The confessed serial murderer Michel Fourniret died this Monday at the age of 79 in a hospital in Paris, to which days before he had been transferred due to health problems that he has dragged on for several months.
Fourniret, nicknamed the ‘Monster of the Ardennes’, was sentenced to two life sentences in 2008 for the murder of seven young men in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2003. His wife, Monique Olivier, was sentenced to 28 years in prison at the be considered an accessory to some of these crimes.
A former worker born in Sedan in northern France, Fourniret was charged with murder, rape and kidnapping, facts that he admitted. His wife had to answer for the accusation of co-author of one of the crimes, perpetrated in 1989, and of complicity in another five.
Admitted on Saturday urgently to the Parisian hospital of Pitie Salpetriere, his situation during the weekend was already described as “irreversible”, so his death was a matter of hours.
Fourniret, who suffered from heart problems and mental degeneration – according to the newspaper ‘Le Parisien’ – was already briefly admitted last November, when he fainted in the prison cell where he had been been locked up for the last thirteen years.
The “diabolical couple”, as the French press called them, was arrested in June 2003 in Belgium, when a 13-year-old girl who had been kidnapped managed to sneak out of the truck in which she had been held and alert the police. Policeman.
Fourniret was convicted for the first time in 1967 for assaulting a minor in the Ardennes, in northern France, where he was originally from. However, he never served the eight-month sentence imposed on him. Already in 1984 he was arrested again and sentenced to five years in prison, after it was confirmed that he had been the author of a dozen sexual assaults since 1981.
Already in prison, in November 2019, the confessed murderer was the target of a new investigation against him for the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin, a 9-year-old girl in Guermantes, near Paris, from whom he had managed years before. However, already in May 2020, the French Prosecutor’s Office confirms “his participation in the events”, after finding contradictions in the alibi and the version of his wife.
