The thought that Andras Pandy will, in all likelihood, die in prison is small comfort to a nation that is still trying to come to terms, not only with his years-long orgy of violence, but with it's own mistrust of the authorities who are deputized to protect it.

Nor does it fully or finally put to rest the question of whether justice was really done for all of Pandy's victims. After all, the police diggers who first encountered the terrible detritus of death in that dismal basement nearly five years ago, recovered fragments from likely victims whose stories have never been told. No one really knows who they were, or how they spent their last few moments on earth. In all probability, authorities admit, those questions will always remain unanswered.

But there is some small solace in the final judgment on Pandy and his daughter.

Timea, his stepdaughter, for one is safe.

So is her son, now 20 years old.

And in a remote corner of Hungary, there are two women Eva Kincs and her elder sister Margit Magyar who spend their summers tending the garden of their tiny house, not far from the Danube and closer still to Pandy's summer house. Perhaps they are as relieved as anyone on earth that Pandy is now behind bars.

Pandys summer home near the Danube (Reuters/Landrov)

In the months before his arrest, Pandy courted Magyar, and unbeknownst to her, he also courted her sister. Each of them believed that she would become his third wife, and when he invited them both to come and stay with him for a time at his home in Molenbeek, they eagerly agreed.

While there, they told reporters later, he pressed the two women into service. They cooked and cleaned for him, and he kept them locked up tight in his home.

"We were in the house. All the doors were locked and he had the key," Kincs said. He told them that they would raise suspicions if they wandered out on the streets of Brussels unable to speak anything but Hungarian. During their stay, he took them out only once, Kincs later said.

A week into their stay, the two women compared notes, and when they discovered that Pandy had proposed to both of them, they angrily demanded that he send them back to Hungary.

Surprisingly enough, he did.

The two women will never know for certain whether the fate shared by Pandy's first two wives and his three children also awaited them.

Still, Kincs said, "we feel like survivors."

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