u/kabush27

I went down this rabbit hole for a project I was working on and the more I read about it the harder it gets to call it an unsolved case. Unsolved suggests they tried.

This took place in November of 1985. The Van de Steen family, two parents and two children, finish their Saturday shopping at a Delhaize supermarket on Parklaan in Aalst, which is a small Flemish town about an hour west of Brussels. It is the long weekend of Saint-Martins Day, the children's festival in Flanders, and the parking lot is full of families doing exactly the same thing as the Van de Steens. They walk back to their car at around 7:30pm. Gilbert, the father in front with Rebecca, ten years old. Thérèse, the mother, a step behind, holding nine year old Davids hand.

Three men get out of a Volkswagen Golf. Dark clothes, balaclavas, and theatrical face paint smeared over the balaclavas. They open fire in the parking lot before they get to the supermarket doors.

Rebecca sees them raise their shotguns at her father and shouts at them. Her exact words were "dont shoot, thats my dad." She did not realise she was trying to negotiate with three men who walked into a Belgian supermarket parking lot to murder strangers for sport. They shoot Gilbert first, then Rebecca. Thérèse, still holding Davids hand, tells him to run. Then they shoot her.

David runs into the supermarket and hides by the comic strip rack. One of the gunmen finds him there. In the book David wrote about this 25 years later, he says the man looked down at him, grinned, and shot. Nine bullets at a nine year old. But David survived. He is the only member of his family who did.

Inside the Delhaize the killing continued. Witnesses said the gunmen were laughing while they shot people. Roaring at customers on the floor. Enjoying it apparently. The whole attack lasted about fifteen minutes. The total cash they took from the supermarket was less than 18,000 euros. Eight people died that night and nine more were wounded.

Then the gang walked out. The leader, the tall one police would later call the "Giant", walked calmly alongside the moving Volkswagen and climbed in through the rear hatch while the car was still in motion. An armed gendarmerie patrol that had been checking the parking lot every twenty minutes that night pulled away from the lot about fifteen seconds before the first shot was fired. Three municipal police vehicles in the area tried to start their engines when the gunfire started and could not. One police van pursued the Volkswagen for a few kilometers and then lost it.

The men who killed Gilbert and Thérèse and Rebecca Van de Steen and five other people that night drove west and were never seen again.

Aalst was their eighth attack. Between March of 1982 and November of 1985 the same three men killed 28 people across Belgium. Supermarkets, restaurants, a textile factory, a gun shop. The first wave from 1982 to 1983 was about money. The second wave in 1985 wasnt about money anymore. Three Delhaize supermarkets in six weeks, twenty-six dead total in the four 1985 attacks. Then they stopped forever.

The buckshot loaded in their shotguns was a rare type used by Group Diane, which was a Belgian gendarmerie special forces unit. Some of the police officers who exchanged fire with them at earlier robberies said the gang was using gunfight tactics that were taught in Belgian police academies. The Volkswagens were modified by someone with mechanic grade facilities. The bulletproof vests they wore had been stolen from a textile factory in Temse before that factory's contract to manufacture vests for the Belgian police was public information.

In 1986, a year after they stopped, divers searched a stretch of the Brussels Charleroi canal at a place called Ronquières and pulled out bulletproof vests, ammunition, and a service firearm that had been stolen from a gendarme. The same stretch of canal had been searched in 1985 and the divers had found nothing. Forensic analysis done in 2013 concluded the items had only been in the water for a few weeks before they were "discovered" in 1986. Somebody who knew where the canal was going to be searched, and who had access to evidence from the case, wanted those items to be found at that time and not before.

In January 2019, a retired officer from the Delta unit was arrested on suspicion of evidence tampering. The Delta unit was the police group assigned to investigate the Brabant Killers. But he denied everything.

The closest Belgium has ever come to a name is Christiaan Bonkoffsky who was part of the same special forces unit whose ammunition type matched the gangs shotguns. Dismissed from the unit in 1981 for an accidental discharge, the year before the first attack. Originally from Aalst, which was the town of the final attack. When he died in 2015, his brother kept quiet for two years and then went on Belgian television in 2017 and said Bonkoffsky had confessed on his deathbed. He said he was the Giant.

