Michel Fourniret

Michel Paul Fourniret (born 4 April 1942),^[2] also known as the Ogre of the Ardennes, is a French serial killer who confessed to killing eleven people in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001. After he was arrested in June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a girl in Ciney,^[3] Fourniret confessed to killing nine people—eight women and one man^[4]—in 2004, having been informed on by his then-wife,^[5] Monique Pierrette Olivier (born 31 October 1948).^[6] Fourniret was convicted of seven of these murders on 28 May 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, while Olivier was given life with a minimum term of 28 years for complicity.^[7]

In February 2018, Fourniret confessed to the murders of two more women.^[8]

History

Fourniret has been imprisoned numerous times, starting when he was 24.^[9] While in prison he met his future (third) wife Monique Olivier. They married on 28 July 1989. His wife was aware of his activities and was held to be an accomplice. They were divorced on 2 July 2010, after 21 years of marriage.^[10]

Fourniret was arrested, in Belgium, after a failed attempt to kidnap a Belgian girl in June 2003. Fourniret and Olivier were interrogated extensively but to no avail.^[9] Olivier, however exposed Fourniret, just before the police were required to release them, probably after hearing the news of another child murderer's wife (Michelle Martin, wife of Marc Dutroux) being convicted. Soon after Fourniret confessed.

Fourniret was extradited, just as Olivier, to France, to stand trial (in Charleville-Mézières, most of the victims were French). The trials started on 27 March 2008,^[11] and ended on 28 May. Fourniret was charged with the abduction of minors and sexual misconduct, and had been in detention since June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl in 2000. Fourniret was also accused of 10 additional murders, nine in France and one in Belgium, and was found guilty of seven of these charges. Fourniret refused counsel and remained silent through most of the proceedings.^[12] Olivier was charged with one murder and for helping Fourniret with a further six.^[13]

Fourniret was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole; Olivier was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole for 28 years.^[14] Fourniret did not appeal the sentence. Fourniret and Olivier have had to appear in court again in 2017, for the murder of Farida Hamiche. This will not change their sentence but will probably mean that their parole will be denied indefinitely. Fourniret is currently held in the maximum security prison of Ensisheim (where Guy Georges and Francis Heaulme are also held^[15]).

The courts also instructed Fourniret and Olivier to pay 1.5 million euros in moral compensation to family members of the victims.^[16] Because the law is different in Belgium, the Belgian victims will probably receive less and their relatives probably nothing, as Belgian law does not allow for compensation of next of kin.^[17]

Confessed murders

The bodies of two victims, Elisabeth Brichet and Jeanne-Marie Desramault, were found buried in the gardens of the Château du Sautou in Donchery in July 2004. Fourniret and Olivier bought the château in the late 1980s using stolen money.

Fourniret admitted to eight murders prior to his trial in 2008. He was convicted of seven of these and sentenced to life in prison.^[18]

On 11 December 1987, Fourniret and Olivier drove, in separate vehicles, to Auxerre. Seeing 17-year-old Isabelle Laville – whom the couple had seen a day or two earlier and were targeting – walking home from school, Olivier stopped to ask her to join her in the car and give her directions, which Laville agreed to do. Driving down the road, Olivier reached the spot where Fourniret was standing with his car, pretending it had broken down. After she, as planned, pretended to offer him a lift, he got into her car. Fourniret choked Laville with a piece of rope, before Olivier sedated her with Rohypnol. The couple brought the girl to their home in Saint-Cyr-les-Colons, where Fourniret raped and strangled her. Laville's body was thrown down a disused well in Bussy-en-Othe.^[19][20] Her remains were recovered from the well on 11 July 2006.^[21]

In March 1988, Fourniret was contacted by Farida Hamiche, the wife of Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch, an imprisoned bank robber with whom he had shared a cell prior to his release in October 1987, and asked to help unearth a loot from a cemetery in Fontenay-en-Parisis, which had been stolen by members of the Gang des postiches. After they managed to retrieve the loot, which consisted of gold ingots and coins, Hamiche gave Fourniret a share worth 500,000 francs for helping her dig it up and hiding it in her apartment in Vitry-sur-Seine. A few weeks later, on 12 April, aiming to steal the rest of the loot, Fourniret and Olivier lured Hamiche out of her home and drove her to Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, where she was strangled and her body buried, before the couple broke into her home and stole the loot. They used the money they made from it to buy a château called the Château du Sautou in Donchery. Hamiche's body was never found.^[22][23][24] By August, Olivier was heavily pregnant with Fourniret's baby. On 3 August, the couple drove to a supermarket in Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne), and encountered 20-year-old Fabienne Leroy in the car park. With Olivier feigning illness, the couple asked Leroy to join them in their car and give them directions to a doctor's surgery. After she got in, they drove to a forest near the military camp of Mourmelon-le-Grand. Fourniret ordered Olivier to look at Leroy's hymen to see if it was still intact, but she refused. After raping Leroy, Fourniret shot her in the chest.^[25][26][27]

In January 1989, Fourniret met 21-year-old Jeanne-Marie Desramault^[28][29] on the evening train to Charleville-Mézières. The two conversed before arriving in Charleville, where Desramault was staying at a convent. She met the couple, who had assumed false identities, at the train station again on Saturday, 18 March, and they invited her to come to their house in Floing – an offer she accepted – and Fourniret promised he would drive her home afterwards. After they got to Floing, Fourniret asked Desramault if she was a virgin, and she told him she wasn't and had a boyfriend. Enraged, he attacked her. She fought back as he attempted to rape her, and as she attempted to escape, the couple gagged her with plasters before Fourniret strangled her. Fourniret and Olivier drove to Donchery and buried her body in the garden of the Château du Sautou.^[30][31][32]

