THE WIDOW OF a French serial killer known as the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, who is on trial over her role in three murders dating back decades, today said that she admitted to “all the facts.”
Monique Olivier’s husband, Michel Fourniret, was charged with abduction, rape and murder in the cases but died in 2021, aged 79, before he could be brought to trial.
The trial of his wife opened in the town of Nanterre, in the west suburbs of Paris, yesterday.
“I acknowledge all the facts,” Olivier said on the second day of her trial.
The 75-year-old, who wore the same white sweater as the day before, was briefly questioned in the afternoon.
The crimes date back to 1988 in the case of Marie-Angele Domece, who disappeared aged 18 from Auxerre, and 1990 for 20-year-old British woman Joanna Parrish, whose naked body was found in the Yonne river that runs through the department of the same name in central France.
Olivier is charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping and murder of the girls.
Her third charge is for complicity in the 2003 disappearance of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin, whose body has never been found two decades on, despite intensive searches.
The body of Domece has also never been found.
Showing little emotion, she listened to the testimony of Francis Nachbar, who was the prosecutor at the couple’s first trial in 2008.
“This woman’s duplicity is beyond comprehension,” said the retired magistrate, recounting how he had witnessed Olivier’s interrogations by Belgian investigators in 2004.
Fourniret was arrested in Belgium in 2003.
The day before, the defendant had claimed that her ex-husband had “used” her to commit his crimes, denying any “criminal pact” between them.
“I regret everything that happened,” she said yesterday.
She has already been convicted twice of aiding and abetting some of her husband’s crimes.
Olivier received a life sentence in 2008, and could face a second in the present trial.
In 2018, Olivier was given a further 20 years’ jail for her part in the killing of Farida Hammiche, the wife of one of Fourniret’s former cellmates.
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