Killer Couples (18 page)

The haul was to take on an extra significance when it was discovered that Irene Silverman had gone missing that same day.

‘Those things aren’t ours,’ Sante insisted. ‘They were planted there. This is a complete miscarriage of justice!’

It was to become a familiar refrain while she and Kenny sat in
custody in New York City waiting for trial. The body of Irene Silverman had never been found and Sante continued to proclaim their innocence, claiming all the evidence against she and her son had been manufactured.

‘It’s the worst mistake in US justice history,’ she repeated to anyone who would listen.

Never exactly shrinking violets the Kimes courted publicity for their cause, giving interviews to TV presenters and magazine feature writers alike in the hope of drumming up public support. ‘There is no crime, there is no body, there is no evidence,’ Sante would repeat, her voice shrill with
self-righteous
anger. ‘This is a witch hunt!’

People may not have bought the ‘poor maligned me’ act, in fact the duo were quickly dubbed ‘Mommy and Clyde’ after the legendary gangster couple of the 1930s. But the one thing no one doubted was Sante’s extravagant concern for her boy, her Kenny.

‘He’s going through hell on earth, hell on earth,’ she lamented to CNN’s Larry King. ‘The only reason I’m alive is that I must prove his innocence… He is as wonderful a son as you could ever pray for.’

Kenny was equally effusive. ‘My mom is a wonderful, caring mother,’ he told Larry King during the same show. ‘Her world is me, and she is my world.’

Many viewers felt a strange chill at his words. Though both mother and son vehemently denied the persistent rumours of an incestuous relationship, somehow Kenny’s proclamation of filial love didn’t seem natural. How many good-looking
24-year
-old
men would go on national TV and admit that their mothers were their whole lives?

In prison, Sante bombarded her son with letters, giving him advice on how to cope with the pressure. These letters invariably started with an endearment such as ‘Kenny, my soul mate son’ or ‘My honey bunny’. A veteran of court appearances, she warned him against looking cold. ‘The key is to show good emotions,’ she wrote. ‘Just like a sweet little beaten puppy.’

Like his mother, Kenny denied any wrongdoing. They were scapegoats, he echoed. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But the jury didn’t believe them. In May 2000, Sante and Kenny Kimes were found guilty of an incredible 118 crimes between them, the most serious of which was the murder of Irene Silverman. Just reading out the verdicts took twenty minutes. Sante was sentenced to 120 years in prison, her darling Kenny to 125.

The judge called Sante ‘the most degenerate defendant who has ever appeared in this court room,’ while Kenny was described as a ‘vacuous dupe’.

As she left the court, Sante was still screaming her innocence, declaring the whole process a catastrophic miscarriage of justice.

So what went through the minds of the two as they were driven to their respective prisons, knowing they were going to spend the rest of their lives behind bars and, worst of all, be separated from one another? Did self-obsessed self-serving Sante ever blame herself for what she’d done to her son? Did she think of
him, just 25, with his whole life ahead of him, and cry for the future she’d robbed him of, for the girls he’d never marry, the children he’d never father?

The answer is probably no. Sante was living the Sante Kimes Show, don’t forget. She was the star and whatever lines she spouted at the time were the ones she believed. Sante probably did think she was innocent and that the police had framed her and Kenny; that she was a fantastic mother whose son was happy to be close to her. She never understood that their relationship overstepped any boundaries simply because she didn’t believe the boundaries existed in the first place. In Sante’s eyes, it was herself and Kenny against the world. Not in a million years would she accept that she was responsible for setting the world against Kenny.

And what of Kenny, alone in his prison cell, slowly facing up to the enormity of what he’d done and to the fact that this was to be his life from now on? Did he ever ask himself how differently his life might have turned out if he’d had a regular mother who brought him up to know that the world had rules, and then set him free to negotiate his own way around them? Did he ever wonder what kind of parent shows their love by suffocating their child, or by acting like a girlfriend rather than a mother?

