On August 23, 2023, around 1:00 a.m., Marie Delhoux (88 years old) alerted her neighbors on rue du Pied d’eau in Ronquières. “Help, help”, shouts the widow. Her neighbor comes out of his house and finds her in front of her house. “It’s night, you have to sleep, Marie“, he said to him.
Something unusual happened. Marie’s face is covered in blood and traces of blows. “There are thieves”, she told him, in shock. Another neighbor goes looking for possible thieves, but finds nothing. Her companion, a nurse, takes care of Marie and rubs her face. She notices that the blood is already partly dried. The attack is not recent.
There was a woman
Marie Delhoux’s relatives are called, her brother-in-law, her son, her daughter. She tells them that she was taken from her bed and placed on a chair to be beaten, and that there were several perpetrators. Almost blind, she says she identified a female voice.
Marie Delhoux is taken to hospital. Her life was not in danger, but she died on the night of August 31 to September 1, 2017. The autopsy revealed that the blows were the cause of the head trauma, which itself caused the death. The pajamas she wore on the day of the incident are seized, just in case.
Robbery with violence and murder in Ronquières: Daniel Bellens and Marie Tenret guilty at the Hainaut assizes
His family discovers that an unknown quantity of jewelry has disappeared, including a gold cartouche, a souvenir from Egypt.
The Gypsy identified
Three years later, analysis of the pajamas revealed DNA known to the legal authorities. He is Daniel Bellens, a repeat thief sentenced in 2005 to life imprisonment for theft and murder of an elderly person in the Charleroi region.
Investigators note that the one nicknamed Le Gitan was released from prison on August 4, 2017, under conditions. Daniel Bellens is arrested, charged with violent robbery and manslaughter, and imprisoned. The investigating judge does not consider the murder. The prosecution will take care of it later before the indictment chamber.
Telephony
The police noticed that he was using a phone, given to him by his girlfriend’s mother, and a SIM card. This phone activates pylons in Ronquières, on August 22, 2017, in the early evening. They notice the activation, among the 11,000 users, of Marie Tenret’s telephone on the same pylon. The two have known each other for years and reconnected after Bellens was released from prison. Marie Tenret serves as his taxi.
She admits to having driven him towards Braine-le-Comte or Braine l’Alleud, she no longer knows, shortly after her birthday, which is August 17. Daniel wanted to see a former fellow inmate to whom he had given drawings a few years earlier.
Thierry Auspert is identified. He was incarcerated in Mons prison with Daniel Bellens. He also has the profile. He was convicted of aggravated robbery and murder. The victim was an elderly person who lived in Braine-le-Comte. Thierry Auspert lived for six years in Ronquières, rue du Pied d’eau, between 1990 and 1996.
He was questioned as a witness in court and declared that he had not heard from Bellens since 2008 and that he was forbidden to associate with former detainees. A car resembling his was filmed on August 22 at rue du Pied d’eau. However, he is exonerated.
Jewelry
Daniel Bellens contests, despite the evidence against him. His relatives load the boat. His partner states that she saw blood on his pants after the incident. His daughter claims he was hiding jewelry. Finally, according to his partner, he tried to resell gold jewelry in Charleroi. Analysis of the telephone call indicates that, on August 23, Daniel Bellens was interested in the price of gold on the market.
Assizes Hainaut – “We must remove Daniel Bellens as far as possible from our society in order to protect the weakest members”
Well, well… Jewelry was just stolen from Marie Delhoux. The witnesses are confronted with photos, it looks like it. Bellens maintains that the jewelry belonged to his mother.
On Monday, jurors did not believe the defendants’ denials. At least two individuals, including a woman, attacked Marie Delhoux, a vulnerable woman due to her age and state of health. It was Daniel Bellens and Marie Tenret, without the slightest possible doubt.
Protect society
On Tuesday, the Attorney General requested a new sentence of life imprisonment against Daniel Bellens, adding fifteen years of provision to the Sentencing Court. “Daniel Bellens has retained nothing from his previous conviction. […] He attacked an elderly person again. It’s a heinous crime. He is incapable of complying with the slightest obligation imposed by his judges. We must move it as far away as possible in order to protect the weakest members of our society,” he declared in his indictment.
He requested a seventeen-year prison sentence against Maire Tenret, recognizing that his life journey was not the easiest. However, she had already put her fingers in the jam jar.
The jury and the court, meeting as a panel, did not consider any mitigating circumstances in favor of Daniel Bellens. His worrying personality and his rapid action, for profit, worried the judges. The repeat offender is sentenced to life imprisonment with remand to the Sentence Enforcement Court for a period of fifteen years.
On the other hand, they retained some in favor of Marie Tenret: her unstructured childhood and the absence of a criminal history. The sixty-year-old is sentenced to fifteen years of criminal imprisonment.
