'The Ogre of the Ardennes' snubs court as trial for 7 murders opens

THE self-confessed serial killer Michel Fourniret goes on trial in France today for the abduction and murder of seven young women and girls.

His wife and suspected accomplice, Monique Olivier, 59, will stand trial with him at the court in Charleville-Mézières in north-eastern France.

Olivier is accused of helping Fourniret carry out one of seven killings of women and girls aged between 12 and 22, between 1987 and 2001.

Investigators believe that the bespectacled, chess-playing 66-year-old former forester, dubbed "The Ogre of the Ardennes" after the region near the Belgian border where he lived, may have killed up to 20 people.

They are alleged to include a British student, Joanna Parrish, 20, whose naked body was found tied up in a river near Auxerre in central France 18 years ago.

Earlier this month Fourniret was charged with the murder of Ms Parrish and that of Marie- Angèle Domece, a 19-year-old disabled Frenchwoman who went missing on the road leading to Auxerre station in July 1988. Her body has not been found. Fourniret, who denies both murders, will be tried for them separately at a later date.

Fourniret's reign of terror was halted on 26 June, 2003, it is alleged. His last intended victim, a 13-year-old Belgian girl whom he had abducted near the Belgian town of Naumur, escaped from the back of his white van.

The terrified child hailed a passing motorist and was able to give police Fourniret's registration number.

She told police her abductor had boasted: "I am worse than Dutroux" – comparing himself to the notorious Belgian paedophile killer, Marc Dutroux, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004 for the murder of four young girls.

With the couple arrested and repeatedly questioned, Olivier cracked soon after Dutroux's wife and accomplice, Michelle Martin, was sentenced to 30 years in jail. Olivier accused her husband of nine abductions and murders in France and Belgium.

Seven days later Fourniret confessed, denying only the killing of a babysitter hired by the couple in 1992, who subsequently went missing.

Olivier, a separated mother of two, first contacted Fourniret during the 1980s while he was serving a jail sentence for sexual assault, after answering his advertisement for pen friends in a Catholic magazine.

The court will hear how the couple's correspondence shows Fourniret and Olivier devising a diabolical pact in which she would help him fulfil his fantasies of "hunting" young virgins in return for the killing of her ex-husband. In 1987 Olivier and Fourniret went to live south of Paris, married and had a child.

Olivier admitted helping her husband by lulling his future victims into a false sense of security to make it easier for him to abduct them from car parks or in the street.

In July 2004, Fourniret led police to the couple's property, the Château de Sautou in Donchery, where they found the remains of Jeanne-Marie Desramault, 21, and those of 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet, who were both abducted in 1989.

The trial is expected to last two months and will cost 1.9 million. Fourniret has said he will refuse to attend his trial, which is certain to end in a life sentence.

18-YEAR HUNT FOR BRITON'S MURDERER
INVESTIGATORS on both sides of the Channel are hoping that the trial of Michel Fourniret over the murder of Joanna Parrish, 20, a British student, right, will end the 18-year hunt for her killer. Her body was dumped in a river near Auxerre in central France in May 1990. The student, from Gloucestershire, was teaching English at a school in Auxerre. She disappeared after setting off to meet a man who had answered her advertisement offering English lessons. Her naked body, which bore traces of sexual assault, was found tied up the next day. Fourniret wrote a letter to investigating magistrates asking to meet Miss Parrish's parents and the families of two other murdered girls, saying he "owed them an explanation".


Roger Parrish, who spent £30,000 in searching for his daughter's killer, said this year that he was "relieved" by the charges against Fourniret.