 (08:24):
Was Anne's first time on holiday without any parents. My
wife Betty and I were initially hesitant about the idea.
I remember Anne said, Dad, I'm almost eighteen, and after
thinking on it, we decided to let her take the trip.
Anne was very responsible and she was so excited about
this trip with her friends. On the day she left,
(08:47):
I dropped her off at the train station with her bike.
Speaker 6 (08:49):
And huge backpack. She was so happy.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
I'll never forget the pure joy radiating from her face
that day. A few days later, I got all around
nine forty five at night from one of her friends.
The friend explained that Anne and another girl, Afia, hadn't
returned home after attending a show the previous evening. All
of the kids were worried sick because it wasn't like
(09:14):
Anne or Afia to just decide to stay out all
night and the next day. They had tried to report
it to the police in west Enda, but they weren't
taken seriously, so finally they decided to call the parents.
I was really calm and lucid at the time. It
surprised me. I called the mother of the other missing
(09:36):
girl and we reported the disappearance to the local police
in our town. After filling out the report, we drove
to the coast, leaving it around three o'clock in the morning.
I think we arrived at the bungalow around five am.
(09:56):
I remember feeling like an intruder, but the other kids
were happy to see us. They were all really worried.
There wasn't really much to say. Anne and Afia had
left to go see a show and simply didn't return.
I took a break to lie down on Anne's bed
in the bungalow to gather my thoughts. I found Anne's
(10:18):
cherished little stuff Snoopy on the pillow. She'd had it
since she was a little girl and still brought it
with her everywhere. The little ribbon around Snoopy's neck was
still there. It had a note attached in her handwriting,
offering a reward of one hundred francs for Snoopy's safe
return in casey went missing. It was at that moment
(10:39):
that it really hit me. Something terrible must have happened
to Anne. That evening, we visited the casino where the
girls went to the show. Security cameras had captured images
of the girls after the show in the casino lobby.
It was very hard to look. At these last images,
(11:00):
Anne looked really vacant and she was holding her hands strangely.
It didn't make sense for them to be in the
lobby at this point. Most people use a different exit
when shows are over, and the direction that they were
walking in was the opposite direction of the trend that
they were supposed to catch. The actual show itself was
also filmed, and later I watched the whole thing. It
(11:23):
was very upsetting Anne. And if you are on stage
and they appear to be hypnotized, at one point they're
eating lemons that they've been told were peaches. I realized
this must have been why Anne was holding her hands
strangely in the security camera video, as if she were
holding the lemon from the show. In the last images
(11:45):
of Anne during the show, you can see her reacting
to the magician tickling a little doll. She was rubbing
her face and yelled stop.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
She looked confused and upset.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
I couldn't help but think that the hypnosis had messed
them up somehow, or maybe they weren't properly woken up
from their hypnotic state.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Imagine the confusion the parents must have been going through.
Suddenly they get a call that their daughters have been
missing for more than twenty four hours. The last images
they see are of their daughters being hypnotized and then
meandering around a casino lobby near midnight, looking confused. Paul
wondered if their disappearance was related to the hypnosis. That
(12:35):
they weren't properly woken up from their hypnotic state, but
is that possible. I spoke to one of the world's
leading experts in hypnosis, Doctor David Spiegel, studied medicine at
Harvard and as a professor and chair at the Stanford
University School of Medicine. He also actively practices psychiatry at
Stanford Healthcare. Andy created a digital hypnosis program and app
(13:00):
called Reverie Health.
Speaker 8 (13:03):
Hypnosis is just a state of highly focused attention. It's
something like getting so caught up in a good movie
or a play that you forget you're watching the movie
or the play, and you enter the imagined world. It's
been called believed in imagination. And we know from functional
magnetic resonance imaging studies that when people go into a
(13:24):
state of hypnosis, they turn down activity in a part
of the brain that is called the salience network. That
part of the brain that causes you to worry should
I be thinking about this rather than that? And instead
you allow yourself to just immerse yourself in whatever it
is you're focusing on.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
If you're in that state of hypnosis, as you just explained,
are you aware of yourself or are you not aware
of yourself?
Speaker 8 (13:49):
Usually, well, that's an interesting question, Matt. We found also
that the part of the brain that is thinking and
planning is relatively disconnected from the part of the brain
that is self aware. We call that dissociation. So you're
doing it, but you're not necessarily aware of yourself doing it.
You're not monitoring yourself. You're just experiencing it, and that
(14:10):
allows you to experience it more thoroughly. That's what good
actors and actresses do, is that they lose themselves in
the part. They become the other person and set aside
their own personal identity.
Speaker 6 (14:22):
Can hypnosis be dangerous?
Speaker 8 (14:24):
Well, you know, anything that has the power to help
has the power to hurt. It can help people take
on a new point of view, give up old ideas.
The fact that you're setting aside your salience, your view
of what might be a problem or dangerous means, and
in a sense in hypnosis, you're more gullible, You're more
willing to take on the instruction of someone who is
(14:45):
conducting the hypnosis if they are, and less likely to
judge and evaluate it. So if somebody is doing something
that is irresponsible or even dangerous, you're more likely to
go along with it.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
What about group hypnosis or hypnosis shows where you have
a hypnotist to claims or attempts to hypnotize a large
group audience at the same time. What do you think
about that? In general?
Speaker 8 (15:10):
I'm not a big fan of hypnosis shows. I think
it can be used dangerously. I've known of situations where
people were left in a hypnotic state and were somewhat
confused or upset. And there's one trick that all of
the stage hypnotists use that the people don't realize. They'll
start out running a series of people through the initial steps,
and what they're doing is screening for the fifteen to
(15:33):
twenty percent of the population who are extremely hypnotizable, and
those are the ones they keep up on the stage
for all the fancy tricks, and they excuse the other
people who are less hypnotizable. I don't want people to
think that by and large, hypnosis is dangerous and you
get stuck in a hypnotic state and never come out.
