UnSub Side Stories
| Peter-Uwe Schmidt and Aurore Martin, aka The Honeymoon Killers. | |
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A Mons magistrate is being accused of holding back important information which could have caused the arrest of Peter-Uwe Schmidt, who killed his newly wed wife, 22-year-old Ursula Deschamps, in an insurance-fraud on 29 august 1992. 20-year-old Schmidt, an officer at the Brussels Nato military headquarters, was apprehended on 13 august 1992 while unscrewing license-plates from a car in the Nato parking yard. Upon searching his house, the police found out he was a large-scale dealer in stolen cars, also his wife had already left him, although they were married only 6 months earlier, on 29 february 1992. In the course of the investigation his wife Ursula was to be questioned, and she agreed to make 'some declarations'. The day before she was to be questioned by the investigating officers, she was killed in a car-accident. She was apparently driving with Schmitz next to the Nimy-Blaton canal, when their Mazda suddenly skidded and drove into the canal. Schmidt luckily survived without sustaining any injuries, and cashed the life-insurance for his wife's life for 17 million francs. The investigating officers were suspicious from in the beginning because no tyre-marks were found on the clear stretch of road, and also Schmitz' clothes were completely dry when he dashed into the police-station to report the accident. These reports were added to the previous report about the stolen-car-scheme, and a note was added for further investigation indicating murder and insurance-fraud. Mons magistrate Van Ausloos, who was to gather all these files and present them to investigating judge Wenstenraad, chose to keep them in his office. As a result Schmitz was only charged with unvoluntary death and sentenced to 2 months imprisonment and fined 80.000 francs. On 11 may 1995 Marc Van Beers, on honeymoon with his 27-year-old wife Aurore Martin, was killed when their car crashed into a ravine on Corsica. Martin managed to jump out of the car 'just in time', to cash 25 million francs of life-insurance for her husbands' death. Only due to the efforts of Van Beers' parents, who hired private investigators to clear out the case, the real facts came to light. It turned out that Van Beers was killed by 4 men, hired by Schmidt, who knew Martin already in 1991, when they both worked at the Nato Headquarters. Schmidt and Martin were arrested in november 1997 in Miami, Florida. On friday 28 november 1997 the Mons magistrate's office admitted that "a serious mistake was made which might have saved a human life". |
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