Map of Belgium with Brussels marked (AP)

It was two years earlier, in 1997 and an army of Belgians 350,000 out of a nation of 10 million had marched in silence through the streets of Brussels. It was much more than simply a candlelight vigil, the kind of spontaneous demonstration of grief and outrage that have become common in the aftermath of brutal crimes. This demonstration which became known as the White March - a massive protest against the government's bungled investigation into a series of kidnappings and murders in Belgium.

Marc Dutroux (AP)

Some in the crowd had even accused the government of participating in a cover up of the crimes of a killer named Marc Dutroux. In fact, a parliamentary inquiry into the cases had found that police and prosecutors had so thoroughly botched the Dutroux affair that their actions "put at risk the state of law." It seemed as if all the institutions of Belgium had been tainted, the police, the courts, the government itself. Shaken Belgians wonder aloud whether there was any institution in the nation that could be trusted.

So deep was the outrage over the killings and the government's handling of them, that some thought the upheaval might threaten to destroy the Maryland-sized country, to rip it apart along ethnic lines, dividing French speakers from Flemish speakers.

"Corruption and spinelessness are eternal," Hugo Claus, the nation's most revered Flemish writer said in a newspaper interview at the time. "Stupidity and mediocrity accompany our existence and in Belgium, this is amplified."

For the authorities in Belgium, the Dutroux case and the explosion of public anger that had followed it -- had been their Waterloo. In its wake, investigators and prosecutors were facing intense scrutiny. They were under immense pressure to prove that they were not bumbling misfits and that the public could have faith in them.

That was why investigators began combing through old records, going back a decade or more, reviewing almost every case they had closed, looking for oversights and errors.

Agnes Pandy (Reuters/Landov)

It didn't take long to find one. At first, the case didn't look like much, a fairly routine complaint, five years earlier by a young woman named Agnes Pandy, the mousy then 38-year-old daughter of a protestant minister, a quiet but diligent woman who spent her days working in the map department of the Albert First Royal Library.

Her whole demeanor made her easy to ignore. A lackluster young woman, blank unblinking eyes behind nondescript spectacles, she seemed to be the kind of person who wandered around the fringes of life, always overlooked. Perhaps she had issues with her father. Women like that often do, authorities thought. She certainly had seemed a little odd when she first walked into police headquarters claiming that her father had turned her into his sex slave.

But she also seemed sincere when she told police that she was worried.

She said that four years earlier her father had sent her and her older brother on holiday to the Belgian coast for several days. When they returned, she told police at the time, her stepmother, Edith Pandy and her sister, Andrea, had vanished.

"Don't look for them," she recalled her father telling her on her return. "They're not coming back."

But in the end, her complaints went nowhere. Investigators had looked into the case back then without much enthusiasm - and had come up empty. There was no evidence to support her claim that she had been sexually assaulted. Nor was there any evidence that her father's parsonage was, as the newspapers would later call it "A House of Horrors." Investigators had spoken briefly with the minister and he had offered a perfectly plausible explanation for his wife and daughter's absence. "They have returned to Hungary" he told authorities. He had even offered them proof that the missing family members were alive and well in Eastern Europe. He had a stack of letters purportedly written by them and postcards mailed from places like Israel, Miami and Brazil.

His explanation certainly seemed satisfactory. The investigators thanked the disheveled parson for his time and moved on, closing the case, confident that the whole thing was just a bizarre tale spun by a frustrated spinster, filled with resentment for her respectable father.

Certainly, Andras Pandy might have seemed a little eccentric, but he was a minister, a respected part of an institution in Belgium, and in the early 1990's, at least, institutions in Belgium were still to be trusted and respected.

Of course, that was back in the days before L'Affaire Dutroux had shaken the foundation of all the institutions in Belgium. Times had changed, authorities thought. Maybe it was time to revisit the Pandy case one more time.

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