I've never lost a patient in a state of self hypnosis,
and I've used it about seven thousand people in my career. However,
(15:56):
there are situations, especially for highly hypnotizable people, if they
are not helped to exit the state, and if they're
not familiar with it, they may wind up in a
hypnotic like state for some period of time, normally till
they go to bed and go to sleep, and in
that state they may be less critical, less likely to evaluate,
(16:16):
for example, evaluate the potential of danger than they would ordinarily.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
So Anne and Ifia were certainly in the highly hypnotizable
category he describes, because we know that they were selected
in the smaller group of people to be part of
the main act. According to doctor Spiegel, it is possible
that Anne and Efia could have been in a more
vulnerable state than normal after the show. It might help
to explain their erratic movements between when the show ended
(16:47):
at eleven fifteen pm and when they were last seen
more than two hours later, around one thirty am. We'll
get into this in a moment but first let's hear
from the family of the other girl who went me,
Effia Lambres. Jean Lombrex is Efia's father. His partner, Else
(17:07):
Schures agreed to speak with me about what John was
going through around the time of the disappearance. Else is
an impressive woman who speaks four languages and carries herself
with class and dignity. I asked her about Jean Lambres
at the time his daughter Efia went missing.
Speaker 9 (17:26):
You see, at that time, jeh was forty seven years
old on the twenty third, So the day after, Jean
received a phone call from If his mother. You need
to know that John and If his mother, they had
divorced seven years prior to this event. So If his
mother called Jean and she told him that if you
(17:47):
had not returned to the bungalow the day before after
having visited a show in Blankenberge. Now that was a
very strange message, and obviously Jean I immediately knew that
something was very very wrong. He knew his daughter If
he had a very good understanding with both of her parents.
(18:10):
They trusted one another, that was no problem. He was
overwhelmed actually with grief, but also with fear because you
need to know that several years prior to this, he
also lost a baby's son, a two year old son
who died from a disease.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
I wasn't aware that John Lombricks had also lost a
son when I started this project. We all encounter a
misfortune in life, but some people really get more than
their fair share of tragedy. A friend of mine lost
his child at a young age and then went through
a divorce. He was never the same and eventually ended
(18:52):
up taking his own life. Most of us will, thankfully
never understand what it's like to lose al. To lose
a second child is an especially cruel twist of fate.
Jean has gone through some incredibly dark tunnels in his life.
I'm happy that he's met such a great and positive
(19:14):
person else. She's really helped me to explore some of
the darker edges of this case. I asked her if
she thought there were aspects of the disappearance that weren't
completely followed up.
Speaker 9 (19:28):
Yes, in my opinions, certainly there are leads that would
have needed more investigation. For instance, a few days before
she disappeared, it was early morning hours of Sunday, A
group of the friends went to Newport, a little town
a bit further. They went there by bicycle. They had
(19:49):
a few drinks at a terrace, and then the bar
owner of that terrace suggested they'd go out and have
some more drinks other bars.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
The minimum drinking age in Belgium is only sixteen, so
it wasn't unusual for a group of teenagers to hit
the bars.
Speaker 9 (20:07):
Okay, if he and two of her friends joined this adult,
this bar owner and a friend of his, and they
visited a few more bars, had some drinks, and afterwards
the bar owner took the girls in his jeep. He
took them back to their bungalow. Okay, he put them
(20:28):
back home, and when they said goodbye, he even gave
them a few bottles of I don't remember what it was,
a liqua anyway, alcoholic drinks.
Speaker 6 (20:39):
Okay.
Speaker 9 (20:41):
Then Sunday nothing happened. But on Monday night, if you
went for a walk with a friend, and they walked
through the dunes, and then again, all of a sudden,
she saw this man that she had met in Newport,
and I was she felt very strange about it. This man,
again in his jeep, had drinks. He offered them drinks
(21:04):
to Afia to her friend, and actually he wanted if
his friend to drink a lot of alcohol, okay, and
if he was very, very upset about what was happening.
In the end, he agreed to drive them back to
their bungalow again on Monday night. But if he told
her friends that she was not confident. She was upset.
(21:25):
She was actually scared of this man who acted weirdly.
He was trying to impose himself on her. He was
harassing between brackets her and she did not at all
feel comfortable about it.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
Was this man a grown man or was he.
Speaker 9 (21:40):
A Yes, certainly he was a grown man. He was
the tenant of this bar in Newport where they had
their first drinks, okay. And then actually the police investigated
this Newport guy. They questioned him, they even observed him,
but they came to the conclusion that there was a
mistake and that he was not the man that Avia
(22:02):
and her friend had met on Monday night in the
dunes during their walk. So that was it. The investigation
stopped there.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
And what about the friends that uh were there and
heard if you talk about this man were what did
they think? Did they believe that the police were wrong
about that and that this had to be the guy.
Speaker 9 (22:23):
Or of course, I mean when she returned to the bungalow,
if you had told her friends, many of her friends,
what had happened, and that she was upset about it,
so the friends could come to no other conclusion that
she really had met this Newport guy in the Junes. Again, Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
And of course she was out with him quite a
long time the previous night, so it's hard to believe
that she could mistaken this person for a whole nother person.
It seems strange to me.
Speaker 9 (22:54):
I think. I think it is absolutely impossible that she
was mistaken. There's one more element. She was very much
interested in cars. If so, she described the car, and
she would never ever have been wrong in describing a
car because she was very interested in cars. She knew
everything about it, so that was apart from the person
(23:16):
that she ad met. She also described the car mentioned
it to her friends. So in my humble opinion, there
can be no doubt about the fact that if you
had met this Newport guy in the.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Tunes, it does seem very suspicious that just before disappearing,
if you got bad vibes from a man who was
hanging out with these younger kids and trying to get
them drunk. Else continues, she tells me about another lead.
It may sound similar, but this lead involves another bar
and man who's a hotel owner in Blunkenberg.
