A man was killed by his own booby-trapped home, then police stumbled upon riddles he had written relating to the deadly traps, but who were they for?

In 2002, a 79-year-old Belgian man was discovered in his home with a gunshot wound to his neck. Authorities first assumed that the old man, whose name was Louis Dethy, had committed suicide, but upon inspection of the house it quickly became apparent that the whole property was a death trap and Dethy had simply been the victim of his own engineering.

Police found out that this case was anything but ordinary the hard way after one detective nearly lost his life when he opened a booby-trapped chest and a shotgun hidden inside went off. Luckily the bullets missed but suddenly the situation became all too clear.

Louis Dethy had filled his house with traps

Dethy had been a retired engineer prior to his passing and it seems in his final years he put his talent to use in creating a death trap of a house that would put Kevin McCallister to shame. His neighbors were shocked to learn what was hiding inside the walls of his home, they described him as a god-fearing but ultimately reclusive character.

Obviously this kind of thing is way above the pay grade of your standard detectives and so they quickly cleared the house. From there military mine experts were called in to sweep the house and clear it out. Thankfully Dethy had left clues as to the locations of his traps in the form of 20 riddles.

The squad worked their way through the list, which contained riddles and clues such as “Cheaper by the Dozen,” according to an article from the Telegraph, the clue was a reference to a scene in the 1950’s film of the same name in which a child throws a plate at someone’s head. This clue referred to a pile of booby-trapped dinner plates.

The crew swept the whole house and one-by-one cleared each of the traps, ultimately disarming 19 of the 20 traps with help from Dethy’s clues. Worryingly, there was one clue that the crew were unable to solve.

Who were the traps intended for?

But why had Dethy gone through all this effort? Well, it turns out the traps had been intended for his own family with whom he had become estranged after his ex-wife caught him having an affair some 20 years prior. Dethy’s mother had actually paid for the materials he had used to build his home, but before her death the relationship between mother and son had become strained leading her to bequeath the property to one of Dethy’s daughters in her will.

Dethy had taken the case to court to have his mother’s will overturned but lost, so he decided his best course of action would be to booby-trap the home and kill his own daughter when she finally took the property.

Of course, it never came to that as Louis Dethy fell victim to his own contraptions and no innocents ended up being hurt by the traps. Of course, there is the case of that final trap the mine experts weren’t able to find. Perhaps Dethy died before he was able to implement that trap, or maybe it’s still lying in wait for some unsuspecting soul to unknowingly activate it.