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The silence will remain as the last in Michel Fourniret's long list of crimes. With his death on Monday, at age 79, the
Ogre of the Ardennes
, France's most famous serial killer, sentenced to two life sentences for the rape and murder of eight women and who had confessed to killing at least another three, he takes his secrets to the grave. And there are too many. Like the place where he buried Estelle Mouzin, the nine-year-old girl who disappeared in 2003, shortly before Fourniret's arrest, and whose remains are being searched to this day. Or how many more women and girls he killed with the complicity of his wife, Monique Olivier, who is also serving a life sentence and is now the only one who could shed some light on the pending cases.
Investigators suspect the crimes are far more dire than the killer ever confessed.
The question is whether one day all the acts of a man will be known who, until the last moment, played cat and mouse with his victims and with justice, criticized for not being up to a murderer like Fourniret.
Even the place where the man who was a before and after in the black history of France will be buried, as yet undisclosed, is a mystery.
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The
Ogre of the Ardennes
, named for this region on the border with Belgium and Luxembourg where he committed most of his crimes -although he attacked throughout the French territory-, "is the murderer that has most marked the criminal history of France," says the journalist Philippe Dufresne, who covered the case for years and has just published the book
Fourniret, truths and lies
, where he reviews the long history of the former draftsman and the loopholes in his criminal career. "Until Fourniret, we knew that there were potential serial killers in France, but we had not yet seen one who openly assumed they were," he explains by phone. To his last known victim, a 13-year-old girl whom he tried to kidnap in June 2003 in the Belgian border town of Ciney and whose complaint ended his deadly career, Fourniret told him before he managed to flee: “I am worse than (Marc) Dutroux ”, the Belgian pedophile and murderer who shocked the whole of Europe in the late 1990s.
His serial killer pride continued behind bars. "Once unmasked, he said, 'I'll take it on and I'm going to have fun with everyone,'" says Dufresne. "He has spent almost 18 years giving information, true or false, with a dropper: he lied or told the truth based on his humor or his objectives, but with the main objective of being the one who imposed the rules." Because for Fourniret, says the journalist, “the murder was almost secondary, what was really important was power. And once, imprisoned, he could no longer kill, he continued to exercise that power, torturing the parents [of the victims] and also the investigators and investigating judges, saying what was convenient for him ”.
Hence a good part of the "anger" that, according to the lawyer for the relatives of several of the victims, Didier Seban, they feel with the death of Fourniret. And against a French judicial system that "does not allow the identification and prosecution of serial killers, because crimes are judged separately in different places, without the judges speaking, when to identify a serial killer you have to see their path" , complaint. “For years we have asked that specialized judges be created at the national level to follow these cases; the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, has promised that he will change the law, ”he said by phone. But for Fourniret's victims, both those known and those yet to be confirmed - according to Seban, it could be at least "another 10 or 15 more" - it will be too late.The criminal who declared that he "needed to hunt virgins twice a year" will no longer speak.
The most palpable example of the “game of chess,” as Dufresne describes it, that Fourniret played for years with judges, researchers and victims is that, just a couple of weeks before his death - he suffered from Alzheimer's and heart problems - he had concluded, again unsuccessfully, the last attempt to find the remains of Estelle Mouzin.
The little girl disappeared on the outskirts of Paris in January 2003, five months before Fourniret's arrest. Although suspicions fell upon him after his arrest, the
Ogre of the Ardennes
spent 17 years making contradictory statements about the case. Only in March 2020 did he finally confess that he was his murderer. Last month, the justice ordered the search - unsuccessful - of the girl's body in a forest in the Ardennes, following the instructions of his ex-wife, Monique Olivier.
The one who was Fourniret's third wife and accomplice divorced him in 2010 from prison where he is serving a life sentence. She was from the beginning the inducer of her husband's confessions. Olivier met Fourniret, born in 1942 in Sedan and father of five children, when he was serving his third prison sentence for sexual assault against a minor. They were married upon release from prison in 1987. The trail of deaths - her husband was "going hunting," the woman called him - began almost immediately and only stopped with his arrest in 2003. Following his arrest, Fourniret remained silent . But in 2004, during one of the regular police interrogations, his wife started talking. It was, Dufresne recalls, on June 22, 2004, the same day that the Belgian justice sentenced Dutroux's wife, Michelle Martin, to 30 years in prison.Fourniret was about to be released on parole in the absence of new evidence.
In May 2008, the couple was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder, between 1987 and 2003, of seven girls between the ages of 12 and 22 in France and Belgium, as well as attempting to kidnap and rape three others. Ten years later, Fourniret received another life sentence for the murder of one more woman. Before his death, he was charged with four other murders, three of which, including that of little Mouzin, he admitted to the eighth investigating judge who has dealt with the case.
By then, Alzheimer's was already ravaging Fourniret's memory.
After his death, eyes turn to his ex-wife, who may hold the key to many of the other crimes he is suspected of.
Investigators continue to compare the murderer's DNA extracted from the van with which he committed several of his crimes and from an old mattress found at his sister's home, with 21 unsolved cases.
Dufresne is under no illusions.
"There are many doubts" with Olivier, he points out.
"Do you know everything?
I doubt it.
Will it say it all?
Certainly not.
Will she want to speak knowing that now she is the only one left to respond to justice and risk a new penalty? ”, She lists.
Lawyer Sebin shares the concerns, but says he cannot throw in the towel: "This is not a closed case and we will continue."