Speaker 9 (23:51):
There is another very very worrying connection, and that is
the fact that the girls were seen on the night
of their disappearance. They were seen very close to and
even in front of a so called Hotel Brazil in Blankenberger.
They had just assisted a show in the casino, they
left the casino and then they were seen by several
(24:14):
witnesses in front of this hotel, so called Hotel Brazil,
which in fact was not a hotel, a regular hotel.
It was actually a bar, some kind of a brothel.
And the owner of this bar was known to the police.
He was known for human trafficking, he was known for prostitution,
(24:34):
he was known for keeping illegal arms, so he was
very much into criminal affairs. Okay, now, what happened. We're
talking about the twenty second of August. But as you know,
two months prior to that, two little girls disappeared in
Grassologne in the Liege area, and one witness in this
(24:59):
case wrote a letter to the police saying that he
had seen at the spot where the girls presumably were
taken a red car, and he also mentioned the license plate. Now,
the fact is that this license plate belonged to a
friend of this bar owner in Blankenberger, the owner of
Hotel Brazil. But moreover, this friend of his with a
(25:22):
license plate that was seen in Grasslona also stayed at
the Hotel Brazil during the summer of nineteen ninety five.
So eventually this bar owner he was questioned by the police.
He was questioned the first time on the first of
October nineteen ninety six, and then one time or a
second time on the sixteenth of October. But after that
(25:46):
he actually vanished from the earth. So he left. He
left Blankemberger. He announced to the local authorities that he
would go to Germany, but in Germany there was no
trace of him left. So in Belgium the detectives could
take no further action. He was not involved in the
investigation anymore.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Remember that mysterious red car in episode one. Could it
be a coincidence that the license plate number reported by
the doctor and liege after the disappearance of Julian Melissa
is almost an exact match to a license plate that
leads right to one of the last places Anne and
Efia were seen alive. It's a bit confusing, so let's
(26:29):
summarize the facts.
Speaker 6 (26:30):
At this point.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
More than one witness claims to have seen Anne and
Effia after the hypnotist show in front of the Hotel
Brazil or nearby in the same street in Blankenbega. The
owner of this hotel and bar had previously been charged
with engaging in prostitution and human trafficking. A friend of
the hotel and bar owner, who is staying at the
(26:54):
Hotel Brazil when Anne and Efi went missing, owns a
car with a license plate that's almost in a exact
match to a license plate identified by a witness of
a suspicious car in Grasselogna under the bridge where Julian
Melissa disappeared. After the owner of the Hotel Brazil was
questioned by police, he disappeared from Belgium and was never
(27:14):
seen again, despite police searches in Belgium and Germany, where
he said he was relocating. To this day, there are
still questions about this man's potential involvement. One of the
witnesses who claimed to have seen Anne an Effia in
front of the Hotel Brazil. Was a butcher named Eric
(27:34):
van Dam who had his shop and home right next
to the hotel. I wanted to speak with him, but
unfortunately he passed away since but I was actually able
to track down his son, Dirk van Dam, who agreed
to speak with me. This is the first time he's
ever been recorded speaking about this. Dirk is a jovial
(27:55):
man in his early fifties. He has red hair and
a sturdy build and speaks with the sort of earnest
directness that you often find in the Dutch speaking region
of Flanders. He had a lot to say about the
Hotel Brazil and its owner. At this point, I don't
want to accuse or implicate anyone without deeper investigation, so
(28:15):
I've bleeped out the name of the man he's talking about.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
It's somebody who left a very deep psychological imprint to
me in my life. As you know, or my father
was a butcher at his own butcher shop in Blankenberg
at the time of the disappearing of an an Athia.
My father thought that he had seen on an Athia
(28:41):
at the Hotel Brazil, which was next door the butcher
shop and the house where my father lived. The hotel
Brazil at the time was owned by and my father
came in conflicts with this person us At a certain time,
(29:02):
he found a young woman outside of his front door,
because the two entrances of the houses were next to
each other, literally next to each other, and he found
outside the front door of his house, he found a
young woman, a Brazilian woman, crying and who had been beaten,
(29:23):
and my father took the woman inside, and it turned
out that this woman had been fetched from Brazil by
whose wife I recall I think was Brazilian, and she
had been brought to Belgium with the expectation that she
(29:47):
would have work, but in reality it was meant for prostitution,
and mister had taken all documents, passport so that he
controlled this woman. My father then contacted the police and
the police went inside the house, found another woman and
(30:08):
also found weapons in the house, and as a result
of that was put to jail for a certain time. Afterwards,
we had a lot of problems with the man. If
we went outside, if we showed our faces at each time,
we were stocked. Everybody came to our house was stocked
(30:31):
because of that was the situation with the Brazilian woman.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
What can you tell me about him as a person?
Speaker 3 (30:38):
For me, it was a psychopaths. I think that's the
correct description of the man, because a psychopath is somebody
who understands emotions, who manipulates. So it's very good at
manipulating people. But it's really inside is a old hearted man.
(31:02):
And I think that's the best way to describe this man,
because he could be friendly to people and at the
same time, or in a split second, be very aggressive
to me or to somebody else, enjoying the fear that
he spreads when he did those things.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Did he actually you talk about stalking? Did he ever
attack you or your father?
Speaker 6 (31:27):
Yes, yes, yes, yes yes.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
For instance, we had a garage at the other side
of the street where we parked the car. It was
very simple. I only had to go to the garage,
and he often came across the street with somebody else
to physically attack me.
Speaker 6 (31:47):
So he attacked you physically more than one time?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes all the time.
