At the Assize Court of Nanterre,
His arrival in the dock almost caused a riot in the Nanterre criminal court. Dozens of photographers and cameramen rush and jostle to try to take a portrait of the septuagenarian. Hunched over, with a gloomy look, Monique Olivier appears with a white sweatshirt on her back, her short-cut gray hair framing her pale face. The flashes crackle. This is about immortalizing the “ogre’s wife”, Michel Fourniret. The serial killer, who was her husband for 21 years, died in May 2021. It is therefore alone that she must answer for complicity for three crimes: the kidnappings and murders of Marie-Angèle Domèce, in 1988 and of Joanna Parrish, in 1990 as well as the kidnapping of Estelle Mouzin, in 2003. They would be the 3rd, 7th and 13th victims of the couple*.
This Tuesday, for more than four hours, the court went back in time, trying to understand the mechanisms of this murderous tandem. Before meeting Monique Olivier, Michel Fourniret had never killed. And experts are convinced, she would never have become such a criminal without him. Their meeting, in the spring of 1987, was born from a small ad placed in a Catholic magazine, Pilgrim. “Prisoner would like to correspond with anyone of any age to forget loneliness. » At that time, Monique Olivier was 38 years old and living in the south of France. A few months earlier, she left the man who was her partner for more than 15 years, the father of her first two sons. The man was violent, she maintains. He even tried to drown her in the bathtub. He always denied it. “He wasn’t going to brag about it,” she says. When she left, she gave up custody of her children. She quickly remarried an American but the relationship fell apart from the moment she began a letter-writing relationship with the “prisoner”.
“It was pretty ridiculous to be looking for virginity.”
The man in question is Michel Fourniret. Their correspondence is intense. Nearly 200 letters exchanged in eight months. “When I started writing to him I was alone. I liked receiving mail. I wanted to exist for someone,” she says in a low voice. If she was rather talkative at the start of her interrogation, speaking at length about her former husband, the words came out in dribs and drabs when the president, Didier Safar, tried to deepen his relationship with Michel Fourniret.
In her letters, she calls him “Sherkane”, “my beast”. Him “my tit”. “It’s stupid, a kind of teenage correspondence,” she says. Their exchanges, however, do not have the lightness of emerging relationships. Missive after letter, Michel Fourniret confides his obsession to him. Which one, asks the president. “Meeting a young person,” she understates in a whisper. “A young virgin,” retorts the magistrate. Was she shocked by this confidence? “Let’s just say it was pretty ridiculous to be looking for virginity. » The accused assures her, for her it was just “words”. “Simply writing.” However, their first meeting took place at the Evry criminal court: Michel Fourniret was then tried for a series of rapes and sexual assaults. Crimes for which he will be sentenced that day.
“I regret doing all that…”
During their exchange, a pact is formed. He promises to kill her ex-husband if she helps him find young virgins. “Sometimes we make promises but we don’t keep them,” Monique Olivier tries to defend herself. “But in your case, you hold them…”, the president replied. “Yes, it came true…” she whispers. In October 1987, Michel Fourniret was released for “exemplary conduct”. He served most of his sentence in pre-trial detention. The couple then settled in Yonne, near Auxerre. Two months later, they committed their first crime: that of Isabelle Laville, 17 years old. The first in a long series of which investigators probably still do not know the extent. “I regret having done all that,” she says in a whisper.
If she admits her involvement in these murders, Monique Olivier assures that she “only obeyed”. Moreover, when a lawyer for the civil parties asked her about her dangerousness, she was surprised. “Dangerous? Me ? I’m not dangerous at all,” she says with a burst of laughter. She claims to have been “instrumentalized” by Michel Fourniret. He used her – sometimes when she was pregnant – or their young son, Sélim, to “reassure” the victims and push them to get into the vehicle. However, she knew perfectly well the disastrous fate that awaited them. Why didn’t she leave if she didn’t condone Michel Fourniret’s crimes? “I was incapable of fending for myself,” she swears. The president is surprised. She broke up with her two previous companions, why not this time? Monique Olivier swears she was “scared”. Of course, he never laid a hand on her, she admits, but she knew “what he was capable of doing”. During the investigation, however, she admitted to having slapped him without him reacting.
“I was afraid of prison”
And why not denounce him? “I was afraid of prison,” she responds straight away. She waited until 2004, several months after Michel Fourniret’s arrest, to speak. The man was arrested a few months earlier in Belgium for trying to kidnap a teenage girl. She managed to escape and a motorist who witnessed the scene raised the alarm. But the criminal remains silent. He is about to be released when Monique Olivier begins to speak. “I had enough, it had to stop,” she confides. And added: “I am not innocent. By denouncing him, I knew I would follow. It was deserved. »
* Among these thirteen victims identified, three survived. Investigators are working on other cases.