Have you ever found / heard of a spooky booby trap intended to hurt someone?

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Four years ago he lost a lengthy legal battle to overturn her will and at that point, the detectives believe, he set about installing the traps, most of them using concealed 12-bore shotguns triggered by barely-visible nylon threads or fishing line.

His thinking appeared to be that if he were evicted, he would ensure that the new owner would not live long enough to enjoy the benefits of the house.

The military engineers found that Dethy had numbered and catalogued each device and left coded notes for the whereabouts of each. A pile of booby-trapped dinner plates was revealed by the clue "Cheaper by the Dozen", a reference to the 1950s film by Walter Lang of the same name in which a child throws a plate at someone's head. Whether the notes were aides-memoire for himself, or cryptic clues for his family - or even the police - is not known.

One scrap of paper containing the words "le vin est tiré", a play on the French word tirer (to pull or shoot), led to a hidden trap in the cellar, while another was discovered in a crate of beer, designed to set off a shotgun when a certain number of bottles were removed.

"In the cellar we found a chest containing money. A length of fishing wire almost invisible to the eye connected the clasp to a hidden cavity in the wall," said the local police chief, Gino van Huffel. "Anybody who opened the chest would have had his head blown off from a weapon concealed in the cavity."

Other shotguns were found wired to the television, a water tank and the bathroom door. It took the bomb squad three weeks to crack 19 of the 20 clues, but after taking the house apart experts have been forced to admit defeat on the final one: "The 12 Apostles are ready to work on the pebbles."

"We've looked everywhere. He refers to the 20th device in his notes, but we can only conclude it wasn't yet in place," said Luc Bodard, the head of the military de-mining team.

Investigators believe that Dethy was killed as he tinkered with one of the booby-traps - hidden in a crockery dresser and triggered by moving a soup tureen - which he had either failed, or forgotten, to disarm. The device, number 18, went off spraying lead shot into his face and severing the main arteries supplying blood to the head and neck.

"The position of the body leaves us in no doubt that he made a false move and the trap went off," said Mr Bodard.

Dethy's daughter Jeanne, 49, said members of his family were convinced that they were their father's intended victims. "He hated us," she said. "Father was a strange and cold man, but he was very ingenious and he put his ingenuity to bad use.

"He wanted to kill us all. Instead he was caught out by one of his own traps."

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