Bonkoffskys height fit the sketch, his military background fit the tactics. His hometown fit the location of the final attack. His dismissal in 1981 also fit the timeline. In 2018, Belgian police announced that DNA from Bonkoffsky did not match samples from the crime scenes. The investigators who disputed the result pointed out something the state never publicly addressed. The DNA at the scenes belonged to three men. Ruling Bonkoffsky out of being one of them does not rule him out of being the other two. Noone officaly questioned this after.

The Belgian Gendarmerie itself had been founded in 1795. It survived Napoleon, two world wars, and the entire Cold War. The Brabant Killers case was one of the contributing reasons it was abolished in 2001. Three men with shotguns and face paint did what no foreign army had managed in two hundred years. They killed an entire branch of Belgian law enforcement.

On the 28th of June 2024, the federal prosecutor of Belgium stood at a press conference and closed the case. The numbers she gave were 1,815 leads checked, 2,748 sets of fingerprints examined, 593 DNA samples compared, and zero identifications. When she finished speaking, a woman named Irena Palsterman, whose father Jan was killed in the Aalst Delhaize parking lot when he was 40, said three words in Dutch. "Vandaag begraven we Vrouwe Justitia" which translates to: "Today we bury Lady Justice."

The federal prosecutors office was still publicly asking, as recently as 2020, for help identifying a man with a three and a half centimetre wine stain birthmark on the back of his neck. He took part in the Beersel raid in October 1983 and multiple witnesses described the birthmark in detail. That birthmark has been on the back of someones neck in Belgium for forty years. Either he died, or he is alive and old now, and nobody who ever spent time around him made the phone call.

In 1986 somebody mailed Belgian police an anonymous photograph of a man holding a Franchi SPAS 12 combat shotgun, standing in a forest. The note that came with it said the man was a very important person in the Brabant Killers case. The photograph was reissued by federal prosecutors in 2020 and ran on the front pages of Belgian newspapers. But nobody came forward.

Whoever those three men were, they had access to classified factory contracts, special forces ammunition, gendarmerie tactics, advance knowledge of police canal searches, and somebody on the inside who pulled an armed patrol away from the Aalst Delhaize fifteen seconds before they opened fire on it. Belgium did not fail to find them because the case was unsolvable. Belgium failed to find them because somewhere along the way, finding them stopped being the point. 28 dead, 22 wounded, 40 years of state silence, one prosecutor at a podium in 2024 saying it is over.

David Van de Steen is 50 years old now. Rebecca would have been 51 this year.

Under a law passed by Belgium in 2024, the case has no statute of limitations and can be tried at any time, by anyone. If anyone is left to try.

Sources:

David Van de Steen - Niet schieten, dat is mijn papa (2010)

Belgian federal prosecutors office, press conference 28 June 2024

VRT and RTBF retrospective coverage, 2014, 2020, 2024

Het Laatste Nieuws archive, 1985-1986

The Guardian and Sky News English language coverage, June 2024

Quick summary:

Mary Bell was an 11 year old girl in Newcastle who strangled two little boys in 1968, four year old Martin Brown in May and three year old Brian Howe nine weeks later. She was the youngest female killer in British history and was diagnosed as a psychopath by four court appointed psychiatrists at her trial. What I cant get past is that none of those psychiatrists ever heard about what her mother had been doing to her since she was four years old, and the defence never put it in front of the court. Im posting because Im genuinely curious what this sub thinks about how that gap played out.

May 1968 in Newcastle upon Tyne, a 4 year old boy named Martin Brown walks to a sweet shop near his home, buys a piece of candy, and starts walking back. About fifteen minutes later three older boys looking for scrap wood climb into an abandoned house on St Margarets Road and find him on the floor of an upstairs bedroom. Hes on his back, arms above his head, blood and saliva running from the corner of his mouth. A workman tries CPR, but it's already too late.