Speaker 6 (31:51):
And with other people too, or yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah it happened with other people. It also happened one
time that my father drove out of the garage, and
my father wasn't a big man. He was one meter
seventy that a very big man, a German Man opened
the door, smiled and said he took my father by
the just and said he shoffered us, I will do that,
(32:16):
which showed the intention of harming my father a grave
dangerous way. His whole being was. It was a really
in deep and evil man.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Really, what was this relationship with his Brazilian wife?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Will I won't say this from who I know it,
matt I will I will tell you in another time,
but from good source that his wife was very scared
of him, so that she feared him as well.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
And when you heard that he left the country very
suddenly after all of this came out, did you think
that he could be the kind of guy who would
be involved and you know, abduct children or something like that.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I have no doubt, no doubt at all that he
might be involved, no doubts about that.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
So who is this mysterious man and what can we
find out about him? Is he alive? If so, it
doesn't appear he's in Belgium. Maybe he's in Germany or Brazil.
If he is alive, it'd be interesting to find him
and question him about his friend with the red car
and the girl's disappearance. At the time, no one thought
(33:35):
that the two disappearances in these vastly different regions of
Belgium were related. One thing is for sure, even to
this day, twenty five years later, the families of Anne
and Effia would like to know what happened between the
time the Hypnotist show ended and their girls were last seen.
The show ended at around eleven to fifteen pm, so
(33:58):
they would have had plenty of time catch the last
tram at eleven forty four pm. Their friends who had
previously attended the show specifically warned them not to miss
this tram because it was the last one that went
all the way back to Westenda where they were staying.
Maybe they just missed it, but you'd have expected them
(34:18):
to take the next tram leaving at twelve fourteen am.
But they didn't take that one either. They took the
last one, leaving at twelve forty four am that ended
service at Ostenda at one eighteen am, where they were
last seen by a taxi driver outside the station. What
we're in in ef youa doing in the two hours
(34:40):
between when the show ended and they were last seen
and what happened to them in Ostenda before they vanished.
Now there were four sets of parents desperately looking for
their children in two very different parts of the country. Unfortunately,
more parents would soon join this list. Next time, on
(35:08):
La Montre.
Speaker 10 (35:11):
The other at around nine am, the phone rang and
Captain Ballar informed me that a fourteen year old girl
went missing the previous evening in the village of Bear Tree.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
A colleague of mine, Fred vor Nambussa, and all the journalists.
He published a book in those days. The title was
young Girls Don't Disappear just like that, and it was
a perfect way of expressing what we all felt because
every summer there were young girls getting killed or disappeared, right,
and there was a very strange and difference among the people,
(35:47):
but among the police as well.
Speaker 4 (35:49):
Really neat, I brought together the parents and the authorities
who have been criticizing face to face. You have to
note that the judge appointed you oversee the investigation left
for a five week vacation a few days after being appointed,
as luck.
Speaker 10 (36:06):
Would have it, by a young man who had given
us information on Monday. I thought he remembered part of
a license plate number.
Speaker 6 (36:25):
LEA.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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
(36:49):
Trevor Young. Original music by Jay Ragsdale, Sound design by
Cooper Skinner and Thomas Resimont, mixed and mastered by Cooper Skinner.
Speaker 6 (36:58):
Cover design by Trevor La.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
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
(37:21):
from iHeartRadio or Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 contained subject matter which may
not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
In August nineteen ninety five, just two months after Julie
LeJean and Melissa Rousseau went missing in the east of Belgium,
a group of teenagers who were part of the Harlequin
Amateur Theater group gathered at one of their houses to
put the final touches on their summer beach trip plans.
It was a big deal for most of the kids,
who'd never been on a parent's free vacation before. The
(00:49):
meeting took place at Paul and Betty Marshaw's house, who,
after much hesitation, decided to let their seventeen year old
daughter Anne join the trip. It was a nice group,
responsible kids, so Paul and Betty went upstairs and let
them plan their trip without helicoptering over them. Their daughter
Anne was so excited that she thought of nothing else
(01:11):
in the days prior to leading for the coast. The
train ride from Hustle to their destination in west Inda
on the Belgian coast was about two hundred kilometers. They'd
rented a bungalow there where ten of them would stay
(01:33):
for a week. Unfortunately, two of them would never return home.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Psychopaths is somebody who understands emotions.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
And I told them it is very exceptional that somebody
abducts two children at the same time.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
Would have been the end of it in nineteen eighty six,
but my god, it was just a beginning.
Speaker 5 (02:10):
I think Belgium was a paralyzed for perverts in those days.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Welcome to La Monstra. I'm your host, Matt Graves. It
had been two months and the community of Liege and
Belgium was still desperately searching for answers and the disappearance
of eight year olds Julie Lejeanne and Melissa Russo. Their
disappearances were presumed to be an isolated incident, but on
(02:42):
August twenty third, nineteen ninety five, on the Belgian seaside,
two more girls would vanish while on a beach trip,
seventeen year old Anne Marschal and eighteen year old Effie Lambricks.
Their disappearance would quickly make the local news.
Speaker 5 (03:00):
He said that these.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Middle Anna, if you went missing, only about one hundred
miles away from Liege, where Julian Melissa disappeared. But the
two places are worlds apart. I'm originally from Texas, where
you can drive for two straight days without much of
a change in culture or scenery. Belgium is the opposite
(03:24):
of that. You can drive less than one hundred miles
and feel like you've been to three different countries. The
first two girls disappeared from Liege, a French speaking region
where rolling hills covered with thick pine forests cut through
river valleys. It's where part of the Battle of the
Bulge took place in World War II, as immortalized by
the book and series Band of Brothers. The Belgian coastal
(03:47):
province of West Flanders is quite the opposite. It's a
Dutch speaking region and one of the flattest places I've
ever seen. It's next to where the famous evacuation and
subsequent World War II Battle of Dunkirk took place. It
was there about twenty five miles up the beach from Dunkirk,
where the group of teenagers including Anne Marschal and Effie
Alambrichs had booked their beach trip. There was an excited
(04:12):
atmosphere when the teens checked into their bungalow at the
Marina Park resort in West Inda. It was about a
fifteen minute walk to the beach and a short bike
ride to the seaside town of Newport with its restaurants,
cafes and attractions. On Monday, some of them took a
(04:34):
one hour trip by tram to the larger town of
Blunkenberga to see a hypnotist show at the local casino.
