Andras Pandy in court, March 5, 2002 (Reuters/Landrov)

It was February of 2002. The "Pastor Diabolique," as he had been dubbed by the Belgian press, seemed vaguely amused as officers led him past the throng of reporters and photographers into the courtroom in the vast marbled hall of justice. That smile, that ever-present smile; that Buddha-like smile, as his former colleague had described it, never seemed to fade from his face, observers would later note.

Throughout his two-week long trial, as he sat next to his co-defendant, who was also his chief accuser, his former sex partner and his daughter, Pandy seemed hardly to be moved by the proceedings.

But the people of Belgium were deeply disturbed. For them, the case, as horrible as it was, was also an indictment against the police, the prosecutors and the courts.

For them, it dredged up again the revulsion they had felt when word of Dutroux's atrocities against young girls and the government's impotence in the face of his crimes. It reminded them of the government's botched investigation a decade earlier into the Killers of Brabant, who between 1982 and 1985 shot dead 28 shoppers in gun attacks on supermarket car parks around Brussels. In that case, hooded murderers, always driving the same Volkswagen Golf GTi would open fire at random with pump-action shotguns, and then escape, evading police roadblocks and even crack military units as they fled, leaving hundreds of wounded people behind them. No one has ever been charged.

Pandy, the smiling, bespectacled pastor accused of a horrific string of murders was just one more example of how the authorities had failed to fulfill the most basic responsibility of any government to protect its citizens.

To make matters worse, this was to be a trial with no bodies. The bone fragments plucked from the mud in Pandy's basement had been studied and tested, but authorities were never able to determine whose remains they were. They were the remains of men and women, all of them over the age of 35, but their identities remained a mystery.

As a result, the indictment against Pandy and his daughter named only the five victims who had been bound to him by blood or marriage -- his two former wives and his three children. Of them, not a trace remained. What's more, his stepdaughter Timea, who had carried his child and survived his alleged attempt against her life, refused to testify against him in court. She told authorities that even after nearly twenty years, she still feared the man.

In court, Pandy seemed to relish the fact that even now nearly 20 years after his killing spree ended, police still had no hard physical evidence with which to confront him.

At one point, he challenged the prosecutors to prove that his family members were dead, claiming that they were "alive and well" and in the care of some unspecified "international society."

"It is up to justice to prove that they are dead," he said. "When I'm free again, they will come and visit me."

Later, he appeared to almost taunt the prosecution, claiming that he was "in contact," with his missing children, then added, "through the angels."

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