An affair, a murder and the shattering of an expat dream

Carmel and Chris Delaney’s work took them around the world. His top job in Brussels was supposed to be their last stop before retirement.

From left, Carmel and Chris Delaney, Greet Vandeput. Picture: Marco Lawrence

Until one night in March, Carmel and Chris Delaney lived lavish lives of successful expat business executives.

The native New Yorkers met when they were starting their careers decades ago, married and raised four children while hopping between companies and continents, making friends at every stop. They celebrated Thanksgiving in Australia, met up with friends in Munich and vacationed on the lush Greek island of Corfu.

They moved to Brussels in 2017, when Chris was promoted to a top job at Goodyear Tire & Rubber, earning about $US5m a year to oversee a large swath of the American company’s international operations. Carmel was a consultant who helped foreign students navigate the college admissions process and get into US schools.

After decades of living abroad and moving around the world together – Europe, Saudi Arabia and China – they decided that Brussels would be their last overseas stop.

Chris, 63, and Carmel, 61, were renovating an apartment in Manhattan near where their oldest son lived with his family. As Chris prepared to retire, they were looking forward to spending time with their grandchildren.

Those dreams ended when Chris came home from work on March 17 to their wealthy neighbourhood in Brussels and found a body on the floor of their apartment. Carmel had been stabbed to death.

At first, news reports blamed a masked intruder and characterised Carmel’s death as a robbery gone wrong. CCTV footage showed a person wearing a mask entering the apartment building before Carmel came home that evening, police said. While there was no sign of forced entry to the apartment, three luxury watches were missing.

Carmel and Chris Delaney

Mourners gathered on April 2 at Carmel’s funeral at a small church in upstate New York to pray for Chris and the couple’s daughter and three sons. Tributes poured in from Sydney to Dublin, Munich to New York on online memorial pages for Carmel and her loving husband.

Two days later, Belgian police arrested a woman named Greet Vandeput – Chris’s executive assistant at Goodyear. Police had discovered the American executive and his Belgian assistant were having an affair.

An autopsy revealed four wounds to Carmel’s chest and torso, prosecutors said. They charged Vandeput with murder and port d’arme par destination, a charge indicating the use of an improvised weapon.

Vandeput, married and in her 50s, is in police custody. Her lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Chris Delaney also didn’t respond to requests for comment; a lawyer he has retained in Brussels said his client was unavailable.

The arrest was prompted by a tip from a friend of Vandeput who came to the police with shocking news – after a conversation between the two, the friend suspected Vandeput had killed Carmel.

Police haven’t said exactly what Vandeput and her friend discussed or why the friend came to suspect her. But the next day they raided Vandeput’s home and a nearby riding stable where Vandeput kept two horses.

At her house, they took her under arrest and crime scene investigators donned orange and white jumpsuits to comb her property for evidence.

When they got to the stable 16km outside the city, police say the tip from Vandeput’s friend helped them know where to look: behind a corrugated metal shed in a paddock where Vandeput’s chestnut horse, named Kazan, was often left to graze. It was there that the police found the three watches.

Chris Delaney has been questioned by police as a witness, says a person familiar with the matter. Goodyear says it will co-operate with investigators if asked.

Neither the boss nor the assistant is still employed by the tyremaker, the company says. Chris Delaney received no severance.

A Goodyear spokesman has declined to comment further.

The crime has captivated the Belgian media partly because it happened in a well-to-do neighbourhood called Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. It’s home to expats, executives and diplomats. Porsches and Mercedes line wide, quiet streets and modern apartments with balconies stand alongside well-kept, century-old buildings.

The street in Brussels where Carmel and Chris Delaney lived. Picture: Noemie Bisserbe/WSJ

A Flemish tabloid is calling Carmel miljonairsvrouw, or the millionaire’s wife.

Carmel and Chris Delaney were expats who went all-in wherever they were. They met at Procter & Gamble, where they both started in the New York sales office, and worked in Poland, Ukraine and Saudi Arabia.

“Her net was far and wide, whether it was Kyiv or Australia or Poland, everyone just adored her,” says Kary Clancy, who lives in Florida, a long-time family friend whose children attended the elite Lawrenceville boarding school in New Jersey with the Delaney children, now in their 20s and 30s.

Born in Queens, New York, as part of an extended Irish-Catholic family, Carmel was raised in Horseheads, a small town in upstate New York. During summers at a family farm in Ireland she learned to ride and later owned two race horses. She went to Cornell University and soon after landed at P&G.

Chris grew up in Huntington, New York, a wealthy Long Island suburb, and studied history at Trinity College in Connecticut. He started his career as a sales representative at P&G in 1983.

