Morgan Vanlerberghe, the amateur detective who wants to catch the ‘butcher of Mons’ – Technologist

At the age of 12, he discovered what was to become the case of his life. On that day in March 1997, police officers had stopped his father’s van to search it. They were looking for the man who had been dubbed “the butcher of Mons.” In the capital of the Belgian province of Hainaut, five women had been successively murdered and dismembered, their remains scattered in 38 garbage bags.

27 years on, 39-year-old Morgan Vanlerberghe refuses to let a serial killer he believes is still alive go free. A psychology graduate from the University of Lille with a passion for criminology, he hopes to contribute towards the case finally being solved. However, it is likely to be definitively closed in 2027, when the statute of limitations expires.

In the windowless office he rents in Neufchâteau, a small town in the Belgian Ardennes where he works in a psychiatric establishment, Vanlerberghe is considering a career change that would enable him to indulge his other passion, motor racing. He might do it if he first manages to close all the files piled up on his table – files which he has patiently built up over the last seven years in an attempt to identify “the butcher.”

Vanlerberghe may be very nearly there. Frank Discepoli, lawyer for the family of Carmelina Russo, one of the five victims, told us that he was in fact thinking of submitting a request for additional investigative actions, “in a few days or a few weeks.” To do this, he is relying particularly on evidence provided by the amateur detective. New DNA identification techniques, unheard of 27 years ago, could help identify the perpetrators of this gruesome crime.

Two rivers, the Haine and the Trouille

Born in Tournai, on the other side of Wallonia, Vanlerberghe published a 2002 book of almost 600 pages entitled, Il est Moins Cinq… Enquête sur le Dépeceur de Mons (“It’s Five Minutes to the Hour…Investigation into the Butcher of Mons,” editions Nombre7). “Dani Corlana,” the alias of a former court clerk and ex-collaborator of the investigating judge in charge of the butcher’s case, helped him carry out his slightly crazy project.

The former civil servant was in charge of the final editing while Vanlerberghe gathered a mountain of period documents, met dozens of witnesses and victims’ relatives, read everything he could about serial killers and took on investigative work from the ground up. He said he did this with “a different perspective” to that of the police. This is undoubtedly what enabled him to gather previously unknown data, sometimes supplied by anonymous sources who had caught wind of his research through the local press.

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