It was a blast and two of them got free
passes to the following night's show. Anne Marshall originally planned
(04:55):
to check out the show with her friend Linda, but
she had gotten delayed, so another girl, Alambrics, took her
place so Anne didn't have to go alone. On Tuesday
evening August twenty second, Ann and Ifia rode their bikes
to the tram station in West India and boarded a
tram for Blunkenberger.
Speaker 6 (05:16):
I'll get us off Blanket back again.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
They made their way to the Blunkenberger Casino and used
their free tickets to get into the Rosty Rostelli hypnotist show.
The Rosty Rostelli show was a mix of magic and
group hypnosis. Rosti himself was a born entertainer, complete with
(05:40):
wavy black hair and a flair for live stage performance,
so who's going to be During the act, he would
get about eighty volunteers up on the stage, where he
would take them through a group hypnosis and then reselect
about fifteen of them who appeared to be responding well
to his spell. We know that Anne and Efia made
(06:02):
the cut that night because they were filmed on stage.
In the video, you can see Rosti on stage dressed
in black. First, you can see Efia smiling and giggling
until Rosti gives her a light tap on the back
of the head, and then she slumps forward in what
looks like a state of hypnosis. Next, you can see
(06:27):
Anne facing Rosti as he tickles a small doll that
seems to trigger her to start scratching her face. She
appears to be visibly annoyed and seems to tell him
to stop. After the show, both Anne and Effia were
captured on security cameras walking towards the exit of the
(06:49):
casino before midnight. They were supposed to catch the tram
at eleven forty five that would take them all the
way back to West ind but they didn't get on
that tram. Instead, they took the last tram at twelve
forty four am, which terminated at the station in Ostenda,
(07:10):
about halfway to their destination. The tram driver confirmed that
Anne and Effie were on this tram when it stopped
for end of service at one eighteen am and Ostenda.
Another employee recalled seeing them at around one twenty am
(07:31):
at the station, and finally, the last person to see
them was a taxi driver parked outside who reported seeing
them exit the station just after one twenty am. The
girls never made it back to the bungalow that morning.
I spoke to the father of Anne, Paul Marshal. His
(07:53):
memories of the disappearance are so painful that he didn't
want to have to go through a recorded interview. I
can only imagine the heartache that Paul, his wife Betty,
and their whole family must feel. Their lives were turned
upside down that summer, and still now twenty five years later,
(08:14):
the memories and the pain are still vivid. Paul agreed
to have his words read by an interpreter. What you'll
hear now, this.
Speaker 7 (08:24):
Was Anne's first time on holiday without any parents. My
wife Betty and I were initially hesitant about the idea.
I remember Anne said, Dad, I'm almost eighteen, and after
thinking on it, we decided to let her take the trip.
Anne was very responsible and she was so excited about
this trip with her friends. On the day she left,
(08:47):
I dropped her off at the train station with her bike.
Speaker 6 (08:49):
And huge backpack. She was so happy.
Speaker 7 (08:53):
I'll never forget the pure joy radiating from her face
that day. A few days later, I got all around
nine forty five at night from one of her friends.
The friend explained that Anne and another girl, Afia, hadn't
returned home after attending a show the previous evening. All
of the kids were worried sick because it wasn't like
(09:14):
Anne or Afia to just decide to stay out all
night and the next day. They had tried to report
it to the police in west Enda, but they weren't
taken seriously, so finally they decided to call the parents.
I was really calm and lucid at the time. It
surprised me. I called the mother of the other missing
(09:36):
girl and we reported the disappearance to the local police
in our town. After filling out the report, we drove
to the coast, leaving it around three o'clock in the morning.
I think we arrived at the bungalow around five am.
(09:56):
I remember feeling like an intruder, but the other kids
were happy to see us. They were all really worried.
There wasn't really much to say. Anne and Afia had
left to go see a show and simply didn't return.
I took a break to lie down on Anne's bed
in the bungalow to gather my thoughts. I found Anne's
(10:18):
cherished little stuff Snoopy on the pillow. She'd had it
since she was a little girl and still brought it
with her everywhere. The little ribbon around Snoopy's neck was
still there. It had a note attached in her handwriting,
offering a reward of one hundred francs for Snoopy's safe
return in casey went missing. It was at that moment
(10:39):
that it really hit me. Something terrible must have happened
to Anne. That evening, we visited the casino where the
girls went to the show. Security cameras had captured images
of the girls after the show in the casino lobby.
It was very hard to look. At these last images,
(11:00):
Anne looked really vacant and she was holding her hands strangely.
It didn't make sense for them to be in the
lobby at this point. Most people use a different exit
when shows are over, and the direction that they were
walking in was the opposite direction of the trend that
they were supposed to catch. The actual show itself was
also filmed, and later I watched the whole thing. It
(11:23):
was very upsetting Anne. And if you are on stage
and they appear to be hypnotized, at one point they're
eating lemons that they've been told were peaches. I realized
this must have been why Anne was holding her hands
strangely in the security camera video, as if she were
holding the lemon from the show. In the last images
(11:45):
of Anne during the show, you can see her reacting
to the magician tickling a little doll. She was rubbing
her face and yelled stop.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
She looked confused and upset.
Speaker 7 (11:56):
I couldn't help but think that the hypnosis had messed
them up somehow, or maybe they weren't properly woken up
from their hypnotic state.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Imagine the confusion the parents must have been going through.
Suddenly they get a call that their daughters have been
missing for more than twenty four hours. The last images
they see are of their daughters being hypnotized and then
meandering around a casino lobby near midnight, looking confused. Paul
wondered if their disappearance was related to the hypnosis. That
(12:35):
they weren't properly woken up from their hypnotic state, but
is that possible. I spoke to one of the world's
leading experts in hypnosis, Doctor David Spiegel, studied medicine at
Harvard and as a professor and chair at the Stanford
University School of Medicine. He also actively practices psychiatry at
Stanford Healthcare. Andy created a digital hypnosis program and app
(13:00):
called Reverie Health.