“You wore a jacket and tie every day and made an appointment to see your boss,” he would recall in a LinkedIn post four decades later.

Chris spent more than two decades at the company. By the mid-1990s he was heading P&G’s marketing operation in Poland, where Carmel had accompanied him, says James Lafferty, who worked closely with both the Delaneys at P&G in the 1990s. The unit needed help and P&G hired Carmel as a brand manager for Old Spice deodorant, he says.

Police searched Greet Vandeput’s property in early April. Picture: ID/ Dirk Vertommen

“She was a star and he was a star,” says Lafferty, who remained friends with the couple when their professional paths diverged. He recalls the Delaneys’ tight relationship and playful banter.

By 2004, they had left P&G. Chris took an executive role overseas at Campbell Soup and Carmel started her own consulting company, International Educational Resources, to advise international students applying to US boarding schools and universities. She ran the business for the next 20 years as the couple moved in expat circles in Asia and Europe.

“What I know is that they loved each other dearly and he did not want anything to happen to Carmel,” a long-time friend says.

Chris joined Goodyear in 2015 in Shanghai, helping to expand the company’s business in China before moving to the Brussels office in 2017.

“My family and I have been lucky to get the opportunity to live and travel extensively, as my wife and my careers brought our family to six countries on four continents,” he wrote on LinkedIn in November 2022.

“Despite the cultural differences we learned to love, underneath we have found that people are more similar than different.”

In Brussels, Chris was in charge of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He was now a senior executive for a classic American brand. Goodyear’s blimps have flown above major sports events for decades and its name has been synonymous with tyres ever since they graced Henry Ford’s Model T. After Covid, Chris’s unit was slow to recover from pandemic shutdowns and the Russia-Ukraine war. In 2023 he oversaw a restructuring of his division that slashed the workforce by 15 per cent.

The couple had an apartment near Woluwe Park, a hilly English-style park with majestic trees and long, winding paths. Carmel joined the Brussels Women’s Club. She ran its website and led many of the English-speaking group’s walking tours of the city.

Vandeput’s house. Picture: Daniel Michaels/WSJ

“I’ve cried every day since she died,” says Beryl Barlow, an expat from England who is a club member. Barlow gave bridge lessons and Carmel was among her students. “She was incredibly persuasive. She was a diplomat,” Barlow says. “She was a little gold nugget, and now she’s gone.”

“Everyone just adored her,” a long-time friend says.

On Carmel’s online memorial page, photos and testimonials show meals with friends on a boat in Sydney, ski trips at the Delaney home back in New York, playtime in a pool with grandchildren and homemade pizza.

In one recent photo, the Delaneys are smiling in a train car, Chris in a blue V-neck sweater and Carmel with a matching scarf. The caption: “Carmel & Chris the dream team xx.”

A circle of friends has rallied around Chris, says Lafferty, the friend from their P&G days. He says he doesn’t judge Chris for having an affair, and appreciates that the couple supported him through his own marital difficulties.

The Delaneys’ eldest son, Sean, declined to comment. Other Delaney family members couldn’t be reached for comment.

Chris isn’t fluent in French, so police say when he discovered his wife’s body after work on March 17 he called someone who could help: his executive assistant.

Vandeput contacted the police at 8.22pm.

She had worked for Goodyear for more than a decade, after previously holding executive assistant roles in Brussels for British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and a subsidiary of German industrial conglomerate Siemens.

Vandeput lived with her husband and their two dogs in a small brick house with green shutters and a chicken coop out front. Their middle-class, Dutch-speaking neighbourhood is just outside Brussels near the airport, where conversations are interrupted by roaring jet engines.

On Monday last week her husband answered the door and declined to comment.

Like Carmel, Vandeput has a passion for horses. She keeps two of them – a bay and a chestnut horse – at a gray concrete boarding stable that holds about 60 horses in total, behind the home of the stable’s owner.

She would visit the stables twice a day to ride and look after the horses, the owner says. Vandeput had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and undergone surgery, he and police say. The owner says a friend of Vandeput had been taking care of her horses while she was in hospital and that same friend was the one who had tipped off police.

Once police and investigative magistrates have completed their probe, a judge will decide whether to send her case to trial or drop the charges.

Chris has returned to the US. Carmel’s friends in Brussels are planning a memorial for June.

On one of Carmel’s memorial pages, one friend shared an inscription from a gravestone in Ireland: “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, Love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

The same day as Vandeput’s arrest, April 4, in a one-paragraph regulatory filing, Goodyear said Chris Delaney was taking a leave of absence and being replaced by the company’s chief financial officer. The filing said nothing about the events that led to the change.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL