It was the first weekend of spring in 1997 when a mounted police officer rode his patrol along Rue Émile Vandervelde, a quiet road that curves around the village of Cuesmes, just outside the Belgian city of Mons. The morning air was crisp, filled with the promise of warmer days ahead. As the officer guided his horse along the familiar route, something caught his attention in the undergrowth below the road.
A cat emerged from the brambles, something dark clutched in its mouth. At first glance, it looked like scavenged food—perhaps a piece of meat from someone's rubbish bin. The officer watched as the cat dropped its prize and darted back into the brush. That's when he realized what he was looking at.
It was a human hand.
Within hours, police tape fluttered in the spring breeze as investigators cordoned off the slope below Rue Émile Vandervelde. What started as a routine patrol had become something far more sinister. Searchers worked methodically through the scrub and brambles, pulling out black plastic garbage bags one after another. Inside were human remains—arms, legs, torso sections—from more than one person.
This discovery would mark the beginning of one of Belgium's most haunting unsolved cases. Between 1996 and 1997, at least five women disappeared from the streets of Mons. Their remains were found dismembered and carefully packaged in bin bags, left in places where they would inevitably be discovered. The case became known as "le Dépeceur de Mons"—the Butcher of Mons.
To this day, no one knows who was responsible.
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To understand what happened in Mons, you need to understand the city itself. Located near the French Belgian border, it's a place where medieval cobblestones tell centuries-old stories, where a Gothic belfry watches over the Grand-Place like a stone sentinel. Mons carries its history in every street corner, every café, every church bell that chimes across the rolling Hainaut countryside.
But Mons also exists firmly in the modern world. Just outside the city sits SHAPE - NATO's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe – bringing a constant flow of international personnel and their families. Diplomats, military officers, contractors, all creating a unique dynamic where ancient Belgium intersects with global politics.
In the mid-1990s, Belgium was a nation in crisis. Marc Dutroux, a convicted child molester, had been arrested for the abduction, abuse, and murder of young girls, and the bungled handling of his case exposed deep flaws in Belgium’s police and judicial systems. The case shattered public faith in the country’s institutions, exposing catastrophic failures in police coordination and judicial oversight. Hundreds of thousands of Belgians had taken to the streets in what became known as the "White March," demanding accountability from those in power and better protection for the vulnerable.
It was against this backdrop of institutional distrust and public anger that Mons found itself confronting a series of murders that would test every assumption about safety in their historic city.
The story most people know begins with Officer Dubois and the cat on that spring morning. But investigators would later trace the horror back more than a year earlier, to a cold January day when a woman simply disappeared, leaving behind only questions that would multiply like cracks in ice.
Her name was Carmelina Russo. She was in her forties, with dark hair and a ready smile, when she vanished on January 4th, 1996. For seventeen days, her disappearance remained a local mystery – the kind of case that generates worry among friends but doesn't make headlines.
Then a fisherman working the muddy banks of the Scheldt River in northern France made a discovery that would change everything. Partially buried in the riverbank near Château-l'Abbaye was a section of human pelvis, weathered but unmistakably human.
It would be months before investigators connected that fragment to Carmelina. At the time, it seemed like an isolated tragedy. Perhaps an accident. Perhaps something that had nothing to do with the quiet woman who had simply failed to come home one evening in Mons.
That summer brought another disturbing discovery. On July 22nd, 1996, the torso of Martine Bohn was pulled from the Haine River in Mons itself. The recovery site was along a footpath with a name that would later seem almost prophetic: "chemin de l'Inquiétude"—the Path of Anxiety.
Martine was forty-three years old, a woman with her own life, her own routines, her own people who cared about her. Like Carmelina's case, her death was treated as a separate incident. Two women, different circumstances, no obvious connection.
The police had no reason yet to think they were looking at something larger, something more sinister than isolated tragedies in a city that, like all cities, occasionally harbored violence.
That would all change on a spring weekend in 1997.
Officer Dubois's discovery in Cuesmes revealed the true scope of what they were dealing with. Eight black garbage bags emerged from the undergrowth that Saturday morning. Each contained human remains that had been methodically sectioned with what forensic experts would later determine was a saw. The cuts were deliberate, careful, suggesting someone had taken time with their work.
But the killer wasn't finished. By Sunday morning, another bag had appeared on the same street – same type of black plastic, same methodical dismemberment. The timing was deeply troubling. Had someone deposited that bag after the initial discovery, while search teams were actively combing the area?
