Pastor who dissolved corpses of slain wives and children gets life | World news

Publish date: 2021-07-15
World news

Pastor who dissolved corpses of slain wives and children gets life

An elderly Hungarian émigré dubbed "the diabolical pastor" by the Belgian media was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday after being found guilty of murdering his first two wives and four of his eight children.

In an unusually brutal case which has transfixed Belgium and shocked investigators, a Brussels court found Andras Pandy, 74, guilty of six counts of premeditated murder and concluded that he had also raped three of his daughters.

His eldest daughter, Agnes, 44, had been sexually molested by Pandy since the age of 13. But she was found guilty of aiding her father in five of the six killings, albeit under duress. She was jailed for 21 years, eight less than prosecutors had demanded, in recognition of her claims that she was an unwilling accomplice.

The case has been compared in its scope and horror to that of the British serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.

Belgians have been shocked at the brutal method of the killings - with hammers and pistols - and the gruesome disposal of the bodies - in acidic drain cleaner.

The court found that Pandy had killed his first wife, Ilona Sores, his second wife, Edit Fintor, his step-daughters Andrea and Tunde and his sons Zoltan and Daniel with unbridled savagery.

Although no bodies were found, police uncovered evidence which, in the words of one magazine, "made prosecutors shudder". Teeth, bones, flesh, bloodstains, ripped clothing, hair and ashes were found in houses owned by Pandy in Brussels.

Firearms were also discovered behind a false ceiling along with 21 litres of an ultra-powerful acidic drain cleaner called Cleanest, which has since been removed from the market because of its strength.

Agnes, who confessed and reported her father in the first place, helped prosecutors fill in the gory details. She explained how they would chop up the corpses using axes and kitchen knives, then dissolve the remains in Cleanest or bag up the bones and organs and dump them at abattoirs or butchers' shops.

"It was my task to take out the organs while Pandy was cutting up the remains," she said. "I just used a kitchen knife... you have to exercise strength. It's not that easy."

The presiding judge, Karel Demyttenaere, said yesterday that the duo had "very dangerous antisocial personalities".

Like about 10,000 of his compatriots, Pandy came to Belgium after the Hungarian uprising was crushed by the Soviet Union in 1956. He set up home in Brussels with his first wife, Ilona Sores, who gave birth to three children. After divorcing her in 1967 he married his second wife Edit Fintor, who already had three children of her own and gave birth to two more by Pandy.

Nobody noticed anything suspicious about the brooding Pandy until 1992 when he retired from teaching, by which time he had already murdered both wives, his step-daughters and his sons.

Pandy threw investigators off the scent by claiming that his wives and children had gone abroad indefinitely.

In an extraordinary attempt to conceal his crimes, he employed actors to impersonate his victims back in Hungary, telling the recruits that they were in a film about his life. Investigators were told by unsuspecting friends of the family back in Hungary that they were alive and well.

The Belgian authorities abandoned the case until 1996, the year in which Belgium was rocked by the paedophile murder case of Marc Dutroux. Shamed into action, police reopened the Pandy files and arrested him in 1997.

Defiant to the very end, Pandy told the court minutes before it retired to consider his sentence that the trial had seen the triumph of "fallacy" over "authenticity".

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK%2Bfp7mle5FpZ2tnnZa%2FcHyWaJinnKKaxLC%2Fwaippw%3D%3D