There were no surprises this Tuesday at the Nanterre Assize Court. After ten hours of deliberation Monique Olivier, the ex-wife of serial killer Michel Fourniret, was sentenced to life imprisonment for her participation in three crimes: the kidnappings and murders of Marie-Angèle Domèce and Joanna Parrish, in 1988 and 1990, and the kidnapping and sequestration of little Estelle Mouzin, in 2003. The court attached his sentence to a security period of twenty years.
Monique Olivier, now 75 years old, welcomed this verdict as she had throughout these three weeks: impassive. No reaction came to mark his face. Even before the sentencing, her lawyer, Mr. Richard Delgenès, assured that his client would not appeal. “Because she is guilty, because the issue is not the sentence” and because it is “out of the question to inflict a second trial on the civil parties”, he pleaded on Tuesday, recalling however that without his client’s confession, there would have been no trial because in these cases, the material elements are thin.
“I regret everything I did”
Before the court retired to deliberate and answer the twenty questions put to it, Monique Olivier reiterated her confessions. “I confirm what I said and I regret everything I did and I ask for forgiveness from the families of the victims while knowing that what I did is unforgivable,” she declared, before sitting down heavily in the box. The accused admitted, from the opening of her trial, the crimes for which she was being tried. However, the three weeks of hearings did not make it possible to resolve the many gray areas in these cases. Starting with the location of the bodies of Marie-Angèle Domèce and Estelle Mouzin. “I don’t know anymore”, “If I knew, I would tell you, but really I don’t know”, “It’s confusing”, the accused kept repeating throughout these three weeks.
In their indictment, the attorneys general sought to dismantle the image of victim submitted to Michel Fourniret displayed by Monique Olivier throughout the trial. “She has the ability to flee, not to be an active accomplice, to save her victims and denounce him; but she does not make these choices,” insisted Stéphanie Pottier, one of the two representatives of the public prosecutor. And to insist: “It is a murderous team, a couple which presents an absolute criminal complementarity. »
The fact remains that this sentence will not change his detention. Monique Olivier was already sentenced in 2008 to life imprisonment, with twenty-eight years of security, for complicity in four murders. Ten years later, she received a new sentence of twenty years in prison with ten years of security for a fifth. It thus reaches the legal maximum of thirty years of security. She will therefore not be able to be released before December 2035. She will then be 87 years old.