2023-12-19 23:30:39
Maximum sentence for Monique Olivier, widow of the French rapist and serial killer Michel Fourniret. She was sentenced this Tuesday by a Nanterre court to life imprisonment with a security period of twenty years for complicity in the kidnappings and murders of a 9-year-old girl and two young men aged 19 and 20 perpetrated by her ex-husband decades ago in France.
«I confirm what I have said (in the three weeks that the trial has lasted) and I regret everything I have done. “I apologize to the victims, to their families, knowing that everything I have said is unforgivable,” Monique Olivier said hours before hearing the sentence.
This former nurse has been convicted of complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Marie-Angèle Domece (19), Joanna Parrish (20) and Estelle Mouzin (9).
The bodies of Marie-Angèle and Estelle, who disappeared in 1988 and 2003 respectively, were never found. On the other hand, the Police did locate the body of Joanna, a young English woman murdered, raped and abused by Fourniret in 1990.
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested a life sentence with a security period of 22 years without a reduction in sentence “taking into account the exceptional seriousness of the acts committed and the necessary protection of society.”
‘Devilish couple’
Olivier, 75, played an active role in her ex-husband’s crimes. According to investigators, she was his accomplice. She selected and lured victims. Being a woman, they did not suspect her and, for example, they got into her car without fear that something could happen to them. Then, Fourniret raped and murdered them.
This “diabolical couple”, as the French press calls them, met thanks to an exchange of letters in 1987 when Fourniret was still in prison, serving time for the rape of a girl.
“Prisoner will want to correspond with people of any age to forget his loneliness,” said the advertisement that Fourniret placed in a Christian weekly and to which Monique Olivier responded. Upon his release from prison in October 1987, Olivier and Fourniet married and had a son together, Selim.
Fourniret was arrested and imprisoned again in Belgium in June 2003 after an attempted kidnapping of a 13-year-old girl. In June 2004, he confessed to committing six murders. Shortly after, his wife attributed nine crimes to him.
The ‘ogre of the Ardennes’ was sentenced in 2008 and 2018 to two life sentences for the murder of eight women and adolescents between 1987 and 2002 in France and Belgium.
Divorce in 2010
The couple divorced in 2010 by mutual agreement when both were in prison and after the woman reported her husband’s crimes. Fourniret died in prison in 2021, which is why Olivier has been the only one currently tried for these three crimes that were until now unsolved.
The widow had already been sentenced in 2008 to life imprisonment for complicity in 2008 for several of these crimes committed by her husband and in 2018 to 20 years in prison for complicity in another murder at the hands of Fourniret. According to the calculations of the Prosecutor’s Office, Monique Olivier will be able to leave prison in 2035. She will then be 87 years old.
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