Two days later, on Monday, March 24th, a tenth bag surfaced back in Mons proper, at the very same Path of Anxiety where Martine Bohn had been found the previous summer. The pattern was becoming clear, and it was chilling in its precision.
As forensic technicians laid out the bags on white tarpaulins and began the grim work of cataloguing human remains, one detail caught their attention immediately. Several of the bags bore printing from Knokke-Heist, a coastal municipality more than a hundred kilometers away on the North Sea.
The discovery raised immediate questions. How had garbage bags from a seaside town ended up in the hills around Mons? Was this a clue, or just another random element in a case that seemed designed to confuse?
April brought the investigation to Havré, a quiet suburb southeast of the city where the Haine River winds through industrial lots and residential neighborhoods. On April 12th, two more black bags were discovered along Rue du Dépôt, near the brown-green waters that flow past like a slow-moving secret.
These bags contained a foot, a leg, and something investigators had not yet recovered in this case – a human head. The only head that would ever be found in the entire series.
Six days later, more remains appeared in the same area, as if the killer was orchestrating a macabre scavenger hunt across the greater Mons region.
The recovery sites now formed a rough map: Cuesmes to the west, the city center, Havré to the southeast. Later that year, the pattern would extend further when a child walking along Bethlehem Way – in the village of Hyon – made a discovery that would haunt the local community for decades.
French speakers couldn't ignore the eerie resonance in the place names. The rivers were called Haine – “hate" – and Trouille – “fear." There was the Path of Anxiety, Depot Street, and Bethlehem Way. Had these locations been chosen for their symbolic meaning, or were they simply convenient places where a killer could pull over, walk a few steps, and dispose of evidence?
The question would become part of the case's dark mythology, adding an almost literary quality to what was already an investigation unlike any other.
Identification of the victims required painstaking detective work. In 1997, DNA analysis was not yet the routine tool it would become. Investigators had to rely on dental records where they existed, personal effects, and composite reconstructions built from fragments of bone and flesh.
Piece by piece, five names emerged from the scattered remains. Each name represented a life cut short, a family destroyed, a future that would never unfold.
Carmelina Russo, whose pelvis had been found in France, was now understood to be the first victim. Martine Bohn, whose torso had been recovered from the Haine River at the Path of Anxiety. Jacqueline Leclercq, a thirty-three-year-old mother of four, who had disappeared just three days before Christmas in 1996.
Twenty-one-year-old Nathalie Godart had vanished in mid-March 1997, shortly before the first major discovery in Cuesmes. And finally, thirty-seven-year-old Bégonia Valencia, whose skull was found by a child walking along Bethlehem Way on an October afternoon that should have been filled with autumn beauty instead of horror.
Each of these women had moved through Mons in their own way, with their own stories, their own reasons for being in the places they were last seen. Several were known to frequent the area around the city's railway station – a district of late-night bars and small businesses, where people came looking for company, opportunity, or simply a place where they could exist without questions.
The station district in the 1990s was different from today. The gleaming new Calatrava-designed terminal that now anchors the area was still years away. Instead, there were narrow streets filled with establishments that stayed open late, where the transient population from SHAPE mixed with locals in ways that could be both cosmopolitan and anonymous.
The police response was swift and comprehensive. A dedicated task force called the Corpus Cell was established under the oversight of an investigating magistrate. The name was clinical, bureaucratic, but the work was anything but routine.
At its peak, the unit had the resources to canvas entire neighbourhoods, interview hundreds of witnesses, process multiple crime scenes, and coordinate with authorities across the French border. It was the kind of investigation that consumed everything – time, resources, emotional energy.
But as months turned into years without a breakthrough, that response gradually scaled back. By 2007, only four investigators remained assigned to the case. Eventually, even the dedicated unit was dissolved, and a single officer maintained what had become one of Belgium's most infamous cold cases.
The forensic evidence painted a disturbing picture of methodical violence. The women had been killed first, then dismembered with a saw after death. The cutting was deliberate, suggesting planning, privacy, and time. But the work wasn't so precise as to indicate formal medical training – no surgeon's hand, no butcher's expertise, just someone who had access to tools and a place where they could work undisturbed.
The disposal sites revealed another layer of the killer's psychology. The bags weren't hidden in remote forests or buried in deep graves. They were left in accessible places – roadside verges, riverside paths, spots where municipal workers or passersby would eventually find them.
This wasn't concealment. This was display.
