“My fighter”
Her father, a career soldier stationed in Delbrück, Germany, Nathalie was born at the Cologne Military Hospital, very premature. “30cm, 700g”. With an incredible will to live. Eric calls her “my fighter”, describes her “funny, playful, adventurous” and remembers the bursts of laughter, roller skates, her bike and the little mischief of kids her age.
Problems at birth, Nathalie suffered after-effects which justified her attending specialized education, in this case at Lovenjoel.
Since his father was transferred to the Panquin barracks in Tervuren, they lived in Leefdaal, 15 km from Brussels.
The bus stop is Foksweg, 200 m from their house. An ordinary morning. It is “between 7:15 and 7:30” when the couple drops her off by car. Nathalie, with her schoolbag, put on a purple winter coat. She has blue eyes, shoulder-length blonde hair. She will never make it to school. She didn’t even get on her bus.
The man in the gray Toyota
The investigation was able to count on several converging testimonies. The best, that of Suzanne who knew Nathalie, also had to drop off her son at the stop. She saw Nathalie sitting in an older model gray Toyota Corolla (early 1980s) that appeared to have broken down, with a man leaning over the open hood. Bald, fifty years old.
Nathalie made a gesture that Suzanne interpreted as a hello while finding it strange. What was Nathalie doing in this car? Having dropped off his son and returning to the location, the “broken down” Toyota had disappeared.
Nowadays, Suzanne would have called immediately. Back when there was no GSM, it was after 8 a.m. when the alert was given.
The trail of monsters
Led by Judge Decoux, the investigators, who did not have today’s computer resources, had more than 10,000 Toyota Corollas to check. You might as well look for a needle in a haystack. Especially since we saw Nathalie everywhere.
After a year, the gendarmes had received 920 denunciations, and more than 120 sex offenders had been questioned, to no avail.
So, investigators looking for sexual predators have, over time, thought of Fourniret – who had kidnapped Elisabeth Brichet two years earlier in Namur; to the never-identified assassin of Katrien De Cuyper (15 years old and like Nathalie, kidnapped in 1991); to Van Geloven killer in France of cousins Muriel Sanchez and Ingrid Van De Portael who were 10 years old. And of course, to the Dutroux affair (who was detained on February 26, 91) and to Michel Nihoul, of whom Eric Geijsbregts notes that the age and description correspond quite well to the man described by Suzanne, in addition to the fact that Nihoul “had ‘a gray Toyota’.
Too curious coincidence
But for Eric Geijsbregts, the best lead is still today that of Michel Stokx, this Belgian international truck driver living in the Netherlands for whom it has been shown that by tampering with the tachograph of his truck, he had created an alibi for the day of the disappearance February 26, 1991.
Quite recently, an investigator expressed his feeling that Stokx could be involved in Western Europe in “at least 65 disappearances” of young children, at least three of which were incontestable.
Asked about that of Nathalie, Stokx, who never said that he had not done it, replied to the investigators that it was up to them to prove that it was him.
In his book, Eric says he is haunted by this answer. What did he mean? We’ll never know. Stokx died in a strange way, in prison, in Scheveningen, in 2001, taking his secrets with him.
What if, against all expectations, the investigation rebounds? “If something were discovered, I wouldn’t be afraid to see Nathalie’s skeleton.”
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