Whatever went through his head in his long dark night of the soul, Kenny Kimes remained fiercely devoted to his high spirited, gregarious mama. In excerpts from his diary, published in an accompanying magazine interview, he talked of ‘dreamy
images of me and Mom, walking down the beach together hand in hand, walking into the sunset.’

The thing that worried him most was the threat of extradition to California to face charges over David Kazdin’s murder. As long as they stayed in New York, they’d serve out their life sentences in prison, but if they were found guilty of murder by a court in California, they could find themselves facing the death penalty. The thought of that happening to himself or his beloved Sante was too much for Kenny to bear.

On 10 October 2000, Kenny was in the process of being interviewed by a female news reporter when he whipped out a pen he’d borrowed from a guard and pressed it into the woman’s neck, effectively holding her hostage. He didn’t want to die and his mother was too old to be executed, he told the shocked guards and onlookers: he wanted a guarantee that they wouldn’t be extradited – and a ride to Canada.

In the end he got neither. After a tense four hours a shaking, desperate Kenny Kimes was overpowered by guards, his hostage released unharmed. He was rewarded for his stunt with eight years in solitary confinement, an eternity for a man whose contemporaries were still partying every Saturday night or taking their first tentative steps towards marriage and babies.

Kenny hadn’t really had a chance to get used to life in solitary before he was on the move again. All his efforts had been for nothing; he and Sante were going to California to face murder charges.

It was back in California, where they’d once lived fast and free
on a diet of champagne and thrillseeking that the bonds between mother and son finally began to unravel. Kenny desperately didn’t want to die. He knew he was unlikely ever to be free, but faced with the prospect of never going out to dinner with a beautiful girl or running into the sea with the sun on his face, he still chose life. But to escape the death penalty, he needed a bargaining chip, and the only one he had was his mother.

In November 2002, Kenny Kimes pleaded guilty to first degree murder and agreed to give evidence against his mother in return for a guarantee that neither of them would face execution. By this stage he’d had enough time alone to realise some uncomfortable truths about his relationship with the woman who’d shaped his life, who’d been his life. What Kenny was starting to understand was that it is possible to love someone and to destroy them at the same time. Sante had adored him – she’d lavished him with affection, with money, with the kind of lifestyle that makes a young, shallow boy feel like he’s worth something – but in so doing, she’d taken from him everything that was his own and made him who he was. She’d shown him a passion as intense as it was inappropriate, and in return she’d demanded everything. Sante’s love was as big as an ocean, as high as a mountain, but it came with a massive price tag: for the honour of being her son, companion and, some implied, her lover as well, Kenny had to buy wholesale into Sante’s world, where money was worth less than people and laws only applied to others.

In a strange sense, it took being locked up behind bars in
solitary confinement for Kenny to truly be freed. Away from Sante’s influence, finally he could sever the umbilical cord and start to breathe independently for the first time. He still loved his mother, but he’d stopped seeing the world through her eyes and he wanted to live. Surely she couldn’t deny him that much?

In June 2004, a shackled and beaten-looking Kenny Kimes shuffled into a Californian courtroom to give evidence against his mother. Though still only 29, he had the gaunt, haunted appearance of a man twice his age and the tears, never far from his green eyes, gave them a rheumy look normally seen only in the elderly.

His mother, who insisted on coming to court in a wheelchair despite not having a definable medical complaint, still complained her love loudly for the broken man in the regulation orange prison jumpsuit. He’d been brainwashed, she told anyone who would listen. They’d tortured him until he confessed.

By this stage Sante Kimes too had changed almost beyond recognition. Her trademark black hair, which people had used to say put them in mind of Elizabeth Taylor, was now short and grey, her face plump, with round cheeks that were quick to flush red. She peered out around the courtroom through large,
white-lensed
glasses, her gaze always coming back to rest on the lone figure in the orange jumpsuit, as if willing him to look at her. She could have been anyone’s benign, beloved grandmother. Instead, after she’d been found guilty, the judge declared her ‘one of the most evil individuals’ she’d ever come across. Kenny, she added, had been another one of her victims.