The case generated suspects, as such investigations inevitably do. Early attention focused on a man known locally as "Le Gitan"or The Gypsy – Léopold Bogaert – who had been close to victim Nathalie Godart. He was detained, questioned extensively, and released when no evidence connected him to any of the killings.
In 2007, international interest brought a lead from New York, where a man from Montenegro named Smail Tulja had been convicted for the murder and dismemberment of his wife. The similarities were striking enough to prompt Belgian authorities to investigate whether Tulja had been in Belgium during the relevant period. Their search turned up nothing.
Other theories pointed toward SHAPE, the NATO facility near Mons. Could a foreign national have committed these crimes and then left Belgium when his assignment ended? Could someone with diplomatic immunity have operated with impunity? If so, that person's identity never surfaced in any investigation.
The geographic pattern of discoveries created its own kind of evidence – a rough arc extending from Cuesmes through Mons to Havré and finally to Hyon. Each site was accessible by road, each offered enough cover for a quick stop, and each was positioned where the bags would eventually be noticed.
There was also a temporal pattern that troubled investigators. The discoveries came in clusters – eight bags on March 22nd, another on March 23rd, a torso on March 24th, more remains on April 12th and 18th. The final discovery came in October. The spacing suggested either remarkable boldness or a stockpile of remains being disposed of over time. There was speculation that the killer had stored the remains in a freezer and disposed of all the remains at the same time.
One lead that investigators thought might prove significant involved the markings on several bags from Knokke-Heist. Years later, Belgian media would report that these bags might have been part of a defective batch withdrawn from normal distribution and resold through a discount shop in Mons.
If that supply chain could be traced – from manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer – it might lead to purchase records, receipts, maybe even surveillance footage. It was the kind of methodical police work that sounds promising in theory but often proves frustrating in practice.
Records were incomplete or missing. If someone had paid cash, there would be no name to find. And after so many years, memories faded, businesses changed hands or closed entirely, and the trail went cold.
The FBI provided a behavioral assessment in 1998, describing what they called an organized offender who controlled the discovery process. The killer was methodical, patient, able to plan and execute complex actions while managing the psychological stress of multiple murders.
Belgian criminologists used the case to explore the difference between criminal signature—the psychological fingerprint of a crime – and simple method. The saw was a method. The placement of bags in accessible, visible locations was a behavioral pattern that revealed something about the killer's psychology.
But neither element, by itself, could identify a specific person. Profiles provide guidance, not proof. And proof remained elusive as the years passed and the dedicated task force dwindled.
Investigators retired or moved to other assignments. The case file remained, thick with reports and evidence logs, but the institutional knowledge walked out the door with the people who had lived and breathed the investigation.
Today, when families and their lawyers push for renewed attention to the case, they make three specific requests. First, they want preserved evidence retested using modern DNA techniques that can amplify trace genetic material that 1990s labs couldn't process.
Second, they want a thorough re-examination of the supply chain for those distinctively marked bags from Knokke-Heist—following every lead, checking every record, pursuing every possibility that might connect those bags to a specific person.
Third, they want the case treated as a national priority rather than a local file, at least for the time that remains.
That last point carries special urgency. Under Belgian law, there's a statute of limitations even for homicide cases, based on the legal framework in effect when the crimes occurred. For the Mons file, families and advocates point to 2027 as the year when that door could close forever.
The prospect of legal prescription has focused attention on what can still be done. It's created a deadline that transforms every lead, every piece of evidence, every possibility into something precious and time-sensitive.
From time to time, private citizens have stepped forward with theories about the case. One is a man who first encountered the investigation as a child, when police pulled over his father's van at a checkpoint after the Cuesmes discovery. The memory stayed with him through adulthood, eventually compelling him to compile interviews, court documents, and press coverage into a book.
He now urges families' lawyers to file formal requests for renewed investigation, pointing to specific actions that could still be taken, leads that could still be pursued, evidence that could still be tested.
Officials acknowledge his dedication while noting the harsh reality of cold case work. The file is voluminous, but the actionable items within it are few.
If nothing new emerges and the statute of limitations arrives in 2027, the case will still live in Mons – in the careful way people speak about certain streets, in the tenderness with which families preserve photographs, in the knowledge that some questions may never find their answers.
The truth is out there, somewhere in the bureaucratic maze of supplier records or the molecular traces left on evidence bags or the fading memory of someone who saw something but didn't realize its significance at the time.
The question isn't whether the truth exists. The question is whether there's enough time left to find it.
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