The pathologist who examined Martin the next day, a guy named Bernard Knight who would later become one of the most respected forensic pathologists in the UK, couldnt find any sign of violence on the body. He couldnt determine a cause of death at all. Martin Brown was buried, by the official record, as a child who died of "nothing in particular".

In reality, he had been strangled. The girl who killed him was so small, and so practiced at hiding it, that the British medical system didnt realise a child had been murdered.

Two days after Martins funeral, the local day nursery on Woodland Crescent is broken into overnight. The intruders peel slate tiles off the roof to get inside. They smear ink and poster paint across the floor and leave four handwritten notes scattered around the building, written in childish printing, alternating between two different handwritings.

The first note reads: "I murder so that I may come back."

The second: "We did murder Martin Brown."

The third: "Watch out, there are murderers about."

The Newcastle police find these four notes, written in clear handwriting that any forensic document examiner could analyze in an afternoon, and they conclude it was a sick prank by older children. They installed a burglar alarm at the nursery and moved on. They dont connect it to Martins death.

Two days after the notes were written, an 11 year old girl from the same neighbourhood knocks on the front door of Martins mothers house. The mother, June Brown, opens the door. The girl smiles at her and asks if she can see Martin. June tells her that Martin is dead. The girl, still smiling, says: "oh I know hes dead. I wanted to see him in his coffin."

June Brown slams the door.

Nine weeks later, a 3 year old boy named Brian Howe walks out of his front door to play. He is last seen in the street with his older sister, the family dog, and the same 11 year old girl who knocked on June Browns door. Hes found seven hours later between two large concrete blocks on waste ground near the railway - strangled with one hand pinching his nostrils shut and the other gripping his throat. With puncture wounds on his legs, hair cut off in sections and genitals partially mutilated. And on his stomach, scratched in with a razor blade, the letter "M".

The lead detective figures out shes the killer the next day when she slips up about a pair of broken scissors that nobody outside the police knew existed.

Her name was Mary Bell. She was 11 years old. She was, and still is, Britains youngest female killer.

In December 1968 she goes on trial at Newcastle Assizes. Four court appointed psychiatrists examine her and diagnose her with psychopathic personality disorder. An 11 year old psychopath. The judge, when asked whether there was any facility anywhere in the United Kingdom equipped to treat a child like her, hears the answer "No", calls this unhappy, and sentences her to detention at her majestys pleasure. She gets sent to a young offenders unit in Lancashire where shes the only female among 24 boys. Twenty five years later, the same unit will house Jon Venables, one of the two boys who killed James Bulger.

What bothers me is what the four psychiatrists who diagnosed an 11 year old as a psychopath never heard. Because the defence chose not to introduce it and the family chose not to come forward.

Mary Bells mother was a woman named Betty McCrickett. She was 17 when Mary was born. According to Marys aunt who was present at the hospital, in the minutes after Mary was born the staff tried to place the baby in Bettys arms and Betty pushed her away and shouted six words. Take the thing away from me.

Around 1960, when Mary was three, Betty dropped her from a first floor window and on a separate occasion she gave Mary a quantity of sleeping pills that a three year old should not have been able to survive. On a third occasion she sold Mary through an adoption agency to a mentally unstable woman who couldnt have her own children, and Marys older sister Catherine had to travel alone across Newcastle to retrieve her and bring her home. Marys family repeatedly offered to take custody of her but Betty refused every time.

And from somewhere around the age of four, according to Mary herself in interviews she gave decades later, her mother began allowing her clients to sexually abuse her. Mary states her mother actively participated in some of those sessions. By the time she was 8, this had been her life for four years.

But none of this was introduced as evidence at the 1968 trial. The four psychiatrists who diagnosed an 11 year old psychopath did so based on her behaviour during interviews and on the facts of the killings. They had no access to her family history.

The defence apparently decided that putting Betty McCrickett on the stand was unworkable, so they made a calculation. And Betty sat in the public gallery during the entire trial sobbing loudly while reporters noted that she was selling stories about Mary to the British and German tabloid press during and after the proceedings.

