How was it possible, the newspaper pundits wondered, that such a brutal and prolonged killing spree could go undetected? Surely, it had to be the incompetence of the judicial system, the police, the prosecutors. Surely, they had failed, the critics opined.

And perhaps, to some degree they did. Perhaps they could have been more aggressive when word first leaked out that something unsavory might be going on at the house in Molenbeek.

But perhaps there was another reason that the diabolical pastor managed to escape detection for so long. Perhaps it was that Pandy himself took great pains to cover his tracks, authorities said. He was, prosecutors would later say, a very "clever liar," and a talented actor.

Take, for example, the dramatic portrayal of a jilted husband that Pandy has said to have given in 1986 at the front desk of a Brussels police station not long after as authorities would later learn he murdered his second wife.

Appearing agitated and distraught, the parson stormed into headquarters to report that his second wife a woman, he claimed, he had rescued from the evils of a communist country, simply up and left him. "She had gone to live in Germany," he told police. His performance was convincing, authorities would later say.

But that is hardly the most elaborate performance the theatrical preacher gave, authorities said.

Not long after Pandy's arrest, police in Hungary discovered what may have been his most elaborate ruse. Claiming that he was writing a screenplay about his life, he hired two young actors to impersonate two of his missing children during his occasional forays back to his native Hungary. Pandy had purchased a tiny green cottage in his old hometown. He called it a refuge from his life in Brussels. "He took the children on family visits," then asked his friends and family to "write letters saying they had seen the children," police said at the time. A widow, who would later be wooed by Pandy and later became dangerously close to him, remembered that Pandy brought two young women to her house one day about a year before his arrest. "They were about 22 or 24, and their names were Andrea and Tunde," Margrit Magyar told a reporter. "But I later learned that these were the names of two of the girls that were supposed to have disappeared."

The young women told police they played their parts several times between 1992 and 1996, and never suspected a thing. They believed that the ruse was "rehearsal for a part on a movie about Pandy's life," authorities said.

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