BRUSSELS — One of Belgium’s most despised criminals, the former wife of a pedophile and child killer who let two of his victims starve to death, left prison for a convent late Tuesday after serving barely half her 30-year sentence.
Earlier in the day, the nation’s highest court had approved a ruling that let Michelle Martin leave prison early despite her part in the mid-1990s kidnappings, rapes and killings by her then-husband, Marc Dutroux.
Prison spokesman Laurent Sempot said Martin, 52, left prison in an unmarked vehicle late Tuesday.
Her eventual destination was the verdant village of Malonne, a 45-mile trip south of the capital, where she will live in a Clarisse convent and, in the words of her lawyer, seek atonement for her crimes.
Family members were outraged at Tuesday’s court decision.
“There is only one word for this. This is simply absurd. But I will have to accept it,” said Paul Marchal, whose daughter An was one of the victims of Dutroux.
Martin has depicted herself as a passive culprit of the psychopath Dutroux. But she is still blamed for aiding her husband as he went on a depraved and murderous spree, and she is particularly loathed for letting the two girls starve while Dutroux was briefly imprisoned.
Dutroux, an unemployed electrician and convicted pedophile on parole at the time of the crimes, was arrested in 1996 and convicted eight years later of abducting, imprisoning and raping six girls between the summers of 1995 and 1996. He was also found guilty of murdering two of the six girls, who ranged in age from 8 to 19 years old. The last two of Dutroux’s kidnap victims were found alive in his basement a few days after his arrest.
Martin faced accusations of conspiracy in the kidnappings and imprisonment leading to the deaths of the two starved girls, who were held in a secret dungeon specially built in a cellar. When Dutroux was serving a four-month sentence for car theft, Martin said she was too scared to go into the cellar to feed them.
