On June 26, 2003, in the Belgian town of Ciney, a thirteen-year-old girl escaped from a man in his sixties who was trying to abduct her, and the vehicle was traced. It belonged to Michel Fourniret, a retired school supervisor and forestry worker who lived with his wife, Monique Olivier, on the Belgian side of the border. The arrest that followed was for an attempted abduction. Within a year it had become the case of a man who had killed at least eleven people over sixteen years, with his wife's help, while police forces in two countries attributed his crimes to other men or to no one.
Fourniret was born in Sedan, in the French Ardennes, on April 4, 1942, the son of a metalworker and a homemaker. He later claimed he had been sexually abused as a child by his mother. People who knew him as a boy remembered a quiet, intelligent child who liked chess and classical music. He was first arrested at twenty-four, in 1966, for sexually assaulting a young girl, and by the 1980s he was serving a prison term for rape. While he was inside, Olivier began writing to him. She had fled a violent first husband with whom she had two children. According to the accounts both later gave, they made a pact: she would help him find virgins, and he would kill her former husband. He never did.
He was released in October 1987. Two months later the couple drove in separate cars to Auxerre, in Burgundy, where they had already picked out Isabelle Laville, seventeen, on her way home from school. On December 11 Olivier stopped beside her and asked for directions, and Laville got in to show her the way. A little farther on, Fourniret stood beside his own car as though it had broken down, and Olivier, as they had rehearsed, stopped to offer him a lift. In the car he choked Laville with a rope and Olivier sedated her. At their home in Saint-Cyr-les-Colons he raped and strangled her, and they threw her body into a disused well at Bussy-en-Othe. It stayed there for more than eighteen years. For a time her death was attributed to Émile Louis, another killer active in the region.
The method changed little over the years that followed, and it depended on Olivier. A woman asking for help, sometimes with a child in the car, frightened no one. On August 3, 1988, in a supermarket parking lot at Châlons-sur-Marne, Olivier pretended to be ill and asked Fabienne Leroy, twenty, to come with them and direct them to a doctor. Leroy was raped and shot, and her body was left in woods near the military camp at Mourmelon. Jeanne-Marie Desramault, twenty-two, was killed in March 1989 near Charleville-Mézières. Elisabeth Brichet, twelve, disappeared in Namur, Belgium, in December 1989. Natacha Danais, thirteen, was killed near Nantes in November 1990.
Money came to Fourniret from prison, too. In March 1988 he was contacted by Farida Hammiche, thirty, the wife of Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch, a bank robber with whom Fourniret had shared a cell. She asked him to help her dig up loot buried in a cemetery at Fontenay-en-Parisis by members of a Paris robbery crew known as the Gang des Postiches. He took the haul and killed her. The proceeds helped buy the Château du Sautou, a manor house in the Ardennes, where the couple lived for a time.
In the Yonne, around Auxerre, two more disappearances that would eventually be traced to Fourniret went unsolved for decades. Marie-Angèle Domèce, a young woman with a disability, vanished in Auxerre on July 8, 1988; accounts give her age as eighteen or nineteen. Joanna Parrish, twenty, a young British woman, was found dead in the Yonne river on May 17, 1990. Domèce's body has never been found.
After the killing of Natacha Danais there is a gap of nearly a decade in the known record, and investigators have never established whether it was a real pause. The couple settled in the Ardennes and later moved just over the border into Belgium. In May 2000 Céline Saison, eighteen, disappeared in Charleville-Mézières. On May 5, 2001, Mananya Thumpong, thirteen, a French girl of Thai descent, vanished in Sedan on her way home from the media library; her bones were later found in the Nollevaux woods in Belgium, about twenty miles away. On January 9, 2003, Estelle Mouzin, nine, disappeared on her way home from school in Guermantes, east of Paris. Her case became one of the best known in France, and for seventeen years no one could say what had happened to her.
The Ciney arrest did not open the case by itself. What opened it was Olivier. In 2004, confronted by investigators, she began to talk about the crimes she had witnessed and helped with, and Fourniret, faced with her statements, confessed to killing nine people, eight women and girls and one man. He at first denied the Saison and Thumpong killings, apparently in the belief that his older crimes were past the statute of limitations, and admitted them on July 1, 2004, after a long interrogation. France's highest court rejected Olivier's argument that the prosecutions for the Laville, Leroy and Desramault killings were time-barred. In July 2006, on directions from Fourniret, gendarmes cleared a well that the commune had since filled in and recovered Isabelle Laville's remains from a depth of about a hundred feet.
The couple were extradited to France and tried together at the court of assizes in Charleville-Mézières in 2008. On May 28, 2008, Fourniret was convicted of seven murders, those of Laville, Leroy, Desramault, Brichet, Danais, Saison and Thumpong, and sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Olivier was convicted of complicity and sentenced to life with a minimum of twenty-eight years. The Hammiche killing, one of the nine he had confessed to, had been left out of that trial. It was tried separately in November 2018; Fourniret received a second life sentence and Olivier a further twenty years.
Olivier's evidence kept opening files that her husband had kept shut. In February 2018 Fourniret admitted killing Marie-Angèle Domèce and Joanna Parrish. "I am the only one responsible for their fates," he told investigators. "If those people had never crossed my path, they would still be alive." In the Mouzin case, detectives had suspected him since 2006, when they found a photograph of the girl on his computer, but he had an alibi for the day she disappeared. In 2019 Olivier withdrew it. In January 2020 she told the investigating judge, Sabine Khéris, that he had kidnapped, raped and killed Estelle, and a fragment of the girl's DNA was found on a mattress seized from the couple's home in 2003. On March 6, 2020, Fourniret confessed.
He was charged over the deaths of Domèce, Parrish and Mouzin and of Lydie Logé, twenty-nine, who had disappeared in 1993, but none of those cases reached trial in his lifetime. His memory was failing, and searches he guided in the Ardennes found nothing. He died in Paris on May 10, 2021, at the age of seventy-nine. "There will be no trial," said Didier Seban, the lawyer for several of the families, including the Mouzins.
Olivier stood trial alone in November 2023 before a court in Nanterre, the first case brought by a new cold-case unit. She had admitted in 2021, for the first time, that she was with her husband when he buried Estelle's body. At trial she called herself "the dog that must obey" her master and asked the families for forgiveness while acknowledging that what she had done was unforgivable. She was convicted of complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Domèce and Parrish and in the abduction of Mouzin, and sentenced to a second life term. Estelle Mouzin's body has not been found, despite repeated searches, including excavations at Issancourt-et-Rumel in the Ardennes in 2022, and each year a march is held in her memory.