from him.
As a politician Weygers made a career this way by thrusting himself into the public spotlight, a trait which would appear to be at odds with the behaviour of a serial killer. He owned 19 investment properties around Perth, mostly inherited from his mother, with whom he lived until her death. He has since married Vicki, a Filipina. Nevertheless in September 2004, the police staged a very public search of his home and, despite his objections, forced him to give a DNA sample.
“This is a gross invasion of privacy. This is a gross invasion of rights. I have no idea what their excuse is for this absolutely disgraceful conduct,” he told a journalist, claiming the police scrutiny was part of a State Government plot to discredit him.
In office, Weygers had questioned the mass DNA testing of taxi drivers by investigators in the Claremont case and, later, took up the issue of the human rights of Lance Williams, then still under day-and-night surveillance.
Steven Ross then further muddied the waters by handing out an unsigned 44-point statement to the media. He claimed police had tried to coerce him into making false admissions about Weygers the day before the raid on the civil libertarian’s home, including suggesting that Ross delivered girls to the former mayor. Weygers had a reputation, when mayor, for making flirtatious or suggestive remarks to female reporters.
“The police made derogatory remarks about Peter Weygers and implied that I was involved in a homosexual relationship with him,” Ross wrote. “I denied that I was in a homosexual relationship with Peter Weygers and that he was not my boyfriend. The police alleged that Peter Weygers exerted an abnormal influence over me, which I denied. The police alleged that Peter Weygers gave me orders that I carried out, which I denied. The police then stated words to the effect that Peter Weygers ‘wanted’ young girls.”
The inability to apprehend the Claremont Killer is seen as a major embarrassment to the Western Australia Police and the “Macro Task Force” set up to investigate the murders has been disbanded and reformed several times. Public confidence has not been helped when several senior officers were implicated in corruption allegations by the Western Australia Police Royal Commission.
In October 2006, it was announced that Mark Dixie, a man on trial in the United Kingdom over the murder in 2005 of the 18-year-old model Sally Anne Bowman, is a prime suspect in the killings, and the Macro Task Force has requested DNA samples from Dixie to test against evidence taken during the enquiry.
Belgium’s Butcher of Mons
On 20 May 1998, Belgian police in the city of Ranst, outside Antwerp found the skeletal remains of what was thought to be seven bodies in a container, along with five human heads. They feared that this might be the reappearance of the “The Butcher of Mons”, a unidentified killer who had dumped 30 bags containing body parts of at least three women, possibly six, in places around the city of Mons, 60 miles away, in 1997.
The killer left police scientists a gruesome anatomical jigsaw puzzle. Some of the remains were so badly decomposed it was an almost impossible task to discover how many victims there were. The authorities were under intense pressure to solve the murders from Belgian Justice Minister Stephane de Clerck after the outcry that followed the bodies of four young girls discovered 20 miles away, victims of paedophile Marc Dutroux.
The killer, who plainly savoured their discomfort, played a grisly game with his pursuers, dumping the bags filled with body parts in places with chillingly evocative names. The first bags, containing 12 neatly-severed parts of an indeterminate number of arms and legs, were found on 22 March 1997 on the banks of the Fleuve Trouille—the River Jitters—a canal bordering Mons and neighbouring Cuesmes.
Two days later, a limbless upper torso was found on the banks of a tributary of the Fleuve Haine—River Hate—next to a road called Chemin de l’Inquietude—the Path of Worry. The limbs had been severed in the same way as those of another torso found floating in the Haine the previous July. The police have established that it was the work of the same killer.
The
The killer left numerous clues which allowed a team of specialist psychiatrists to compile a profile. He is thought to be an intelligent, methodical, calculating and obsessive man, who takes pleasure in the ritualistic dismemberment of his victims and the careful distribution of their remains. Detectives believe that there might be a perverse religious motive for the killings. Mons is an ancient religious town with connections to a number of saints associated with decapitation.
A stone head of St John the Baptist can be found over the door of the oldest inn in Mons, which dates back to 1776. The inn was built by a monk, a member of the Catholic Brotherhood of St John the Beheaded. The order was established in the Middle Ages to escort condemned men to the scaffold. It still exists today. The head looks out over the Rue de la Clef—Road of the Key—a fact that investigators feel could be significant, given the clues the killer is volunteering. It may also be significant that relics of the decapitated St Symphorien are kept in a nearby church.
Two of the three victims whose names are known disappeared on a Sunday, and the third may also have done so, though no one seems to have noticed that she was missing.
“We have not ruled out that he is a member of a satanic sect,” said Didier Van Reusel of the public prosecutor’s department. “The treatment of the bodies is very methodical, which is often the case with Satanists involved in ritualistic killings.”
A song about the Butcher of Mons called “Bowels of Murder” appears on
It was initially thought that the killer was a surgeon or a butcher, due to the precision of the dissection. But further investigation revealed that the killer had not dismembered the bodies by hand. He ran his victims through an automatic sawing machine with several circular blades at 12-inch intervals—the kind of machine normally used for slicing chopping logs into planks. The severed limbs were exactly one foot long.
“There are not that many places you can carry out that operation, with the blood and the smell,” said Van Reusel. “And there are not that many people who own a machine like that.”
The killer appears to have chosen his victims from a group of transients, who congregate around Mons station and the string of cheap bars opposite. One of the victims was 43-year-old transexual Martine Bohn, a retired prostitute who had worked out of the bars. Having lost contact with her family years before, she disappeared on Sunday 21 July 1996 and it was her torso found floating in the Haine. Her breasts had been sliced off. It is thought that the killer may have been angry at discovering she was not a real woman.
A second victim was 33-year-old Jacqueline Leclercq, a mother-of-four who had separated from her husband. After losing custody of her children, she drifted into the station scene. She had disappeared on Sunday 23 January 1997.
A third victim was 21-year-old Nathalie Godart, who lived in a bedsit in Mons. Her young son had been taken into care. No one had reported her missing. The staff at the Intercity, the Metropole and the Cafe de la Gare, the bars opposite the station, knew her well.
“She was promiscuous, but not a prostitute,” said one bar owner.
The police are aware that the killer is playing a complex game with them. Tests indicate some of the first bags found on the bank of the Trouille had lain there undiscovered for months. They were only discovered only when the last bag dumped there hung conspicuously on a tree, drawing attention to it. The remains they contained were between one week and two years old which indicated that the killer had access to an industrial refrigeration unit.
The killer plainly enjoyed the publicity their discovery brought and he became more audacious. Succeeding bags were placed in highly visible places, with evocative names, at a time when the police search was already fully underway.
Psychiatrists believe the perpetrator relishes not just the killing but also the handling of the corpse. Each of the body parts found had been wrapped individually in its own white plastic bag which is then knotted tightly at the
