The French serial killer and pedophile Michel Fourniret, who had been nicknamed by the media “the monster of the Ardennes”, died this afternoon in Paris. He suffered from Alzheimer’s and heart problems and was hospitalized at the end of his life since April 28 in the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, connected to the Fresnes detention center, where he was being held.
Samuel Little, the most ruthless serial killer in American history, has died: he confessed to the murder of 93 women
Fourniret, 79, had been sentenced to two life sentences for killing eight people, all young women or adolescents, between 1987 and 2001, and had been involved in other investigations. Three times married, father of five, he claimed to have turned into a sexual predator after discovering that his first wife was not a virgin.
The role of the wife
At the age of 25, in 1967, he was found guilty of the assault of a girl in the Ardennes. Arrested and jailed in 1984, in 1987 he was sentenced to five years for sexual assault on a dozen young girls.
In prison he begins a correspondence with Monique Olivier, a separated woman and mother of two children with whom in 1987, released from prison, he goes to live. The following year Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch, his former cellmate, through his girlfriend Farida Hammiche asks him to recover some gold bars hidden in a cemetery in Fontenay-en-Parisis by a group of robbers. Fourniret kills the woman and takes possession of the “treasure” with which he buys the castle of Sautou, in the Ardennes.
From serial killers to unknown soldiers, the US tries to name the war dead with the DNA database
by Massimo Basile
In 1988 he has a son with Olivier, who later becomes his third wife, as well as his accomplice. In 2003 Fourniret was arrested in Belgium after attempting to kidnap a teenager. The following year, his wife accuses him of killing nine girls, including Hammiche (and he will accuse him of others later). Fourniret, detained in Dinant, Belgium, confesses eight murders, all committed in France and Belgium since 1987. He says he had to “hunt down at least two virgins a year”. On his indication, the bodies of two victims are found in the park of his castle.
The open cases
On May 28, 2008, at the age of 66, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Ardennes Court for seven murders, preceded by rape or attempted rape, and for the assault of three other girls, who managed to escape him. Monique Olivier is sentenced to life in prison for complicity in four murders and for gang rape of another girl. After having confessed to two other murders, in 2018 Fourniret takes a life sentence again, for the killing of Hammiche, whose body will never be found. In March 2020 he admits his responsibility in the death of Estelle Mouzin, who had disappeared in 2003 at the age of 9, and on December 22 he is also accused of that of Lydie Logé, which occurred in 1993 when the girl was 29 years old.
.