When Sante, alongside her son, was sentenced to life without possibility of parole, her shrieks of outrage seemed to still echo around the courtroom long after she’d been led away.

Sante and Kenny Kimes may have been mother and son, but they behaved like a romantic couple, with Sante calling the shots and Kenny following devotedly and powerlessly behind. By keeping him apart from his peers, controlling his every move and showering him with extravagant gifts and even more abundant displays of affection, Sante sought to create in her son an idealised companion and soul mate, perhaps even a lover. The tragedy is that in so doing, she also created a monster – in that at least, the two were well matched.

M
ichelle Martin picked her way fearfully down the dark stairs. In the damp, oppressive silence the only sounds she could hear were the occasional movements of the two restless Alsatian dogs upstairs, plus the pounding of her own heart.

The bags containing water bottles and various packets of food swung awkwardly from her hand as she descended further into the fuggy gloom, her apprehension increasing with each step. And here was the basement, close and airless, the odd jar or bottle or lumpy sack giving it an abandoned, uncared for feel. The shape of an upside down letter ‘L’, the basement walls were formed on all except one side by crumbling brick. The other wall was covered in white plastic panels, fronted with shelves. That was the wall that disguised the door to the dungeon.

Now other sounds came wafting through the suffocating,
dank air, the sounds of children whispering. Michelle was really nervous, her thin fingers fidgeting anxiously with the handle of the bags. So they were there, behind the door – awake, listening, conspiring. What would they say to her? What would they do?

She imagined them flying at her, screaming, accusing… How would she look them in the eyes? How could she turn her back on them and walk back through the hole, knowing what she knew? Knowing who they were, seeing the terror in their faces? The raw, savage animal fear.

They’d be like wild things, she told herself fearfully. They’d attack her. She couldn’t take the chance.

Stomach churning, she pulled aside the plastic panelling and heaved the 200-kilo cement door open. It was not enough to see anything, certainly not enough for them to get to her. Quickly she shoved the water bottles and the bags of food into the hole that led to the cellar. It’d be all right, she told herself, relief and revulsion coursing through her as she pulled the door shut again. Marc was bound to have left them with enough provisions to survive. And she couldn’t be expected to go in there again; it was too dangerous. What if they went for her? What if they escaped? Marc would kill her if they weren’t there when he got back. Hurriedly, she rearranged the panelling to cover up any sign of a door and shoved two sacks of coal against it.

It wasn’t her fault, she told herself. It was Marc’s fault, all of it. Yes, she was supposed to be feeding them but it wasn’t she who had brought them here. Besides, there wasn’t anything she could do for them. She had her own children to protect.

And so Michelle Martin decided not to go there again. She’d come back to feed the dogs, but not go back down into the basement where wild beasts lurked in cellar holes, waiting to torment her. She’d wipe from her memory the sound of children whispering through cement walls, the thought, quickly quashed, of small bodies slowly starving away to nothing. They weren’t human, these presences in the cellar – not like her own children. Best to forget all about them.

And so two 8-year-old girls slowly starved to death in a filthy, damp underground cellar, their names crayoned on the wall in their childish writing, the only testament to their last bleak days. Because the man who’d kidnapped them and kept them as sex slaves had gone away and the woman he’d asked to feed them convinced herself that they weren’t human to save her own skin.

When adult relationships become sufficiently twisted, other people, even small children, count for nothing – servants of their whims, or collateral damage in a private power struggle.

Michelle Martin was a good skater. Whenever she could, the young woman would head for the local skating rink, near her home just outside Brussels, losing herself for a while in the loud music, the excitement of streaking across the ice, feeling her skates slice through the surface like the blade of a knife. It was a way of escaping her overprotective mother for a while, and it was also a great way of meeting men.

One day in 1983, her attention was caught by a man working his way across the ice. He was older than her, with black hair
and swarthy features, but he moved with such effortless grace and skill that she was quite mesmerised. The next time she went, she noticed him again, and after a while she began to look out for him, secretly hoping to spot his black hair so clearly offset against the white background.

