French serial killer trial starts

 Kidnapping, pedophilia, multiple rapes, murder… a true white all-star.

Self-confessed serial killer Michel Fourniret is due to go on trial in France accused of murdering seven young women in France and Belgium. Fourniret, 65, is also charged with several counts of rape.

His wife, Monique Olivier, is separately charged with complicity in murder and kidnapping.

Fourniret, a carpenter dubbed by the media “The Ogre of the Ardennes”, is accused of carrying out the murders between 1987 and 2003.

The charges against Fourniret relate to the murder of six women in France and one in Belgium. They ranged in age between 12 and 22 years.

Confessions

He was arrested in Belgium in 2003 after an attempt to kidnap a 13-year-old girl. Now aged 17, she will be giving evidence at the trial, but out of public view.

Fourniret’s extradition to France followed in early 2006.

The bulk of the prosecution evidence follows Fourniret’s confessions to Belgian investigators in 2004.

Prosecutors say he had moved to Belgium after being convicted of paedophile offences in his native France. But he often crossed back into France to commit offences in his home country, they say.

Fourniret has admitted to eight murders, among them that of 13-year-old Mananya Thumpong, who disappeared in France in 2001. He also led police to the bodies of some of his victims.

Investigators were taken to the remains of one of his alleged victims in 2006 – 17-year-old Isabelle Laville, who was raped and murdered in 1987. Her body was dumped in a well.

The case is expected to last two months

Two bodies were found on a country estate in northern France which he shared with his wife.

It was on his release from prison in the 1980s that Fourniret’s killing spree is alleged to have begun. He had been convicted of voyeurism and assault.

Monique Olivier became his wife after getting to know him while working as a volunteer prison visitor.

According to letters seized by investigators, the two agreed a pact while he was in prison. He undertook to kill her first husband if she helped him to kidnap young girls.

Investigators say the method used by the couple was nearly always the same.

He would spot a potential victim while driving and stop to ask for directions, then persuade the girl to get into his car.

Olivier’s presence in the vehicle was designed to help re-assure the future victim, according to the prosecution.

She was handed over to the French authorities in 2005 and charged after confessing to having lured women to her home between 1992 and 1997.

Olivier is alleged to have done so in the knowledge that her husband would kill them.

Testimony

The cases of two further victims will not feature at this trial and are the subject of a separate legal process.

Earlier this month, Fourniret was charged with the kidnap, rape and murder of British teaching assistant Joanna Parrish, 20, in 1990 while she was working in the French town of Auxerre.

Two bodies were found at a country estate

He was also accused of the kidnap, murder and attempted rape of Marie-Angele Domece, a 19-year-old disabled woman from France.

He denies involvement in either woman’s death.

Fourniret’s trial, in the town of Charleville-Mezieres in the Ardennes region bordering Belgium, is expected to hear testimony from another of his victims.

He served time for assaulting Dahina Le Guennan in the 1980s when she was 19.

“He does not frighten me anymore,” she said in an interview with French TV channel TF1 on Monday. “I want to show him that I have got my life together and that he did not break me.”

She said she hoped the failings of the police and judiciary would be clearly exposed.

Around 30 relatives of those killed will be present at the trial, which is expected to last two months.