Fourniret and Olivier married in July 1989.^[33] On the afternoon of 20 December, they drove across the Franco-Belgian border to Saint-Servais, Namur, with their one-year-old son. Fourniret saw 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet walk to a friend's house, and waited outside for her until she left to walk the short distance home just before 7 pm. He asked her to give him directions to a doctor's surgery for his son. She agreed to do so, and the couple drove back to Floing with her. When Fourniret undressed the girl, he saw that she was on her period, so Olivier cleaned Brichet's genitals. The next day, the couple took her to the château, where Fourniret strangled her after a failed attempted to suffocate her with a plastic bag. Her body was buried in the garden of the château, near to that of Jeanne-Marie Desramault.^[34][35][36] There were a number of reported sightings of Brichet, in Belgium and abroad, in the years following her disappearance, and a number of people were suspected by police of abducting her, including Marc Dutroux.^[37][38] After Dutroux's arrest in 1996, Brichet's mother Marie-Noëlle Bouzet helped to organise the White March in honour of Belgium's missing and murdered children.^[39] The remains of Brichet and Desramault were exhumed from the gardens of the Château du Sautou on 3 July 2004, after Fourniret and Olivier confessed to the killings.^[40]

The final known murder Fourniret committed with Olivier's help took place on 21 November 1990 near France's western coast. The couple drove to a shopping centre in Rezé after leaving court in Nantes, where they had been convicted of burglary. They saw Natacha Danais, a 13-year-old local, walking through the car park towards her home, having been sent to fetch her mother's forgotten purse. They lured her into the van, asking her for directions. After driving to a secluded area near the coast, Fourniret stabbed Danais twice in the chest with a screwdriver and strangled her before leaving her body on the beach.^[41][42] Later investigation suggested that the girl's body was raped after the murder.^[43] Eight days after Danais's death, Jean Groix, a neighbour of her family, was arrested after a white van belonging to him matched the description of the van that her sister had vaguely seen her get into from across the shopping centre's car park at the time she disappeared. Groix was found to be lodging suspected members of the ETA in his home; police suspected that Danais had found out about this. Two months later, Groix committed suicide in his prison cell. He was reported to have been unable to bear the burden of having been accused of murder.^[44][45][46]

The Fourniret family moved to Sart-Custinne, Gedinne, Belgium, in the early 1990s. Michel Fourniret admitted that he committed two more murders in France between 2000 and 2001, after a ten-year break. He drove alone across the Franco-Belgian border to Charleville-Mézières on 16 May 2000 and accosted 18-year-old Céline Saison, who was on her way home from school, in the late afternoon. Driving with her back to Belgium, he blackmailed her into having sex with him before strangling her with a rope and dumping her body in a forest in Sugny, Vresse-sur-Semois.^[47] Saison's skeletal remains were discovered there by mushroom pickers on 22 July.^[48] On 5 May 2001, Fourniret drove back to France – this time to his birthplace of Sedan – and met Mananya Thumpong, a 13-year-old girl of Thai origin whom he had met and given a lift home a few weeks earlier, outside the local library. He invited her to come to his house and play with his son. Accepting this offer, Thumpong climbed into the car and was driven to Nollevaux, Paliseul, where Fourniret strangled her.^[49][50][51] Her body lay undiscovered for months in a nearby forest as it was devoured almost entirely by wild animals. Thumpong's remaining bones were found on 1 March 2002.^[52][53]

In February 2018, Fourniret confessed to killing two more women in Auxerre: Marie-Angèle Domèce, an 18-year-old disabled woman,^[54] in July 1988, and Joanna Parrish, a 20-year-old British student, in May 1990.^[8]

     indicates victims whose murders Fourniret was convicted of.

Other crimes

Two French journalists have suggested that Fourniret killed former Minister for Labour Robert Boulin (who was involved in a real estate scandal at the time), based on a letter Fourniret wrote to Olivier.^[55]

Christian Ranucci was one of the last persons executed in France, having been convicted of the abduction and murder, committed on 3 June 1974, of Marie-Dolorès Rambla, aged eight. There are suspicions that Ranucci may not actually have been the killer (although he confessed, his confession was later retracted). It has been suggested that Fourniret may have been involved as Fourniret was in the area at the time and had practically the same car as Ranucci. Analysis of photographs, however, suggest that the man in photographs produced as evidence could not have been Fourniret.^[56]

"Virgin hunter"

Fourniret was also named the "Virgin hunter". Although it is unclear where this nickname came from, it is alleged that Olivier promised Fourniret to help hunt "virgins" for sport, in return for Fourniret helping Olivier to murder her first husband (which never took place).^[57] The rape of women assumed to be virgins, is a recurring theme in the way Fourniret operated, something which he considered "sport".

Legacy

Rachida Dati the then French Minister for Justice, who advocated legal reforms in France, wanted a more relaxed attitude to preventative custody and parole under supervision. She was heavily criticised by the judiciary.^[58] The question was asked how Fourniret, who was a known criminal, could have carried on for such a long time without being noticed and how the changes in the law would have a positive influence on cases like these.

References