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Michel Fourniret Admits Murdering Estelle Mouzin, Missing Since 2003

Questioned for several days by a Paris investigating judge, the Ogre of the Ardennes admitted killing the 9-year-old who vanished in Guermantes 17 years earlier. Her body has not been found.

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Illustration: a search team in orange vests walking into a misty winter wood past a strip of cordon tape

For seventeen years, the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin had no answer. In the first week of March 2020, in a Paris judge's chambers, Michel Fourniret finally gave one. Questioned over several days by investigating judge Sabine Khéris, beginning on Wednesday, March 4, the man the French press called the Ogre of the Ardennes admitted that he had killed the 9-year-old girl. The news magazine Le Point reported the confession on the evening of Friday, March 6, and the next afternoon the Paris prosecutor's office confirmed it.

Estelle vanished on Thursday, January 9, 2003, on her way home from school in Guermantes, in the Seine-et-Marne department. She was last seen in front of a bakery, walking back toward her mother's house, and her mother reported her missing to the local police shortly after 7 p.m. The inquiry that followed was vast: more than 130 people were questioned and every house in the town was searched.

Fourniret had been under suspicion almost from the start. After his arrest in Belgium in June 2003, investigators considered him and then discounted him, because of a single telephone call. He said he had been in Belgium on the day Estelle disappeared and had phoned his son that day to wish him a happy birthday. In 2007 the police dropped the lead, citing that alibi and a lack of supporting evidence.

The alibi did not survive his former wife. In November 2019, and again in January 2020, Monique Olivier told an investigating judge that Fourniret had asked her to make the birthday call to his son Jean-Christophe herself. On November 27, 2019, Fourniret was formally placed under investigation for the kidnapping and unlawful confinement of Estelle, followed by her death. He did not confess. At one hearing before the judge, pleading problems with his memory, he said that he had nothing left to fear or lose at his age, that he had no recollection of the girl, and that he should nonetheless be considered and treated as guilty.

By then Fourniret was already serving a life sentence for other murders. His admission in March 2020 was the first time he had acknowledged killing Estelle. It did not bring her home. When prosecutors confirmed the confession, her body still had not been found.

Fourniret's admission was made during the investigation, not at a trial, and the hearing itself was not public. The account of it comes from press reports of March 6 and 7, 2020, and from the Paris prosecutor's confirmation as reported by Actu17.

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