2023-12-09 07:36:53
Monique Olivier, during her trial at the Hauts-de-Seine Assize Court, November 28, 2023. MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP
Philippe Guichard and Stéphanie Duchatel are going to have a bad time at the helm, they know it. These two experienced police officers, 62 and 56 years old today, participated in the investigation into the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin in Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne), in 2003, but they are on the wrong side of history: on the side of those who, in this matter, “failed” Michel Fourniret.
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The judicial police (PJ) of Versailles, where they were officiating, were contacted in the first hours of the case. After sixteen years of investigation, she had achieved nothing. In 2019, a new investigating judge – the eighth – inherits the Mouzin file: Sabine Kheris makes the decision to divest the Versailles PJ in favor of the gendarmes of the Dijon research section. A few months of investigation later, Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier confessed. “Fortunately a judge had the courage to contact another service, otherwise we would not be here”summarizes Didier Seban, lawyer for the Mouzin family.
At the start of the week, Sabine Kheris was at this same bar. The lawyers for the civil parties had brought her in to thank her publicly. This Friday, December 8, Philippe Guichard knows that he is going to have a bad time, so he takes the lead. A word to the parents of Estelle Mouzin, who waited for this trial for twenty years: “I understand their dismay, and even their anger towards the Versailles judicial police. » And the hostilities begin: “I am here to defend the PJ and its investigators. It seems important to me to put the church back in the middle of the village. »
“Total and exceptional involvement”, “extraordinary investment”, “extremely heavy investigations” : the Mouzin file benefited from preferential treatment, insisted Philippe Guichard. “In history, never in a disappearance case have there been so many investigations. » And the Fourniret track has not been neglected, on the contrary: “He is the individual who was treated the most in the case. Except that at some point, we realized that it wasn’t possible. We were unable to position it in France on January 9, 2003. And the priority track became a little less priority. »
“I said I had doubts about his involvement”
The list of grievances of the Mouzin family and their lawyer against the PJ of Versailles is long. They accuse, among other things, the investigators of having ignored the testimony of a friend of Estelle who, three weeks before the schoolgirl, had also been approached in Guermantes by a stranger in a van – without getting in. inside ; of having left behind statements from former fellow prisoners to whom Monique Olivier would have confided about the involvement of her couple in the Mouzin affair; to have, above all, given disproportionate credit to an alibi that was nevertheless very fragile.
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