page_title: Michel Fourniret
section_title: Confessed murders
hierarchical_section_title: Michel Fourniret / Confessed murders
caption_attribution_description: Chateau du Sautou, where lived w:fr:Michel Fourniret
context_page_description: Michel Paul Fourniret, also known as the Ogre of the Ardennes, is a French serial killer who confessed to killing twelve people in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2003. After he was arrested in June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a girl in Ciney, Fourniret confessed to killing nine people—eight females and one male—in 2004, having been informed on by his then-wife, Monique Pierrette Olivier. Fourniret was convicted of seven of these murders on 28 May 2008 and sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole, while Olivier was given life with a minimum term of 28 years for complicity.
  In February 2018, Fourniret confessed to killing two more women. On 16 November 2018, Fourniret and Olivier were convicted of the murder of Farida Hammiche, the last of the eight females that Fourniret confessed to killing in 2004. Fourniret was given a second life sentence and Olivier was sentenced to a further twenty years' imprisonment. In March 2020, Fourniret confessed to killing Estelle Mouzin, who disappeared from Guermantes in 2003.
context_section_description: Fourniret admitted to eight murders prior to his trial in 2008. He was convicted of seven of these and sentenced to life in prison.
  On 11 December 1987, Fourniret and Olivier drove, in separate vehicles, to Auxerre. Seeing 17-year-old Isabelle Laville – whom the couple had seen a day or two earlier and were targeting – walking home from school, Olivier stopped to ask Laville to join her in the car and give her directions, which Laville agreed to do. Driving down the road, Olivier reached the spot where Fourniret was standing with his car, pretending it had broken down. After Olivier, as planned, pretended to offer him a lift, he got into her car. Fourniret choked Laville with a piece of rope, before Olivier sedated her with Rohypnol. The couple brought the girl to their home in Saint-Cyr-les-Colons, where Fourniret raped and strangled her. Laville's body was thrown down a disused well in Bussy-en-Othe. Her remains were recovered from the well on 11 July 2006.
  In March 1988, Fourniret was contacted by 30-year-old Farida Hammiche—the wife of Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch, an imprisoned bank robber with whom Fourniret had shared a cell prior to the latter's release in October 1987—who asked Fourniret to help her unearth a haul from a cemetery in Fontenay-en-Parisis, which had been stolen by members of the Gang des postiches. After Fourniret and Hammiche managed to retrieve the haul, which consisted of gold ingots and coins, Hammiche gave Fourniret a share worth 500,000 francs for helping her dig it up and hiding it in her apartment in Vitry-sur-Seine. On 12 April, aiming to steal the rest of the haul, Fourniret and Olivier lured Hammiche out of her home and drove her to Clairefontaine-en-Yvelines, where she was strangled and her body buried, before the couple broke into her home and stole the haul. They used the money they made from it to buy a château called the Château du Sautou in Donchery. Hammiche's body was never found.
  By August, Olivier was heavily pregnant with Fourniret's baby. On 3 August, the couple drove to a supermarket in Châlons-sur-Marne (now Châlons-en-Champagne), and encountered 20-year-old Fabienne Leroy in the car park. With Olivier feigning illness, the couple asked Leroy to join them in their car and give them directions to a doctor's surgery. After Leroy got in, the couple drove to a forest near the military camp of Mourmelon-le-Grand. Fourniret ordered Olivier to look at Leroy's hymen to see if it was still intact, but Olivier refused. After raping Leroy, Fourniret shot her in the chest.
  In January 1989, Fourniret met 21-year-old Jeanne-Marie Desramault on the evening train to Charleville-Mézières. The two conversed before arriving in Charleville, where Desramault was staying at a convent. Desramault met Fourniret and Olivier, who had assumed false identities, at the train station again on Saturday, 18 March, and the couple invited Desramault to come to their house in Floing – an offer she accepted – and Fourniret promised he would drive her home afterwards. After they got to Floing, Fourniret asked Desramault if she was a virgin, and she told him she wasn't and that she had a boyfriend. Enraged, he attacked her. She fought back as he attempted to rape her, and as she attempted to escape, the couple gagged her with adhesive bandages before Fourniret strangled her. Fourniret and Olivier drove to Donchery and buried Desramault's body in the garden of the Château du Sautou.
  Fourniret and Olivier married in July 1989. On the afternoon of 20 December, they drove across the Franco-Belgian border to Saint-Servais, Namur, with their one-year-old son. Fourniret saw 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet walk to a friend's house, and waited outside for her until she left to walk the short distance home just before 7 pm. He asked her to give him directions to a doctor's surgery for his son. She agreed to do so, and the couple drove back to Floing with her. When Fourniret undressed the girl, he saw that she was on her period, so Olivier cleaned Brichet's genitals. The next day, the couple took Brichet to the château, where F
caption: The bodies of two victims, Elisabeth Brichet and Jeanne-Marie Desramault, were found buried in the gardens of the Château du Sautou in Donchery in July 2004. Fourniret and Olivier bought the château in the late 1980s using stolen money.
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