Despite successive failures, hope continues to animate the gendarmes and judge Sabine Khéris.
A little over a month after the death of Michel Fourniret, new excavations are organized this week in the Ardennes in order to find the body of little Estelle Mouzin, kidnapped on January 9, 2003 in Guermantes.
After being put in place on Monday, the research should begin on Tuesday and will take place in the presence of Monique Olivier, the widow of the Ogre des Ardennes, now the only one able to direct the investigators.
The ex-wife of the serial killer has already been verbose in this affair.
Last April, she told the gendarmes that she had kept the little girl kidnapped by Michel Fourniret for a while, then had transported her husband by car to the place where he got rid of the body.
Despite these indications deemed "credible" by investigators, the vast search campaign carried out at the end of April did not yield anything.
For more than a week, the gendarmes of the Dijon research section had worked hard to turn over the land in a wooded area of Issancourt-et-Rumel.
A place which is located less than 4 km from Ville-sur-Lumes, where, according to Monique Olivier, Fourniret kidnapped, raped and killed Estelle Mouzin.
No significant new indications
This week, the immediate surroundings of this already excavated area will be explored. “Monique Olivier is not very precise, underlines a source familiar with the investigations. She gave an area that is quite large. The most obvious area has been explored, but there are still hypotheses nearby. We owe it to ourselves to continue this work. “Heard for three days at the beginning of June, Monique Olivier was once again cooperative with the examining magistrate, but she was unable to give any new notable indications on the fate of the girl's body. , according to corroborating sources.
In parallel with these excavations, important work is currently being carried out within the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie (IRCGN) in order to direct research and assess its relevance. "In the region, the corpses decompose very quickly, only tiny traces remain after a few months", explained Yves Charpenel, the former attorney general of Reims, to Le Monde last December. Anthropologists from the gendarmerie are therefore working on the nature of the soil in the Ardennes, the acidity of the earth, or the speed of decomposition of bodies in the region. This is to explore an unfortunately plausible hypothesis: the one that there is no longer any trace of the body of Estelle Mouzin, kidnapped 18 years ago ...
