Michel Fourniret was born at Sedan on April 4, 1942. He had convictions for sexual assault on minors from the 1960s and served time in the 1980s. In prison he began corresponding with Monique Olivier, and they married in 1989 on his release, on what both later described as an agreement: she would help him find virgins, and he would kill her ex-husband.
Those named in the record are Isabelle Laville, seventeen; Fabienne Leroy, twenty; Jeanne-Marie Desramault, twenty-two; Elisabeth Brichet, twelve; Natacha Danais, thirteen; Farida Hellegouarch; Celine Saison, eighteen; and Manyana Thumpong, eighteen. A sixteen-year-old girl and an unidentified man are also in the file. The French press called him the Ogre of the Ardennes.
They worked as a pair for the better part of two decades in the Ardennes on both sides of the French-Belgian border. Olivier drove and made the approach, because a woman offering a lift was not frightening, and Fourniret did the rest. The victims established at trial were aged twelve to twenty-two.
He was funded, oddly, by a hoard. In 1988 an associate's widow gave Fourniret the location of the buried proceeds of a robbery, which he dug up and used to buy a small chateau at Sautou, where several victims were buried.
He was arrested in Belgium in June 2003 after a thirteen-year-old he had taken escaped from his van and got the registration. Olivier began talking in 2004 and her statements broke the case open. He was convicted at Charleville-Mezieres in May 2008 of seven murders and one killing that he had ordered, and sentenced to life with no possibility of review; Olivier received life with a twenty-eight-year minimum.
He continued to be questioned for the rest of his life. In 2018 he admitted the 2003 killing of Estelle Mouzin, a nine-year-old whose disappearance was one of France's best-known unsolved cases, after Olivier gave evidence about it. He died in Paris on May 10, 2021, aged seventy-nine, with several suspected cases never resolved, which was widely felt in France to be a deliberate withholding.