Speaker 8 (13:03):
Hypnosis is just a state of highly focused attention. It's
something like getting so caught up in a good movie
or a play that you forget you're watching the movie
or the play, and you enter the imagined world. It's
been called believed in imagination. And we know from functional
magnetic resonance imaging studies that when people go into a
(13:24):
state of hypnosis, they turn down activity in a part
of the brain that is called the salience network. That
part of the brain that causes you to worry should
I be thinking about this rather than that? And instead
you allow yourself to just immerse yourself in whatever it
is you're focusing on.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
If you're in that state of hypnosis, as you just explained,
are you aware of yourself or are you not aware
of yourself?
Speaker 8 (13:49):
Usually, well, that's an interesting question, Matt. We found also
that the part of the brain that is thinking and
planning is relatively disconnected from the part of the brain
that is self aware. We call that dissociation. So you're
doing it, but you're not necessarily aware of yourself doing it.
You're not monitoring yourself. You're just experiencing it, and that
(14:10):
allows you to experience it more thoroughly. That's what good
actors and actresses do, is that they lose themselves in
the part. They become the other person and set aside
their own personal identity.
Speaker 6 (14:22):
Can hypnosis be dangerous?
Speaker 8 (14:24):
Well, you know, anything that has the power to help
has the power to hurt. It can help people take
on a new point of view, give up old ideas.
The fact that you're setting aside your salience, your view
of what might be a problem or dangerous means, and
in a sense in hypnosis, you're more gullible, You're more
willing to take on the instruction of someone who is
(14:45):
conducting the hypnosis if they are, and less likely to
judge and evaluate it. So if somebody is doing something
that is irresponsible or even dangerous, you're more likely to
go along with it.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
What about group hypnosis or hypnosis shows where you have
a hypnotist to claims or attempts to hypnotize a large
group audience at the same time. What do you think
about that? In general?
Speaker 8 (15:10):
I'm not a big fan of hypnosis shows. I think
it can be used dangerously. I've known of situations where
people were left in a hypnotic state and were somewhat
confused or upset. And there's one trick that all of
the stage hypnotists use that the people don't realize. They'll
start out running a series of people through the initial steps,
and what they're doing is screening for the fifteen to
(15:33):
twenty percent of the population who are extremely hypnotizable, and
those are the ones they keep up on the stage
for all the fancy tricks, and they excuse the other
people who are less hypnotizable. I don't want people to
think that by and large, hypnosis is dangerous and you
get stuck in a hypnotic state and never come out.
I've never lost a patient in a state of self hypnosis,
and I've used it about seven thousand people in my career. However,
(15:56):
there are situations, especially for highly hypnotizable people, if they
are not helped to exit the state, and if they're
not familiar with it, they may wind up in a
hypnotic like state for some period of time, normally till
they go to bed and go to sleep, and in
that state they may be less critical, less likely to evaluate,
(16:16):
for example, evaluate the potential of danger than they would ordinarily.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
So Anne and Ifia were certainly in the highly hypnotizable
category he describes, because we know that they were selected
in the smaller group of people to be part of
the main act. According to doctor Spiegel, it is possible
that Anne and Efia could have been in a more
vulnerable state than normal after the show. It might help
to explain their erratic movements between when the show ended
(16:47):
at eleven fifteen pm and when they were last seen
more than two hours later, around one thirty am. We'll
get into this in a moment but first let's hear
from the family of the other girl who went me,
Effia Lambres. Jean Lombrex is Efia's father. His partner, Else
(17:07):
Schures agreed to speak with me about what John was
going through around the time of the disappearance. Else is
an impressive woman who speaks four languages and carries herself
with class and dignity. I asked her about Jean Lambres
at the time his daughter Efia went missing.
Speaker 9 (17:26):
You see, at that time, jeh was forty seven years
old on the twenty third, So the day after, Jean
received a phone call from If his mother. You need
to know that John and If his mother, they had
divorced seven years prior to this event. So If his
mother called Jean and she told him that if you
(17:47):
had not returned to the bungalow the day before after
having visited a show in Blankenberge. Now that was a
very strange message, and obviously Jean I immediately knew that
something was very very wrong. He knew his daughter If
he had a very good understanding with both of her parents.
(18:10):
They trusted one another, that was no problem. He was
overwhelmed actually with grief, but also with fear because you
need to know that several years prior to this, he
also lost a baby's son, a two year old son
who died from a disease.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
I wasn't aware that John Lombricks had also lost a
son when I started this project. We all encounter a
misfortune in life, but some people really get more than
their fair share of tragedy. A friend of mine lost
his child at a young age and then went through
a divorce. He was never the same and eventually ended
(18:52):
up taking his own life. Most of us will, thankfully
never understand what it's like to lose al. To lose
a second child is an especially cruel twist of fate.
Jean has gone through some incredibly dark tunnels in his life.
I'm happy that he's met such a great and positive
(19:14):
person else. She's really helped me to explore some of
the darker edges of this case. I asked her if
she thought there were aspects of the disappearance that weren't
completely followed up.
Speaker 9 (19:28):
Yes, in my opinions, certainly there are leads that would
have needed more investigation. For instance, a few days before
she disappeared, it was early morning hours of Sunday, A
group of the friends went to Newport, a little town
a bit further. They went there by bicycle. They had
(19:49):
a few drinks at a terrace, and then the bar
owner of that terrace suggested they'd go out and have
some more drinks other bars.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
The minimum drinking age in Belgium is only sixteen, so
it wasn't unusual for a group of teenagers to hit
the bars.