Theres a journalist named Gitta Sereny who covered that trial and never let it go. She wrote two books on the case, 26 years apart. The second one was based on over 70 hours of interviews she conducted with Mary as an adult. And theres a sentence in that second book, said by Mary herself.

Reflecting on the killings decades later she said: I didnt know I had intended for them to be dead. Dead forever. Dead for me then did not mean forever.

An 11 year old, who had been told from infancy that her own life didnt matter, did not understand that other lives could end. The court never knew that. Because the court never asked.

Im not trying to excuse what she did. Two little boys are dead. Martin Browns mother lived the rest of her life feeling phantom tugs at the back pocket of her trousers, expecting to turn around and see him. None of what I just wrote brings either of them back.

In 1993, twenty five years later, two ten year old boys would walk a toddler named James Bulger out of a shopping centre in Liverpool and kill him. Britain learned nothing in those 25 years.

Couple of things Id genuinely want to hear takes on:

Was the defence right not to put Betty McCrickett on the stand? They apparently decided it was unworkable. But the consequence was an 11 year old getting diagnosed as a psychopath without anyone in the room knowing what shed survived.

Should psychiatric evaluations of child defendants legally require family history access? The four psychiatrists worked entirely off interviews and the killings themselves. In 1968 that was standard. Is it still defensible now.

Sources:

BBC News, 17 December 1968 trial coverage — http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/17/newsid_3261000/3261087.stm

The Guardian archive, original 1968 trial reporting — https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1968/dec/18/ukcrime.childprotection

Gitta Sereny - The Case of Mary Bell (1972)

Gitta Sereny - Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill (1998)

Crime and Investigation UK case file — https://www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk/crime-files/mary-bell

I went down this rabbit hole for a project I was working on and Ive been turning it over in my head for two weeks now. I keep coming back to the same question and I dont know what to do with it.

May 1968 in Newcastle upon Tyne, a 4 year old boy named Martin Brown walks to a sweet shop near his home, buys a piece of candy, and starts walking back. About fifteen minutes later three older boys looking for scrap wood climb into an abandoned house on St Margarets Road and find him on the floor of an upstairs bedroom. Hes on his back, arms above his head, blood and saliva running from the corner of his mouth. A workman tries CPR, but it's already too late.

The pathologist who examined Martin the next day, a guy named Bernard Knight who would later become one of the most respected forensic pathologists in the UK, couldnt find any sign of violence on the body. He couldnt determine a cause of death at all. Martin Brown was buried, by the official record, as a child who died of "nothing in particular".

In reality, he had been strangled. The girl who killed him was so small, and so practiced at hiding it, that the British medical system didnt realise a child had been murdered.

Two days after Martins funeral, the local day nursery on Woodland Crescent is broken into overnight. The intruders peel slate tiles off the roof to get inside. They smear ink and poster paint across the floor and leave four handwritten notes scattered around the building, written in childish printing, alternating between two different handwritings.

The first note reads: "I murder so that I may come back."

The second: "We did murder Martin Brown."

The third: "Watch out, there are murderers about."

The Newcastle police find these four notes, written in clear handwriting that any forensic document examiner could analyze in an afternoon, and they conclude it was a sick prank by older children. They installed a burglar alarm at the nursery and moved on. They dont connect it to Martins death.

Two days after the notes were written, an 11 year old girl from the same neighbourhood knocks on the front door of Martins mothers house. The mother, June Brown, opens the door. The girl smiles at her and asks if she can see Martin. June tells her that Martin is dead. The girl, still smiling, says: "oh I know hes dead. I wanted to see him in his coffin."

June Brown slams the door.

Nine weeks later, a 3 year old boy named Brian Howe walks out of his front door to play. He is last seen in the street with his older sister, the family dog, and the same 11 year old girl who knocked on June Browns door. Hes found seven hours later between two large concrete blocks on waste ground near the railway - strangled with one hand pinching his nostrils shut and the other gripping his throat. With puncture wounds on his legs, hair cut off in sections and genitals partially mutilated. And on his stomach, scratched in with a razor blade, the letter "M".

