This week’s excavations in Issancourt-et-Rumel were the seventh in a year. – FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI / AFP
The new excavations started on Monday in the Ardennes to search for the body of Estelle Mouzin, alleged victim in 2003 of Michel Fourniret, in the presence of the killer’s ex-wife, ended on Thursday, according to a family lawyer and a source close to the file. There are “a priori” no more excavations, briefly indicated Me Corinne Herrmann, one of the lawyers for the father of the child who disappeared at 9 years old in Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne).
Nevertheless, the judge can very well decide, as she has done several times, to take them back when she wishes. This seventh excavation campaign in a year was initiated Monday, in the presence of Monique Olivier, in a communal wood from Issancourt-et-Rumel, explored for three days at the end of April by investigators and examining magistrate Sabine Kheris, from “indications” provided by the ex-wife of the deceased serial killer. Without results so far.
“It’s difficult, twenty years later”
Extracted from her cell where she is serving a twenty-eight-year security sentence for complicity in four of the murders of her ex-husband, Monique Olivier, 72, provided “details” and tried to help “find the scenario of these three terrible days “, but” it is difficult, twenty years later, “said Corinne Herrmann on Tuesday. Monday, the excavation operations continued late in the evening, in particular “to restore it to the conditions of the time”, but also to “bring up images”.
During a previous research campaign in this region of the Ardennes, the scene of a good part of Michel Fourniret’s criminal career, Monique Olivier had for the first time recognized on April 1 a role in the kidnapping of Estelle. She had specified having accompanied her ex-husband to the edge of the wood of Issancourt-et-Rumel to let him go bury the body of the girl, January 11, 2003. The village of Issancourt-et-Rumel is located about four kilometers from Ville-sur-Lumes, where, still according to Monique Olivier, Fourniret kidnapped, raped and killed Estelle, in a house belonging to her sister.
Sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001, Michel Fourniret finally admitted in March 2020 his responsibility in the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin. He died at 79 in Paris in May.