Originally from Hungary, Pándy is believed to have killed his wife, ex-wife, two biological children, and two step-children who disappeared mysteriously, with the assistance of his daughter, Ágnes.
[3][4] Pándy was born on 1 June 1927, in Chop, Carpathian Ruthenia (then under Czechoslovak administration), a village just across the border from Hungary, to Hungarian parents.
At the beginning of the 1970s after his separation from Ilona, Pándy began courting other women through dating services in Hungarian newspapers, often giving them a false name and job description while using the motto "European Honeymoon".
Tímea's claims of sexual abuse were brushed off by her family members, stating that she had probably used a towel containing Pándy's semen to impregnate herself.
In 1986 Tímea escaped from her family, first staying with relatives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, before starting a new life in Hungary.
Hungarian police became involved in the investigation due to a possible connection with Pándy to cases of many missing women in Hungary.
Pándy frequently visited Hungary, owning a summer home near the River Danube, and during his trips he was known to charm local women and offer to take them with him to Brussels.
Later, two siblings from the town, Eva Kincs and Margit Magyar, claim to have both accepted Pándy's offer, each with the hopes of becoming his wife.
According to the two women, they were locked in the Brussels home by Pándy and forced to cook and clean, telling them that they would raise suspicions if they wandered out on the streets unable to speak anything but Hungarian.
However, in 1988 his colleague, the Dutch minister Andries den Broer, apparently became aware of abuses at home and the lack of police interest.
Pándy was arrested on 16 October 1997—coincidentally the same date as the "White March", a large demonstration for the victims of another Belgian serial killer Marc Dutroux, who had sexually abused and killed several girls in Charleroi a few years prior.
In court, Pándy dismissed the proceedings as a "witch trial" against him, and told the jury that the allegedly dead were still alive and he is "in contact with them through angels."
When asked why the missing family members could not be traced in four years of searching, Pándy replied: "It is up to justice to prove they are dead.
During an investigation of the home on Vandenbrande Street, several firearms including three rifles and four handguns were found stashed in a hidden compartment built into the ceiling.
On 26 November 1997, a month after his arrest, the Hungarian newspaper Népszava reported that Pándy had fostered an unknown number of Romanian children—orphan refugees from the 1989 revolution that toppled communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu—at his home in Brussels.
The children were supposedly recruited by a charity called YDNAP (Pándy spelt backwards), and Népszava reported that "nobody knows what happened to them or if they returned home" to Romania.