This Flemish thriller did not finally have its epilogue on October 20, when excavators turned over the surroundings of the former convent of Saints Vincent and Paul, in Dendermonde, in East Flanders. That day, the police did not find the remains of Germaine Robberechts, alias sister Gabrielle, or Gaby. They wanted to take advantage of the demolition work in progress to check if it had not been buried there.
The nun disappeared on March 6, 1982, when she was 56 years old. Flight, party to join a lover, murdered? The investigation, still in progress, ended, after many years, by orienting itself towards Canon Gaston Mornie, the superior of the school annexed to the convent, where Sister Gabrielle taught drawing and aesthetics.
The judicial file confirms that the nun had pierced the mystery of the priest’s financial worries, apparently linked to a troubled private life and far removed from the precepts of the Church. Gaston Mornie, who died in 2011, at the age of 77, in a psychiatric hospital in Zelzate, will have taken all his secrets with him, leaving the nun’s family to his questions.
Visit of sex clubs
Sister Gabrielle had the reputation of being a specialleke – a “little special” – at the convent. A plastic arts graduate, she didn’t have her tongue in her pocket and did ceramics and photography when she wasn’t playing the accordion. Supreme oddity in the eyes of her cronies: she had obtained her driver’s license, paid with her own money.
At the wheel of her Peugeot, she took the sisters for a walk, went shopping and ended up serving as a driver for Canon Mornie, a discreet man, with a balding forehead and a face devoured by large glasses. He regularly asked him to drop it off at a distance from places where he participated in “Readings” and to “Pensions”. Something to intrigue this curious woman, often forced to wait long hours for her superior.
Gradually, she was to discover, at the beginning of 1982, that, in fact “Readings” and of “Pensions”, these are sex clubs that the priest visited. A few weeks later, Gaston Mornie found little words under his pillow inviting him to lead a more Christian life. But Gaby was the only one to have a keychain allowing her to open all the rooms. What arouse the suspicions of the priest as to the signatory of the missives.
Violent argument
On March 3, 1982, three days before the nun’s disappearance, a violent argument pitted Sister Gabrielle against Mornie. Not enough, however, to alert the episcopate or justice. The latter did not react until two months after the disappearance. No doubt, as the daily noted Het Laatste Nieuws, October 21, because the prosecutor at the time belonged to the circle of Catholic notables of Dendermonde. And that the deputy in charge of the investigation knew Gaston Mornie well. The two magistrates refused, in any case, to broadcast a wanted notice on television, as was the rule at the time.
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