Serial Killer's Macabre Clues Frustrate Police In Belgium

MONS, Belgium - First, a mutilated torso of a transsexual prostitute on the banks of the river Hate. A month later, nine trash bags of body parts near the river Fear. Two days later, a torso found on Anxiety Lane.

In a macabre game of hide-and-seek, an apparent serial killer has been dumping his victims - or parts of them - at locations with appropriately grim names. The murders - five so far - have happened on weekends.

On April 12, police found a severed head on Deposit Street. On April 19 and 20, police found three bags of body parts on Saint Symphorien Street, named for a beheaded martyr whose bones are enshrined in a Mons church.

"The locations all have a special name, so it is important to know whether there is some message, some sign," said Mons prosecutor Didier Van Reusel. "It leaves us with a puzzle."

Only the victim killed April 12 has been identified: a 21-year-old woman who was homeless and alcoholic. Last week, police arrested someone who knew her as their first suspect. But as the weekend approached, they were worried.

"This has never happened in Belgium," Van Reusel said. "We have now reached the heights of horror."

The serial murders in Mons, 60 miles south of Brussels, have only increased the climate of anxiety generated by the recent discovery of a string of child sex killings. Five victims of pedophiles have been found over the past year; more than a half-dozen children are missing.

Aside from where the killer leaves his victims, police had two other clues. The bags are always knotted the same way. And the bodies are dismembered with "remarkable precision," said chief investigating magistrate Pierre Honore.

Police believe the killer must have been trained as a doctor or a butcher.

It also seems that he is daring police to catch him. At first, he left only parts of his victims that could not identify them; then, he left the woman's head.