Trainee teacher Michelle was a pretty blonde of just 20, with delicate features and a slim, almost fragile frame, and she soon attracted the attention of the mystery skater. The two began chatting.

Marc Dutroux was unlike anyone Michelle had ever met. To her, he seemed so charismatic and charming, and so interested in her. A reserved, slightly nervous character, she’d never had anyone pay attention to her the way Marc did, as if he was truly listening to what she said.

Soon the couple began meeting outside of the skating rink. Michelle told him how fed up she was at home and how she’d always felt her mother blamed her for her father’s death in a car accident while he was driving her to school. With Marc she felt desirable, young and reckless. He seemed so worldly, so sophisticated. She couldn’t believe a man like him had singled her out.

Of course there was a catch. Marc Dutroux was already married, with two young sons. Not only that, he had at least one other lover as well. But by the time Michelle found out, she was already madly in love. More than in love, she was completely infatuated, unable to contemplate a future without him in her life.

‘I don’t care about the other women, as long as we can be together,’ she told him.

When Marc’s wife found them in bed together and walked out, Michelle was secretly glad. Now she could move in with him and be the number one woman in his life. She could learn to live with his womanising, she told herself, as long as he came home to her at night.

But life with Marc Dutroux was to prove far from the fairytale she’d been promising herself. For one thing, he was very volatile. One minute he could be charming, attentive and loving, the next he’d be in a violent rage about something, pushing her roughly around the house they shared in Charleroi, Southern Belgium. Sex too was often brutal, his face contorted into an expression much more to do with power than love.

Then there was his ‘work’. Though an electrician by trade, he seemed to do few jobs of that kind. Instead the phone rang all day with men who talked in low voices and cryptic phrases. Gradually she gathered that he was involved with car theft and drug dealing. And yet she stayed with him, by this time hooked on the adrenaline rush of being with him, terrified at the idea of being alone.

Being with him was like an addiction. No matter how badly he treated her, or what dark secrets she learned about him, Michelle always came back for more. She knew he’d had a miserable childhood, living with a man who wasn’t his real father and a mother he insisted didn’t like him. He’d run away, even worked as a rent boy, learning all the ways in which sex can be turned
into a commercial commodity, the prices people would pay for their own gratification or someone else’s degradation.

Yes, she knew he was terminally unfaithful. Waiting up for him at night, she’d know exactly where he was – parking his camper van by the ice rink, hoping to pick up a woman there, who was willing to have sex with him on the mattress in the back.

‘Why can’t you just stay home with me?’ she’d plead. ‘Why aren’t I enough?’

But Marc would only gaze at her with brown eyes that burned with disdain.

‘I told you I needed my independence,’ he’d hiss at her, making her feel parochial, narrow-minded and petty.

‘I understand. I love you,’ her words would come out in a rush, so desperate was she to win his good favour back, to have him smile at her again.

And so slowly, Michelle Martin, dedicated primary school teacher, started to lose her grip on what was right and what was wrong, what was acceptable and what should have caused immediate outrage. Even so, when Marc first mentioned kidnapping, she was shocked.

‘If I just take a girl instead of wasting time hanging round the ice rink hoping to pick one up, it’ll give me more time to spend with you,’ he explained, as if it were the most logical thing in the world.

‘You’re joking, right?’ she asked.

But Dutroux didn’t joke about things like that. Instead he started to snatch girls off the street to drug and rape in the back
of his van. Michelle Martin’s moral compass slipped still further: first when she discovered the attacks but stayed silent, and then when she was dragged along to be an accomplice, driving the van to make the girls less suspicious when they pulled up.

It was as if all free will had been surrendered: no longer could she remember a time when life was black and white, a time when there were things you did and things that you’d never in a million years consider doing. She couldn’t remember a time when she looked at her reflection and knew who she was. It was surprising how quickly she ceased to be affected by the terror in a girl’s eyes, or the way she might gaze at Michelle in horrified, mute appeal, trying to block out the terrible things being done to her body. It was surprising how quickly she became immune to suffering, even started to enjoy it.

