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French Court Jails Michel Fourniret for Life Without Parole for Raping and Murdering Seven Girls and Young Women

His wife, Monique Olivier, who helped lure the victims, was given life with a minimum of 28 years. The couple's trial lasted two months.

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Illustration of press photographers behind a barrier on a wet cobbled square facing a stone building in a French town. Not an actual scene from the case.

For almost 20 years, Michel Fourniret and his wife lured girls and young women into their van in France and Belgium. On May 28, 2008, a French court sentenced Fourniret to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the rape and murder of seven of them.

Fourniret, 66, a former electrician, was convicted of seven murders committed between 1987 and 2001. His wife, Monique Olivier, 59, who helped select and lure the victims, was sentenced to life with a minimum term of 28 years. The prosecution called the couple a "devil with two faces." The victims, aged 12 to 21, included Isabelle Laville, 17, a schoolgirl abducted in Burgundy in December 1987 after Olivier stopped to ask her for directions, and Jeanne-Marie Desramault, a student who met the couple on a train.

The murders had been treated as separate crimes until 2003, when a 13-year-old girl escaped from the back of Fourniret's van. Fourniret mostly refused to speak during the two-month trial. He still faced charges in three other cases, including the 1990 murder of Joanna Parrish, a 20-year-old British woman who worked as a teaching assistant in Auxerre.

The Guardian reported that Olivier was tried for one murder and complicity in four other crimes, while Public Sénat later reported that she was found complicit in four murders and one gang rape.

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