On October 20, 1997 Belgian authorities charged Andras Pandy -- a 70-year-old protestant pastor from Hungary -- with the murder of two of his ex-wives and four of his eight children. His daughter Agnes, 40, who claims that her father sexually abused her from the age of 13, confessed to helping kill five family members and was charged as an accessory to the murders. This arrest -- coupled with the nefarious Dutroux affair and a serial rampage gripping Mons -- is starting to make this sleepy northern European nation look like the bedrock of worldwide serial mayhem.
In 1997 police started digging for human remains in several abandoned properties owned by Pandy in the seedier parts of Brussels. They found kneecaps, teeth, bone fragments and ashes in one of the cellars, but DNA tests showed they were not from the missing Pandy family members. It remains unclear whose body parts those were. Authorities also found a blood splattered wall in another of the homes and "large pieces of unspecified flesh" stocked inside two fridges." The preacher's arrest followed a joint investigation by Belgian and Hungarian authorities.
Pandy came to Brussels after the Hungarian uprising in 1956 and had three children, including Agnes, with his first wife, Ilona Sores. The couple divorced in 1967 and Pandy later married Edit Fintor, who already had three children and who gave birth to two more by Pandy. Until he retired in 1992, Pandy worked as a Protestant pastor and religious education teacher. In a statement, the United Protestant Church of Belgium said Pandy had retired as a teacher in 1992 and held no post within the church.
Not one for family planning, between 1961 and 1971 the pastor fathered eight. Between 1986 and 1989 four of his children and two former wives began disappearing. Later he claimed they were all alive and well back in Hungary. Curiously, no ever saw them again since they left. To appease investigators, the crafty preacher used fake papers and postcards to try to prove the six were alive and well and had moved back to Hungary.
Hungarian police found two girls and a boy who had on several ocassions impersonated the missing children of the suspect killer pastor Andras Pandy. "He took the children on family visits to relatives and friends in Hungary, who were then asked to send letters saying they had seen the children." Allegedly Pandy recruited the children in 1992 -- when Belgian police first began investigating him -- and used them several times. The children never suspected any wrongdoing because they "were told it was a rehearsal for a part in a movie about Pandy's life"
In Hungary investigators are trying to establish whether Pandy could be linked to any of 60 "missing person" cases which have remain unsolved since the early Eighties. Investigators used sniffer dogs to search the preacher's home in Dunakeszi, north of Budapest. In Belgium police brought in sonar devices -- similar to those employed at the Gloucester home of serial killers Frederick and Rosemary West -- to investigate the six interconnected cellars under his second home. Questions have also been raised over the identity of the pastor. Belgian investigators think the man in custody could be the younger brother of the real Andras Pandy, who died in Hungary in 1956.
Agnes Pandy confessed to police that she and her father either shot or sledgehammered to death five relatives -- her mother, two brothers, a stepmother and her daughter. Then they chopped up the bodies and used a powerful drain cleaner to dissolve the corpses and flush them down the drain. Agnes told authorities that her preacher dad had been raping her since age 13. He also regularly raped his stepdaughters. Things got ugly when 20-year-old Timea, one of the stepdaughter, became pregnant. Pandy tried to kill her and her son, but she managed to escape to Canada and then Hungary.
Authorities have also linked Agnes to the disappearance in 1993 of a 12-year-old girl whose Hungarian mother had a relationship with Pastor Pandy. Belgian newspapers reported that five years ago Agnes notified police that several members of her family were missing. At the time, she also denounced her father for sexually abusing her and her step-sisters. In true Belgian fashion, nothing came of it and charges were eventually dropped.
The Hungarian Nepszava newspaper reported that Pandy fostered an undetermined number of orphaned or homeless Romanian children in his home in Brussels. The children -- who became orphaned or homeless in Romania's 1989 revolution which toppled communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu -- were taken in by a charity club named YDNAP (PANDY backwards) founded by the lethal pastor. They stayed under his care for varying periods of time, "and nobody knows what happened to them or if they returned home." In Brussels, press reports speculated that bones found under a concrete slab in one of Pandy's homes were those of a Hungarian woman who arrived in Belgium with her daughter after replying to a personal add placed by the pastor in search of a wife.
On April 24 tests by Norwegian forensic scientists showed that the new set of teeth discovered were from seven women, aged between 35 and 55, and a man, who was between 18 and 23. It is suspected that the unidentified victims were lured from Hungary to Belgium with promises of marriage. Police had previously thought that the teeth, bones and other remains found at Pandy's house might have come from five people unrelated to him.
On March 6, 2002, a Belgian court convicted of Pandy of killing six family members and dissolving their bodies in chemical drain cleaner. He was sentenced to life in prison. His daughter 44-year-old Agnes Pandy, received a 21-year sentence for being an accomplice in five murders and one attempted murder. Pandy, who is Hungarian but moved to Belgium to escape Communism, was found guilty of murdering two wives and four children, one of which, a daughter, he also was convicted of raping. Not the cornerstone in family values, he was convicted of raping Agnes and another daughter.
Prosecutors had requested a 29-year sentence for Agnes, but her lawyers pushed for leniency, saying Agnes had been under the "overwhelming irresistible spell" of a father who was raping her as he coerced her into collaborating in the killings of her mother and siblings. "I had no way out. I was completely in his grip," Agnes said in her closing statement.
In court, Pandy dismissed the proceedings as a "witch trial" against him. He told the jury that the allegedly dead were still alive and he is "in contact with them through angels." When asked why the missing family members could not be traced in four years of searching, Pandy replied: "It is up to justice to prove they are dead. When I'm free again, they will come and visit me."