MICHEL FOURNIRET ENLISTED THE HELP OF HIS WIFE TO RAPE AND KILL YOUNG WOMEN
InJune 2003, Michel Fourniret was arrested and questioned over the attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl in Belgium. The teenager had stepped inside Fourniret’s van to give him directions when he attacked her, but she managed to escape him and raise the alarm.
Fourniret denied any wrongdoing and may have got away with it if it hadn’t been for his wife, Monique Olivier. She made astatement against her husband, revealing astaggering tale of amultiple murderer who had been operating under the radar for years, and was responsible for astring of unsolved killings in the Ardennes region going back decades. And the story did not end until December 2023, when justice was finally done for three more victims of the so-called Ogre of Ardennes.
EVIL ALLIANCE
Fourniret was born in Nazi-occupied Sedan in France on 4April 1942. Remembered as aquiet child at school, he would later claim he was sexually abused by his mother, even saying she took his virginity. This would later be given as the reason Fourniret became obsessed with attacking young virgins. Fourniret –who at one time worked as aschool supervisor –was 24 when he was arrested for his first-known offence of sexually assaulting aminor, and he would go on to assault five more girls before being imprisoned in 1984.
While behind bars, he placed an ad in amagazine looking for apen pal, and Olivier, who was six years his junior, responded. It was an unholy meeting of minds –he shared his fantasies about raping and killing, and she told him she wanted to join him. Letters read at their trial would show that, in exchange for Fourniret murdering Olivier’s husband, she would find him virgins to fulfil his fantasies. And though he did not kill her husband, she left her marriage and when Fourniret was released in 1987, they moved in together in Burgundy, France. They would claim their first victim on 11 December that year.
Isabelle Laville, 17, was walking home from school when Olivier pulled over in her car and asked for directions. Seeing no threat in alone female, Isabelle got in to show Olivier the way, but at some point, they came across Fourniret, standing by aseemingly broken-down vehicle. Olivier offered him alift, but it was all aruse, and when Fourniret got into the back seat, he placed arope around the girl’s neck. The unconscious teenager was taken back to the couple’s home in Saint-Cyr-les-Colons, where Fourniret raped and strangled her. The evil pair then dumped her body in a well.Her remains were found in July 2006.
They committed their second murder in April 1988, b
