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After His Wife Talks, Michel Fourniret Confesses to Murders of Girls and Young Women in France and Belgium

Fourniret had been held in Belgium for a year. Within days of his wife's statements becoming public, he admitted nine killings, and diggers searched his former château.

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Illustration of searchers in white suits walking toward a digger on overgrown château grounds in a misty Ardennes wood. Not an actual scene from the case.

Michel Fourniret had been held in Belgium for a year over a failed abduction. In the summer of 2004, after his wife began talking to investigators, he confessed to a string of murders of girls and young women.

Revelations by his wife, Monique Olivier, were made public on Wednesday, June 30, 2004, and Fourniret then began to confess. That day he said he had buried the body of a Belgian girl, Elisabeth Brichet, near the Château du Sautou, an estate he had bought in 1988. By July 1, Reuters reported, he had confessed to raping and killing six girls over 15 years, four of them French and two Belgian. By the end of the week, Fourniret, 62, had admitted nine killings, including those of seven girls and young women, committed between 1987 and 2001 in France and Belgium.

On Friday, July 2, Belgian authorities charged Fourniret and Olivier over the abduction and confinement of Elisabeth Brichet, 12, who had disappeared near Namur in 1989. The next day, two mechanical diggers cut trenches on the 37-acre grounds of the château, where about 200 people took part in the search, and human remains were recovered. Yves Charpenel, the prosecutor-general of Reims, said Fourniret had buried Brichet and Jeanne-Marie Desramault, a 22-year-old French student, there. He called it "the culmination of fifteen years of investigation," and said the two families had just been informed. The remains were sent for formal identification. In Belgium the same day, investigators recovered about 25,000 euros in gold coins from a place Olivier had pointed out.

A failed abduction attempt in June 2003 had led to the couple's identification and arrest. In May 2008 a court in Charleville-Mézières found Fourniret guilty of killing seven women and girls and sentenced him to life in prison, with no chance of a reduced sentence for 30 years. Olivier was ordered to serve at least 28 years for her part in some of the murders and a rape.

Reuters reported on July 1 that four of the victims Fourniret had then confessed to were French and two Belgian, while the court that convicted him in 2008 counted six French victims and one Belgian.

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