He was 12 years old at the time and discovered what would become the case of his life. On that day in March 1997, police officers stopped his father's van to search it: they were looking for the man who had been dubbed “the Mons dismemberer”. In the capital of the Belgian province of Hainaut, five women had been successively murdered and dismembered; their remains had been distributed among thirty-eight garbage bags, scattered in different places.
Twenty-seven years later, Morgan Vanlerberghe, 39, refuses to allow a serial killer he believes is still alive to end his days in freedom. This psychology graduate from the University of Lille, who is passionate about criminology, hopes to contribute to this case finally being solved. However, it risks being 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 facility, Morgan Vanlerberghe is thinking about a career change that would allow him to indulge his other passion, car racing. He might succeed if he can first close all the files, piled up on his desk, that he has patiently built up over the past seven years trying to identify “the dismemberer.”
Morgan Vanlerberghe may be very close to the goal. Me Frank Discepoli, the lawyer for the family of Carmelina Russo, one of the five victims, is considering filing a lawsuit “in a few days or a few weeks”, he explains to us, a request to obtain additional investigative acts. To do this, he relies in particular on elements provided by the amateur detective. New DNA identification techniques, unknown twenty-seven years ago, would make it possible to identify the perpetrator(s) of this macabre incident.
Two rivers, Hate and Fear
Born in Tournai, on the other side of Wallonia, Morgan Vanlerberghe published, in 2022, a book of almost six hundred pages entitled It's five minutes to… Investigation into the Mons dismemberer (éditions Nombre7). “Dani Corlana”, the pseudonym of a former court clerk, former collaborator of the judge in charge of the investigation into the dismemberer, helped him to carry out his somewhat crazy project.
The former civil servant took charge of the final drafting, while Morgan Vanlerberghe gathered a mountain of period documents, met with dozens of witnesses and relatives of victims, read everything he could about serial killers, and took over the investigation from scratch. With, he says, “another look” than that of the police. This is probably what allowed him to collect previously unknown data, sometimes provided by anonymous people who had heard about his research through the local press.
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Source: Lemonde
