Five days of situation in his former stronghold of the Ardennes were not enough: Michel Fourniret has still not revealed where he buried the body of Estelle Mouzin, whom he admitted to having killed in 2003, but the defense of the family refuses to admit defeat.
"Trigger memories" in the serial killer, now 78 years old: this was the objective of the examining magistrate Sabine Kheris to find the body of the girl, four months after unsuccessful searches in the same area.
READ ALSO>
In search of Estelle Mouzin in the Ardennes: Fourniret will he help the investigators?
Without convincing results while "the family is waiting to be able to bury Estelle's body", as one of her lawyers, Me Corinne Herrmann, pointed out.
"The body of Estelle Mouzin has not been found at the present time", she declared Friday at the end of the operation while leaving the castle of Sautou, a large isolated property that belonged to to Michel Fourniret.
"The research will continue in a second time", she added, without further details.
Started Monday, the operation first focused on the house in Ville-sur-Lumes, where the serial killer's sister once lived.
Michel Fourniret sequestered, raped and killed Estelle Mouzin, according to Monique Olivier, his ex-wife also present this week.
The girl's partial DNA was found in two places on a mattress seized in this house, searched in June in the absence of the serial killer.
"Points on the map"
For five days, the convoy of twenty vehicles escorting the ex-couple - accompanied by investigators, experts in criminal research from the gendarmerie, archaeologists ... - Then crisscrossed the area, going from a pond at a cemetery in Charleville-Mézières, in Floing - where Michel Fourniret had land converted into a kindergarten - at the Château du Sautou.
The program wanted to be "flexible" to adapt to convoluted statements of Michel Fourniret, whose neurological state is inconstant and the health "fragile" according to a source close to the file.
But if the “Ogre des Ardennes” “showed points on maps”, he did not designate a specific location, and no excavation was undertaken.
PODCAST.
Michel Fourniret: in the footsteps of a monster who has not revealed all his secrets
Old age or concealment?
"We do not know if he no longer remembers, if he is afraid of making a mistake or if he does not want to give a location," asked Me Herrmann, who however refuses to admit defeat.
Welcoming "serious progress", she stressed that "the couple admitted the facts" and "never went back" on their confession.
Monique Olivier was "very involved", she noted.
Newsletter - Most of the news
Every morning, the news seen by Le Parisien
I'm registering
Your email address is collected by Le Parisien to enable you to receive our news and commercial offers.
Learn more
The latter's lawyer, Me Richard Delgenes, had shown him a certain optimism.
"We are not far," he said Wednesday.
Trial at the end of 2021 at the earliest
Indicted in November 2019 for "kidnapping and sequestration followed by death", Michel Fourniret ended up confessing in March his responsibility in the case: "I recognize there a being who is no longer there by my fault", had- he declared to the judge.
On October 15, the two ex-husbands were confronted in Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne), at the scene of the disappearance of the nine-year-old girl on her return from school on January 9, 2003. Monique Oliver, she - even indictment for "complicity", had then confirmed "the implication" of the killer in the disappearance of the girl.
At the end of the judicial investigation, the prosecution will take its requisitions before an indictment before the Assize Court, for a trial which should not be held before the end of 2021, or even 2022. The serial killer has been sentenced to life imprisonment in 2008 for the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001. In 2018, he confessed to having killed two other young women in Yonne, Marie-Angèle Domece and Joanna Parrish.