The lead detective figures out shes the killer the next day when she slips up about a pair of broken scissors that nobody outside the police knew existed.

Her name was Mary Bell. She was 11 years old. She was, and still is, Britains youngest female killer.

In December 1968 she goes on trial at Newcastle Assizes. Four court appointed psychiatrists examine her and diagnose her with psychopathic personality disorder. An 11 year old psychopath. The judge, when asked whether there was any facility anywhere in the United Kingdom equipped to treat a child like her, hears the answer "No", calls this unhappy, and sentences her to detention at her majestys pleasure. She gets sent to a young offenders unit in Lancashire where shes the only female among 24 boys. Twenty five years later, the same unit will house Jon Venables, one of the two boys who killed James Bulger.

What bothers me is what the four psychiatrists who diagnosed an 11 year old as a psychopath never heard. Because the defence chose not to introduce it and the family chose not to come forward.

Mary Bells mother was a woman named Betty McCrickett. She was 17 when Mary was born. According to Marys aunt who was present at the hospital, in the minutes after Mary was born the staff tried to place the baby in Bettys arms and Betty pushed her away and shouted four words. Take the thing away from me.

Around 1960, when Mary was three, Betty dropped her from a first floor window and on a separate occasion she gave Mary a quantity of sleeping pills that a three year old should not have been able to survive. On a third occasion she sold Mary through an adoption agency to a mentally unstable woman who couldnt have her own children, and Marys older sister Catherine had to travel alone across Newcastle to retrieve her and bring her home. Marys family repeatedly offered to take custody of her but Betty refused every time.

And from somewhere around the age of four, according to Mary herself in interviews she gave decades later, her mother began allowing her clients to sexually abuse her. Mary states her mother actively participated in some of those sessions. By the time she was 8, this had been her life for four years.

But none of this was introduced as evidence at the 1968 trial. The four psychiatrists who diagnosed an 11 year old psychopath did so based on her behaviour during interviews and on the facts of the killings. They had no access to her family history.

The defence apparently decided that putting Betty McCrickett on the stand was unworkable, so they made a calculation. And Betty sat in the public gallery during the entire trial sobbing loudly while reporters noted that she was selling stories about Mary to the British and German tabloid press during and after the proceedings.

Theres a journalist named Gitta Sereny who covered that trial and never let it go. She wrote two books on the case, 26 years apart. The second one was based on over 70 hours of interviews she conducted with Mary as an adult. And theres a sentence in that second book, said by Mary herself.

Reflecting on the killings decades later she said: I didnt know I had intended for them to be dead. Dead forever. Dead for me then did not mean forever.

An 11 year old, who had been told from infancy that her own life didnt matter, did not understand that other lives could end. The court never knew that. Because the court never asked.

Im not trying to excuse what she did. Two little boys are dead. Martin Browns mother lived the rest of her life feeling phantom tugs at the back pocket of her trousers, expecting to turn around and see him. None of what I just wrote brings either of them back.

In 1993, twenty five years later, two ten year old boys would walk a toddler named James Bulger out of a shopping centre in Liverpool and kill him. Britain learned nothing in those 25 years.

I dont know what to do with this case. Im interested in what this sub thinks. What should the court have heard?

Sources:

Gitta Sereny - The Case of Mary Bell (1972)

Gitta Sereny - Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill (1998)

BBC News archive, December 1968 trial coverage

Crime and Investigation UK case file

The Guardian archive, December 1968

okay so I have been going down a rabbit hole on this case for a while and I cannot stop thinking about it, hoping some of you know more.

Jürgen Bartsch killed four boys in West Germany between 1962 and 1966. He was 15 when he started. By the time he was caught at 19 he had killed Klaus Jung (8), Peter Fuchs (13), Ulrich Kahlweiß (12), and Manfred Graßmann (12), all in the same sealed-off WWII air-raid shelter in Langenberg. He dismembered all four. The standard true crime version of this case stops there and calls him der Kirmesmörder, the carnival killer, because he picked his victims at fairgrounds. That is what most English-language coverage gives you.

