Not everyone was swayed by Pandy's performances.

Istvan Stweszek, a retired minister in the Hungarian Protestant Church in Belgium and a former colleague of Pandy's, told the Irish Times in a 1997 interview that he had long had a disquieting feeling about his fellow pastor even before Fintor's disappearance.

"We often had the impression that his wife was not only his wife, but also his servant and slave," Steszek told the newspaper.

In fact, as early as 1989, a pastor in the nearby Netherlands who knew both Pandy and his second wife well enough to be concerned about Fintor's sudden disappearance, wrote to police and to Queen Fabiola, urging the government to investigate.

The letters were examined, authorities said, and a missing persons report was filed. But when police spoke to Pandy, he put on yet another grand performance, telling them that he had heard from his estranged spouse and that the news was all grim. She remained in Germany, he told them, and had fallen gravely ill. As a matter of fact, he said, she seemed to be near death.

Ironically, at about the same time, workers rebuilding a canal alongside Pandy's house unearthed a handful of human bones. No attempt was ever made to link those remains to Pandy's missing family members.

It was in 1992 when a friend of a high-ranking police official suggested that someone might want to talk to Agnes Pandy, the pastor's daughter.

They did. They met with her. They listened to her. For seven hours, they listened. And then they turned to Pandy.

Angrily, he denied his daughter's allegations of incest and worse. He accused her of being pathologically jealous, and suggested that she was secretly a member of a strange sect.

Besides, he told them, it was he who had first reported his wife missing, and with his emotional state at the time, certainly that was proof enough that he had borne his wife no ill will.

Besides, he said, brandishing a stack of letters, he had evidence in black and white that his children were alive.

In August of that year, the incest case was closed. A few months later, the police notes, the records of the phone calls, the transcripts of their interviews were all shuffled into a file marked "no further action," and buried in the deepest recess of a Brussels police station.

But five years later, as the nation reeled from the shock of the Dutroux scandal, the Pandy file would be exhumed. Soon thereafter, police diggers in vulcanized rubber boots would slowly descend the basement stairs in Pandy's home, easing their way along the blood stained wall, to begin sifting through the muck, searching for fragments of unthinkable horror.

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