Eventually, in 1986, the couple were arrested and charged with the savagely violent kidnap and rape of five girls, the youngest just 12, and one 50-year-old woman, who had had a razor blade inserted into her vagina. At their trial in 1989, Michelle received a five-year sentence, Marc thirteen years. He was allowed out in 1992 just three years later - a fact which enraged his own mother, Jeanine Lauwens.

‘Please don’t release this man,’ she pleaded with prison authorities. ‘I have known for a long time my eldest son’s temperament. What I do not know, and what all those who know him fear, is what he has in mind for the future.’

But her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Dutroux and Martin had got married while incarcerated in jail in 1989 and were reunited on their release from prison. Michelle soon became pregnant and gave birth to a son, the first of three children they’d have together. But if she thought that becoming a father again would rein in her husband’s sickening activities, she was much mistaken.

In addition to trading in stolen cars and drug dealing, Marc became involved in selling young girls into prostitution. He travelled widely around Europe and was gone for lengthy periods. The financial rewards were substantial. Marc owned seven different properties around Belgium, some rented out, others used as the settings for pornographic movies. He had a network of male acquaintances, to whom he spoke at length about his ‘business’.

By now Michelle was so deeply entrenched in her husband’s seedy private life that she’d stopped seeing it from any other perspective but his own. Forget the life she’d known before, this was normality, this twilight world of shady men and
frightened-looking
girls, of grainy barbarities played out on an amateur video. Never a strong character, she no longer had the power of will to question him. Even if she had, she now knew enough of his violence not to even attempt to do so. Instead, she surrendered herself to him: Marc was in charge and he could deal with the questions of conscience, the logistics, the calls in the night… She had her children to keep her busy. Besides, she liked the money, the big houses and the smart parties to which they were invited by her husband’s underworld contacts.

And so Michelle Martin sat back and did nothing, morally bankrupting herself, even while her bank balance swelled. But even Michelle, to whom rape and brutality were now as commonplace as studying and skating had once been, was not prepared for Marc’s announcement in 1994 that he wanted to kidnap more girls, this time keeping them prisoner in one of his houses, not his van, for weeks, not hours. There were other people involved, he intimated – people who’d pay well for girls kidnapped to order.

‘I’m not going to prison again,’ Michelle told him angrily.

But Dutroux didn’t pay any attention. Instead he started on some ‘modifications’ to his house in Marcinelle, near Charleroi. He was building a hidden dungeon.

Poking about in the dank basement, Rene Michaux stopped for a minute. There it was again, the sound of a child talking.

The policeman remained motionless, alert, but his eyes darted around the room, taking in the crumbling brick walls, on all except one side. There was no window anywhere through which voices might carry from the street, no door to another room, just shelves filled with bottles and sacks of coal.

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked the locksmith accompanying him on the search of the house in Marcinelle.

The other man nodded. He’d clearly heard not one, but two girls’ voices.

At that moment one of Michaux’ colleagues came thudding down the stairs.

‘Silence,’ he called, and for a moment no one moved, each man straining to hear something, anything.

But no other sounds came.

Eventually the police officers gave up and moved away, relieved to get out of that airless, cheerless place. Later, when they checked the back garden and saw children’s clothes hanging on a neighbours’ washing line, Michaux reassured himself that the voices had just been kids playing outside.

Through a hidden door in the wall, the wall so different from the others, two 8-year-old girls sat in chains, waiting for the rescue that never came.

Their names were Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo. Until 24 June 1995, they were ordinary schoolgirls, best friends who giggled and argued, who rode bikes and drew pictures with bright coloured crayons. And then one day, while playing on an overpass near Melissa’s home in Grace-Hollogne, Liege, where they’d gone to wave to the lorry drivers passing underneath, they disappeared. Two little girls were gone in a heartbeat, their high-pitched laughter wafting gently on the summer breeze.

Their disappearance sparked a massive search, with their distraught families growing increasingly desperate as the days passed, but no clues were found. They had simply vanished.