The house was located at 128, avenue Philippeville, in Charleroi, an hour’s drive from Brussels. Just one hour, and you feel like you’re leaving Earth for another solar system, leaving the capital of Europe for a city unlike any other. Its prosperity, formerly based on coal mining and metallurgy, disappeared somewhere in the 1960s with deindustrialization, freezing the metropolis and placing it before a future to be invented.
At 128, avenue Philippeville, the owner, Marc Dutroux, deserted the premises on August 13, 1996, after his arrest by the Belgian police, with his partner, Michelle Martin, and two of his accomplices. Found guilty in 2004 of murder, rape of minors and kidnapping, he is serving a life sentence in Nivelles prison. His ghost still haunts the town, even though his house no longer exists. Razed in 2022, it was replaced the following year by a memorial garden called “Between Earth and Sky”. A name chosen by the parents of Julie Lejeune and Melissa Russo, two 8-year-old girls kidnapped in June 1995 near Liège, imprisoned in the basement of the house, and whose bodies were found in another property of Marc Dutroux .
The white bricks used for the memorial contrast with the black bricks of the other houses in Marcinelle, the second most populated section of Charleroi. Part of this district once housed heavy industrial factories, now deserted, between disused blast furnaces, abandoned cranes and a gigantic overhead tunnel, never dismantled either, where coal once transited. The vestiges of this industrial splendor, like a gigantic urban scar, constantly take this city back to its tattered past.
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