Serial killer leads police to bodies of woman and 12-year-old girl

A FRENCH avowed serial killer has led police to the bodies of a 12-year-old girl and 22-year-old woman he admitted having killed and buried on the grounds of his former home 15 years earlier, prosecutors said.

The two are among nine people, including eight women and girls, that Michel Fourniret has confessed to having killed between 1987 and 2001.

“We have found the second body, and thus 15 years of investigation have just come to their conclusion,” prosecutor Yves Charpenel announced on the site of the chateau, in the Ardennes forest region bordering Belgium and France. “It is with quite some emotion that I announce the discovery of (the remains of) Elisabeth Brichet,” a 12-year-old Belgian girl whom Michel Fourniret has admitted to killing in 1989, said another prosecutor, Cedric Visart de Bocarme.

The body of Jeanne-Marie Desramault, who Fourniret said he also killed and interred in 1989, was identified earlier. Prosecutors said experts would conduct analyses to confirm the identifications.

In a startling case that has unfolded with dramatic speed, Fourniret, 62, confessed to the nine killings, many of which took place in the wooded border region, and then offered to help police dig up the remains of two of his victims at the chateau he once owned.

He has been dubbed “the French Dutroux” by media because his confessions emerged just a week after Belgian’s most-hated man Marc Dutroux received a life sentence for a horrific series of rapes and murders of teenage girls that traumatised Belgian society. Fourniret, who has been held in Belgium since June 2003 for abduction of minors and sexual misconduct, confessed to the killings after his estranged wife accused him of committing at least 10 murders.

Both he and his wife, Monique Olivier, were brought to the Sautou chateau on Saturday, where about 200 police equipped with ground-digging excavators hunted for the victims’ bodies in areas indicated by Fourniret.

When the bodies were disinterred, Fourniret showed no emotion, prosecutor Charpenel told journalists on the site, near this small town in the French Ardennes mountains. The prosecutor said expert testing would be done, possible DNA testing, to confirm the victims’ identities, adding that the “clay earth has preserved the bodies.”

Speaking of Brichart’s body, Visart de Bocarme said: “the elements of visual identification are absolutely positive.”