Photographers Blog

Brussels, Belgium

By Francois Lenoir

My first big assignment after a few weeks off was to cover convicted Belgian serial killer and child molester Marc Dutroux, who was appearing in court in Brussels on February 4 to request his release. Benelux chief photographer Yves Herman was covering the exterior of the courthouse waiting for the arrival and the departure of the convoy carrying the serial killer. We also had a photographer at the Nivelles prison.

Heavy security measures surrounded the building. Police officers were placing fences inside the palace to prevent people from looking into the hearing through the windows. No pictures were allowed inside.

As the national and international media gathered to get the arrival of the lawyers and family at the entrance to the court, I decided to look around to try to work out what route Dutroux would take through the 19th century courthouse in central Brussels, which has about 40 km (24 miles) of corridors and is bigger than the basilica of Saint Peter in Rome.

The hearing was just about to start and I still didn’t see any way to get a good picture, I thought that I wasn’t going to have any luck that day. I walked back to the entrance of the court where I received a tip from a court reporter who knew the building well.

Dutroux was supposed to pass through a corridor following the hearing, and the source showed me a place from where the corridor could be seen. I had to make a decision. At this point I had nothing and if I went back to the court room I would have been able to at least get a picture of Dutroux’s lawyer coming out of the hearing.

By Zoran Milic
Any opinions expressed here are the author’s own

It’s late May and I’m still crouched in a Caribbean bush, hours away from the streets of New York City, wondering how did I end up here and why? Just last week I was shooting New York Yankee Derek Jeter for a sports cover and next week I’m booked to spend a week with a horse that could become a Triple Crown winner. But today in the sizzling heat, it’s a different type of subject in front of my long sports lens; I’m waiting for one of the world’s most notorious serial killers, Karla Homolka, to show her face.

I’m waiting for the blonde killer who simply vanished in 2007 after spending just 12 years in prison for the death of two teenagers. Homolka drugged her own 15-year-old sister, Tammy Lyn, so she and her then-fiance, Paul Bernardo, could take her virginity. She protected serial rapist Bernardo as he terrorized young women, even luring some to her home. Then, Homolka plotted alongside him to kidnap, drug, rape, torture and eventually kill three teenage girls, including her sister. She talked the courts into a “sweetheart deal” and is free while Bernardo is in prison for life. (Homolka never faced charges in the drugging-sex-assault death of her sister). Psychiatric experts couldn’t agree on her diagnosis or predict if she’d kill again. Many citizens were just happy to hear she may have left Canada.

I’d been horrified by the serial killers at the time, but now that I am a devoted father, I have an even higher level of horror. Part of me didn’t want to think about the dead girls, but I understood perfectly why investigative reporter Paula Todd was worried. I’d worked with Todd before and trusted her implicitly. She’d found online reports that the “Barbie Killer” was now teaching school in the Caribbean and I shared her fear that as journalists we had an ethical obligation to find out. Many other reporters had tried to find the elusive killer and failed. But Todd is a smart, inexhaustible ace investigator. Todd not only found the killer but succeeded in spending a tension-filled hour with her. What she learned is detailed in “Finding Karla: How I Found An Elusive Serial Child Killer and Discovered A Mother of Three“. Now, it was up to me to attempt the near impossible: photograph the elusive Homolka after she knew Todd had found her.