The 57-year-old Tongeren resident, who has already been arrested and is in Hasselt prison, was not present on Thursday morning when the court in Tongeren pronounced its sentence. The man administered sleeping pills to his wife and daughter for years, and then sexually abused his daughter. He received a prison sentence of seventeen years. That is five years more than the prosecutor demanded.
Furthermore, the man will be deprived of his rights for ten years and will be placed under the supervision of the sentencing court for ten years. He must also pay compensation of more than 78,000 euros to his wife and daughter. The doctor whose name was misused to obtain the sleeping pills can count on compensation of 2,600 euros.
The first rape happened when the daughter was barely eight years old. “That is a very clear memory, because my brother came in then. I know that my father immediately sent him outside again,” the woman said in tears before the Tongeren judge last month. When the girl turned 12, her father stepped up a gear by secretly mixing sleeping medication into dinner on Saturdays so he could do his thing later in the evening. The girl would always fall asleep like a baby. “It felt like a man was hitting my head with a hammer. “When I lay down on the couch, everything went black until I woke up again in the morning,” the woman described her drowsiness.
She never would have dared to think that her father was involved in anything. Her mother had also suffered from the same symptoms for thirty years, which now suggests that she herself was raped for years when their daughter was not yet born or was too young. Yet the women were unaware all this time. “We previously thought of a genetic condition, a sleeping sickness,” he said. And the father eagerly responded to this, especially when the victim became an adult and left the parental home in 2020.
Five pills, every eight weeks
The man was looking for a way to lure his daughter back home at the weekend and therefore created a fake email account in the name of a specialist. He made up a story about a chance meeting with the doctor in the hospital and a chat about the so-called symptoms of his daughter and wife. In the emails he sent from the fake account to himself and to his daughter, he spoke on behalf of the doctor about a medication schedule that the girl had to follow to keep her ‘sleeping sickness’ under control: “every eight weeks, on Saturday , take five pills,” was the prescription.
What the girl didn’t know was that she was not taking medication for her ‘sleeping sickness’, but was just unknowingly swallowing sleeping pills such as Lorazepam. Her mother was also given a pill at the same time, which was probably mixed in the dinner. This way she was also in a deep sleep, allowing DB to strike without any risks. “Now that all sounds very naive, but I believed and trusted my father,” the daughter said.
Ultimately, it was the sister-in-law of the now 29-year-old woman who started asking questions about the condition and the story her father-in-law told. She was able to convince the victim that there was more going on, which is why he ultimately decided to trap her father. The woman deliberately allowed herself to be drugged and raped one last time.
The next day, on February 5, 2023, she went to the care center in Leuven to be examined and thus collect evidence against her father. During the DNA test, the father’s semen and saliva were found on the woman’s body and her blood contained a toxic amount of sleeping medication.
During the hearing of the case, the Tongeren prosecutor spoke about horrible and hallucinatory facts that transcend any fiction. According to her, probation measures have no chance of success, because the man always categorically denied that he raped his daughter for more than twenty years. He only admitted the facts after 2020 because the false doctor emails provided black and white evidence for that period.