Speaker 9 (20:07):
Okay, if he and two of her friends joined this adult,
this bar owner and a friend of his, and they
visited a few more bars, had some drinks, and afterwards
the bar owner took the girls in his jeep. He
took them back to their bungalow. Okay, he put them
(20:28):
back home, and when they said goodbye, he even gave
them a few bottles of I don't remember what it was,
a liqua anyway, alcoholic drinks.
Speaker 6 (20:39):
Okay.
Speaker 9 (20:41):
Then Sunday nothing happened. But on Monday night, if you
went for a walk with a friend, and they walked
through the dunes, and then again, all of a sudden,
she saw this man that she had met in Newport,
and I was she felt very strange about it. This man,
again in his jeep, had drinks. He offered them drinks
(21:04):
to Afia to her friend, and actually he wanted if
his friend to drink a lot of alcohol, okay, and
if he was very, very upset about what was happening.
In the end, he agreed to drive them back to
their bungalow again on Monday night. But if he told
her friends that she was not confident. She was upset.
(21:25):
She was actually scared of this man who acted weirdly.
He was trying to impose himself on her. He was
harassing between brackets her and she did not at all
feel comfortable about it.
Speaker 6 (21:38):
Was this man a grown man or was he.
Speaker 9 (21:40):
A Yes, certainly he was a grown man. He was
the tenant of this bar in Newport where they had
their first drinks, okay. And then actually the police investigated
this Newport guy. They questioned him, they even observed him,
but they came to the conclusion that there was a
mistake and that he was not the man that Avia
(22:02):
and her friend had met on Monday night in the
dunes during their walk. So that was it. The investigation
stopped there.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
And what about the friends that uh were there and
heard if you talk about this man were what did
they think? Did they believe that the police were wrong
about that and that this had to be the guy.
Speaker 9 (22:23):
Or of course, I mean when she returned to the bungalow,
if you had told her friends, many of her friends,
what had happened, and that she was upset about it,
so the friends could come to no other conclusion that
she really had met this Newport guy in the Junes. Again, Yeah,
that's right.
Speaker 2 (22:42):
And of course she was out with him quite a
long time the previous night, so it's hard to believe
that she could mistaken this person for a whole nother person.
It seems strange to me.
Speaker 9 (22:54):
I think. I think it is absolutely impossible that she
was mistaken. There's one more element. She was very much
interested in cars. If so, she described the car, and
she would never ever have been wrong in describing a
car because she was very interested in cars. She knew
everything about it, so that was apart from the person
(23:16):
that she ad met. She also described the car mentioned
it to her friends. So in my humble opinion, there
can be no doubt about the fact that if you
had met this Newport guy in the.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Tunes, it does seem very suspicious that just before disappearing,
if you got bad vibes from a man who was
hanging out with these younger kids and trying to get
them drunk. Else continues, she tells me about another lead.
It may sound similar, but this lead involves another bar
and man who's a hotel owner in Blunkenberg.
Speaker 9 (23:51):
There is another very very worrying connection, and that is
the fact that the girls were seen on the night
of their disappearance. They were seen very close to and
even in front of a so called Hotel Brazil in Blankenberger.
They had just assisted a show in the casino, they
left the casino and then they were seen by several
(24:14):
witnesses in front of this hotel, so called Hotel Brazil,
which in fact was not a hotel, a regular hotel.
It was actually a bar, some kind of a brothel.
And the owner of this bar was known to the police.
He was known for human trafficking, he was known for prostitution,
(24:34):
he was known for keeping illegal arms, so he was
very much into criminal affairs. Okay, now, what happened. We're
talking about the twenty second of August. But as you know,
two months prior to that, two little girls disappeared in
Grassologne in the Liege area, and one witness in this
(24:59):
case wrote a letter to the police saying that he
had seen at the spot where the girls presumably were
taken a red car, and he also mentioned the license plate. Now,
the fact is that this license plate belonged to a
friend of this bar owner in Blankenberger, the owner of
Hotel Brazil. But moreover, this friend of his with a
(25:22):
license plate that was seen in Grasslona also stayed at
the Hotel Brazil during the summer of nineteen ninety five.
So eventually this bar owner he was questioned by the police.
He was questioned the first time on the first of
October nineteen ninety six, and then one time or a
second time on the sixteenth of October. But after that
(25:46):
he actually vanished from the earth. So he left. He
left Blankemberger. He announced to the local authorities that he
would go to Germany, but in Germany there was no
trace of him left. So in Belgium the detectives could
take no further action. He was not involved in the
investigation anymore.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Remember that mysterious red car in episode one. Could it
be a coincidence that the license plate number reported by
the doctor and liege after the disappearance of Julian Melissa
is almost an exact match to a license plate that
leads right to one of the last places Anne and
Efia were seen alive. It's a bit confusing, so let's
(26:29):
summarize the facts.
Speaker 6 (26:30):
At this point.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
More than one witness claims to have seen Anne and
Effia after the hypnotist show in front of the Hotel
Brazil or nearby in the same street in Blankenbega. The
owner of this hotel and bar had previously been charged
with engaging in prostitution and human trafficking. A friend of
the hotel and bar owner, who is staying at the
(26:54):
Hotel Brazil when Anne and Efi went missing, owns a
car with a license plate that's almost in a exact
match to a license plate identified by a witness of
a suspicious car in Grasselogna under the bridge where Julian
Melissa disappeared. After the owner of the Hotel Brazil was
questioned by police, he disappeared from Belgium and was never
(27:14):
seen again, despite police searches in Belgium and Germany, where
he said he was relocating. To this day, there are
still questions about this man's potential involvement. One of the
witnesses who claimed to have seen Anne an Effia in
front of the Hotel Brazil. Was a butcher named Eric
(27:34):
van Dam who had his shop and home right next
to the hotel. I wanted to speak with him, but
unfortunately he passed away since but I was actually able
to track down his son, Dirk van Dam, who agreed
to speak with me. This is the first time he's
ever been recorded speaking about this. Dirk is a jovial
(27:55):
man in his early fifties. He has red hair and
a sturdy build and speaks with the sort of earnest
directness that you often find in the Dutch speaking region
of Flanders. He had a lot to say about the
Hotel Brazil and its owner. At this point, I don't
want to accuse or implicate anyone without deeper investigation, so
(28:15):
I've bleeped out the name of the man he's talking about.
