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Widow of French serial killer faces trial over cold cases

Monique Olivier is charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping of two young women in central France and with complicity in the 'disappearance' of a third.

Published: 25 November 2023 10:02 CET

French police stand at cordoned-off during an investigation at the site where Monique Olivier is charged with helping abduct a young girl. (Photo by Lucas BARIOULET / AFP)

The widow of a French serial killer known as the “ogre of the Ardennes” will face trial from Tuesday over her role in three murders dating back several decades, including the killing of a British woman whose body was found in a river in 1990.

Monique Olivier was married to Michel Fourniret, who was charged with abduction, rape and murder in the cases but died in 2021, aged 79, before he could be brought to trial.

The crimes date back to 1988 in the case of Marie-Angele Domece, who disappeared aged 18 from Auxerre, and 1990 for 20-year-old British woman Joanna Parrish, whose naked body was found in the Yonne river that runs through the department of the same name in central France.

Olivier is charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping and murder of the girls.

Her third charge is for complicity in the 2003 disappearance of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, whose body has never been found two decades on, despite intensive searches.The body of Domece has also never been found.

Many of the witnesses set to be called in the three-week trial are investigators from France and Belgium, where Fourniret was arrested in 2003. They are also set to include Sabine Kheris, the investigating magistrate who took Fourniret’s confession.

She is now in charge of a recently created “cold cases” unit based in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. This case is the first of the unit’s to come to trial.

France has for years been simultaneously repelled and fascinated by the crimes of Fourniret, who was dubbed the “ogre of the Ardennes” by media after the hilly region on the French-Belgium border where he lived and preyed on his victims.

‘Very long battle’

The trial is “the result of a very long battle”, said Didier Seban, a lawyer representing Estelle’s father, Eric.

The fact Fourniret never stood trial for the crimes shows “we didn’t manage to run the investigation the way it should have been”, Seban said.

Fourniret himself asked in 2008 to be tried in all three cases but “nothing was done”, said Monique Herrmann, a lawyer for Domece’s family.

The trial of Olivier alone is “somewhat short of the mark” for Eric Mouzin, who threw all his energy into finding out what happened to his daughter.

“It will be difficult to pass judgement with only a single defendant,” he said, even though Olivier herself is charged with “significant” crimes.

Neither does he hope for anything from the woman in the dock herself, beyond seeing her “sentenced in line with the seriousness of the crime”.

Olivier’s lawyer, Richard Delgenes, said the court should “not expect any revelations” on her part but that her “participation” in the process is what sets her apart from her husband.

“Unlike him, she takes no special pleasure in the pain of his victims or of the families,” he added.

The 75-year-old has already been convicted twice of aiding and abetting in some of her husband’s crimes.

She fled in the early 1980s from her violent first husband, with whom she had two children, before becoming a penpal of Fourniret while he was serving a jail sentence for rape.

‘Only one responsible’

The two sealed a pact that she would find him virgins to rape if he would kill her then-husband — which he never did.

They lived together after he was released in 1987 — buying a chateau with stolen gold dug up from a graveyard — and had a son together.

Olivier received a life sentence in 2008 over her role in four murders and a rape committed by Fourniret.

In 2018, Olivier was given a further 20 years’ jail for her part in the killing of Farida Hammiche, the wife of one of Fourniret’s former cellmates.

In 2019, she overturned her husband’s alibi for the day Estelle Mouzin disappeared, prompting him to admit responsibility months later. Fourniret had earlier admitted killing Parrish and Domece.

“I am the only one responsible for their fates… If those people had never crossed my path, they would still be alive,” he told investigators.

Olivier said in 2020 that her husband kidnapped, raped and killed Mouzin, a fragment of whose DNA was found on a mattress seized from the couple’s home in 2003.

And in 2021 she admitted her own role in the case for the first time, saying she was with her husband when he buried the girl’s body near a forest in the Ardennes.

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The French Jewish community, the third largest in the world, has for months been on edge in the face of a growing number of attacks and desecrations of memorials.

“National police in Rouen neutralised early this morning an armed individual who clearly wanted to set fire to the city’s synagogue,” Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Police responded at 6.45 am to reports of “fire near the synagogue”, a police source said.

A source close to the case told AFP the man “was armed with a knife and an iron bar, he approached police, who fired. The individual died”.

“It is not only the Jewish community that is affected. It is the entire city of Rouen that is bruised and in shock,” Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol wrote on X.

He made clear there were no other victims other than the attacker.

Two separate investigations have been opened, one into the fire at the synagogue and another into the circumstances of the death of the individual killed by the police, Rouen prosecutors said.

Such an investigation by France’s police inspectorate general is automatic whenever an individual is killed by the police.

The man threatened a police officer with a knife and the latter used his service weapon, said the Rouen prosecutor.

The dead man was not immediately identified, a police source said.

Asked by AFP, the National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office said that it is currently assessing whether it will take up the case.

France has the largest Jewish community of any country after Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

There have been tensions in France in the wake of the October 7th attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas on Israel, followed by the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.

Red hand graffiti was painted onto France’s Holocaust Memorial earlier this week, prompted anger including from President Emmanuel Macron who condemned “odious anti-Semitism”.

“Attempting to burn a synagogue is an attempt to intimidate all Jews. Once again, there is an attempt to impose a climate of terror on the Jews of our country. Combating anti-Semitism means defending the Republic,” Yonathan Arfi, the president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF). wrote on X.

France was hit from 2015 by a spate of Islamist attacks that also hit Jewish targets. There have been isolated attacks in recent months and France’s security alert remains at its highest level.