Here is what bothers me about that framing. The German source material, especially Paul Moor's book of letters from Bartsch in prison, paints a completely different picture of the case. Some of what comes out of those letters is genuinely hard to read.

A few things that almost never make it into English coverage.

Bartsch was adopted at 11 months. His birth mother died of TB. His adoptive parents kept him locked in a cellar with barred windows until he was six years old. The room had a single artificial bulb. They did this because they were afraid that if he played with other children, he would learn that he was adopted. They were that worried about him finding out. So they hid him underground for the first six years of his life. This is in the German Wikipedia citing Spiegel coverage and I have not been able to get to the original Spiegel piece to verify directly, if anyone has access I would love to see it.

His adoptive mother had what would today be called severe OCD. She bathed him personally every single day until he was 19 years old. According to multiple sources she was still doing it the day he was arrested. She would also throw kitchen knives at him when she was upset and call him a "Stück Scheiße." A former employee of the family said in an interview "he was only allowed to do what his parents said. He was not allowed to be independent at all."

At age 12 his parents sent him to a Catholic boarding school in the Rheingau. At a summer camp at 13 he was abused by a priest named Gerhard Pütz, nicknamed PaPü by the pupils. After Bartsch's arrest five other former pupils came forward accusing the same priest. The investigation was dropped. Pütz's name was not on the witness list at Bartsch's 1967 trial. I cannot find a single record that he was ever investigated or charged by either civil authorities or the Salesian order. If anyone knows what happened to Pütz I would genuinely like to know.

In June 1961, when Bartsch was 14, he attacked another boy in the same air-raid shelter he would later use for the murders. He was charged with bodily harm at the Wuppertal Amtsgericht. The case was dismissed because Bartsch told the court they had been "just horsing around." Eight months later he killed Klaus Jung. The other three boys he killed were alive on the day that 1961 charge was dropped.

Bartsch tied the boys up in the bunker, beat and assaulted them, and then almost every time he left and went home for dinner. He sat at the table with his parents at 7pm, ate, watched TV until the news ended, and then went back to the bunker. Sometimes the boys were still alive when he got back. Sometimes not. He told investigators his actual goal was to torture a victim slowly to death.

The fifth boy survived. Peter Frese, 14. Bartsch tied him up, told him he would come back to kill him, and went home for dinner. He left a candle burning. Frese held the rope above the flame until it burned through and walked out of the bunker. He found a house and called the police.

Bartsch confessed everything. Got life in 1967. The verdict was the first in German legal history to formally include the defendant's psycho-social background in the sentence. In 1971 the BGH reduced it to 10 years juvenile detention plus indefinite psychiatric placement at Eickelborn, since he had been a juvenile when he killed.

Then the part that is genuinely unresolved. Bartsch repeatedly requested voluntary castration to qualify for release. The state initially refused. He kept asking. They approved it. On April 28, 1976 he was put under anesthesia at Eickelborn and the anesthetist administered halothane at approximately 10x the standard dose. Bartsch died on the operating table. He was 29.

The same anesthetist had reportedly killed other patients in exactly the same way before. He received a 9-month suspended sentence. The court ruled it an accident. There is a long-running rumor in Germany that it was deliberate. I have not been able to find authoritative sources on the disciplinary case file for the doctor and would love to see them if anyone has access.

So here is what I keep getting stuck on. By the time you read all of this, the question stops being "why did Bartsch kill four boys." Because it is obvious why. The cellar, the mother, the priest, the dropped 1961 charge, the butcher shop where his father took bodies apart for a living and his mother beat him in the same room. He was built. The real question is whether the system had any chance of stopping him at any of those points, and whether in 1976 that same system, knowing it had failed him, decided to clean up after itself on the operating table.

Has anyone here found English-language sources for the original Spiegel coverage of the cellar detail? Or anything on what happened to Pater Pütz after the investigation was dropped? Most of what is online in English seems to be derivative summaries and I am trying to get to primary material.