Speaker 3 (28:19):
It's somebody who left a very deep psychological imprint to
me in my life. As you know, or my father
was a butcher at his own butcher shop in Blankenberg
at the time of the disappearing of an an Athia.
My father thought that he had seen on an Athia
(28:41):
at the Hotel Brazil, which was next door the butcher
shop and the house where my father lived. The hotel
Brazil at the time was owned by and my father
came in conflicts with this person us At a certain time,
(29:02):
he found a young woman outside of his front door,
because the two entrances of the houses were next to
each other, literally next to each other, and he found
outside the front door of his house, he found a
young woman, a Brazilian woman, crying and who had been beaten,
(29:23):
and my father took the woman inside, and it turned
out that this woman had been fetched from Brazil by
whose wife I recall I think was Brazilian, and she
had been brought to Belgium with the expectation that she
(29:47):
would have work, but in reality it was meant for prostitution,
and mister had taken all documents, passport so that he
controlled this woman. My father then contacted the police and
the police went inside the house, found another woman and
(30:08):
also found weapons in the house, and as a result
of that was put to jail for a certain time. Afterwards,
we had a lot of problems with the man. If
we went outside, if we showed our faces at each time,
we were stocked. Everybody came to our house was stocked
(30:31):
because of that was the situation with the Brazilian woman.
Speaker 6 (30:35):
What can you tell me about him as a person?
Speaker 3 (30:38):
For me, it was a psychopaths. I think that's the
correct description of the man, because a psychopath is somebody
who understands emotions, who manipulates. So it's very good at
manipulating people. But it's really inside is a old hearted man.
(31:02):
And I think that's the best way to describe this man,
because he could be friendly to people and at the
same time, or in a split second, be very aggressive
to me or to somebody else, enjoying the fear that
he spreads when he did those things.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Did he actually you talk about stalking? Did he ever
attack you or your father?
Speaker 6 (31:27):
Yes, yes, yes, yes yes.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
For instance, we had a garage at the other side
of the street where we parked the car. It was
very simple. I only had to go to the garage,
and he often came across the street with somebody else
to physically attack me.
Speaker 6 (31:47):
So he attacked you physically more than one time?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes all the time.
Speaker 6 (31:51):
And with other people too, or yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:54):
Yeah it happened with other people. It also happened one
time that my father drove out of the garage, and
my father wasn't a big man. He was one meter
seventy that a very big man, a German Man opened
the door, smiled and said he took my father by
the just and said he shoffered us, I will do that,
(32:16):
which showed the intention of harming my father a grave
dangerous way. His whole being was. It was a really
in deep and evil man.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
Really, what was this relationship with his Brazilian wife?
Speaker 3 (32:33):
Will I won't say this from who I know it,
matt I will I will tell you in another time,
but from good source that his wife was very scared
of him, so that she feared him as well.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
And when you heard that he left the country very
suddenly after all of this came out, did you think
that he could be the kind of guy who would
be involved and you know, abduct children or something like that.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
I have no doubt, no doubt at all that he
might be involved, no doubts about that.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
So who is this mysterious man and what can we
find out about him? Is he alive? If so, it
doesn't appear he's in Belgium. Maybe he's in Germany or Brazil.
If he is alive, it'd be interesting to find him
and question him about his friend with the red car
and the girl's disappearance. At the time, no one thought
(33:35):
that the two disappearances in these vastly different regions of
Belgium were related. One thing is for sure, even to
this day, twenty five years later, the families of Anne
and Effia would like to know what happened between the
time the Hypnotist show ended and their girls were last seen.
The show ended at around eleven to fifteen pm, so
(33:58):
they would have had plenty of time catch the last
tram at eleven forty four pm. Their friends who had
previously attended the show specifically warned them not to miss
this tram because it was the last one that went
all the way back to Westenda where they were staying.
Maybe they just missed it, but you'd have expected them
(34:18):
to take the next tram leaving at twelve fourteen am.
But they didn't take that one either. They took the
last one, leaving at twelve forty four am that ended
service at Ostenda at one eighteen am, where they were
last seen by a taxi driver outside the station. What
we're in in ef youa doing in the two hours
(34:40):
between when the show ended and they were last seen
and what happened to them in Ostenda before they vanished.
Now there were four sets of parents desperately looking for
their children in two very different parts of the country. Unfortunately,
more parents would soon join this list. Next time, on
(35:08):
La Montre.
Speaker 10 (35:11):
The other at around nine am, the phone rang and
Captain Ballar informed me that a fourteen year old girl
went missing the previous evening in the village of Bear Tree.
Speaker 5 (35:22):
A colleague of mine, Fred vor Nambussa, and all the journalists.
He published a book in those days. The title was
young Girls Don't Disappear just like that, and it was
a perfect way of expressing what we all felt because
every summer there were young girls getting killed or disappeared, right,
and there was a very strange and difference among the people,
(35:47):
but among the police as well.
Speaker 4 (35:49):
Really neat, I brought together the parents and the authorities
who have been criticizing face to face. You have to
note that the judge appointed you oversee the investigation left
for a five week vacation a few days after being appointed,
as luck.
Speaker 10 (36:06):
Would have it, by a young man who had given
us information on Monday. I thought he remembered part of
a license plate number.
Speaker 6 (36:25):
LEA.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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
(36:49):
Trevor Young. Original music by Jay Ragsdale, Sound design by
Cooper Skinner and Thomas Resimont, mixed and mastered by Cooper Skinner.
Speaker 6 (36:58):
Cover design by Trevor La.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
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
(37:21):
from iHeartRadio or Tenderfoot TV, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Matt Graves
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com