Jurors, officials and journalists filed silently through the house, shielded from the public by huge screens. Inside, one said, it was "sordid and stinking, a descent into hell, the monster's lair".

Sabine Dardenne lived to tell what it was really like inside. She was a curly-haired 12-year-old with a friendly smile when she was abducted while cycling to school. She was sexually abused by Dutroux for 80 days. Now aged 20 she cannot stand the sight of yellow paint - the colour of the damp cement walls in the stifling underground cell.

Sabine and Laetitia Delhez, then 14, who was held there for six days before Dutroux's arrest, wept during the court visit as they emerged into the sunshine from the grim little terrace house. Surrounded by lawyers, they were just yards away from their bearded tormentor, wearing a bulletproof vest and handcuffed to armed guards.

Dutroux's youngest victims were eight-year-old Melissa Russo and Julie Lejeune, snatched while they played near their homes outside Liège and left to die slowly of starvation.

Dutroux denied kidnapping them, insisting he had "found" them in his house, but one witness identified him as the man who had tried to abduct her young daughter and a friend just hours before Julie and Melissa went missing.

Julie's father, Jean-Denis Lejeune, had already visited the notorious house several times. "It's important for me to come back," he said. "And every time I see Julie's name written in crayon on the wall." Dutroux sounded boastful as he told the court his DIY skills had made the cell "undetectable". He was emotionless as he described finding the girls dead when he came home after serving a four-month prison sentence for car theft, and putting their emaciated bodies in the family freezer.

His former wife, Michelle Martin, a mother of three, said he had given her money to buy food for the girls, but she had been too frightened to go down into the cellar. Martin, blonde, frail, remorseful, shrank away from Dutroux in the glass dock.

He admitted kidnapping, drugging and raping but not killing two teenage girls - An Marchal, 17, and Eefje Lambrecks, 19, in Flanders. Their corpses, plastic bags over their heads, were found buried on another of his properties, with the remains of an accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, whose murder Dutroux also denied.

Now the verdict has been given and Dutroux prepares to spend the rest of his life in jail, Belgium's horror lingers on - and so do many troubling questions.

Details of the crimes that shamed a country were already widely known after most of the 440,000 pages of evidence were leaked to the media years ago. Almost nothing new has emerged from the 569 witnesses who appeared over the past 15 weeks. Crucially there was little to substantiate Dutroux's claim that he and three accomplices had been part of a wider "network" of child sex abusers with links to powerful politicians, bankers and public figures, including the royal family.

Martin was seen as being in thrall to her husband, as was Michel Lelièvre, a small time criminal and heroin addict. The only defendant with outside connections was a Brussels businessman, Michel Nihoul, accused of organising the kidnapping of Laetitia Delhez in return for supplying ecstasy tablets to Lelièvre.

Nihoul's acquittal on all but drugs charges will be a blow to those who believe in the network theory.

Twice the court heard from René Michaux, the gendarme who searched the house but failed to hear Julie and Melissa hidden behind a false wall. Other aspects of police and judicial incompetence remain obscure - as they did in two parliamentary inquiries.

Belgians came out in mass protests when the crimes first became known in 1996. They were obsessed by the case, devouring acres of newspaper and hours of television coverage as the trial progressed. But many feared from the start that the truth would never come out.

Conspiracy theories still flourish: a recent book by a Flemish journalist, Dead Witnesses, counts 30 people in Dutroux's vicinity, including a former chief prosecutor, who have died mysteriously.

And suspicions of a cover-up remain strong. In the last days of the trial it was reported that two judges had had their phones tapped. Dutroux, always seeking to demolish the idea that he was a lone predator, claimed in his closing statement that leads had not been followed and the investigation had been bungled.

Cruelly, he also ignored repeated pleas to tell victims' parents the truth about how - never mind why - their children had suffered and died. "I've got no answers to my questions," wrote Jean Lambrecks, the father of Eefje. "A lot of time and energy has been put into this trial, and we're no wiser than before."

Appeals seem certain once the sentences have been handed down, but expectations of getting to the bottom of what really happened in Marcinelle remain low. "Marc Dutroux has always lied and he continues to lie," said Raymond Lejeune, Julie's grandfather. "What we have been waiting to know is who kidnapped our little girl. But we will never know. That is what chokes us up."