'Ogre' child killer goes on trial in France

A self-confessed serial killer whose wife helped him select young girl victims goes on trial tomorrow for the rape and murder of seven of them.

Frenchman Michel Fourniret, dubbed the “Ogre of the Ardennes” was helped in his terrible catalogue of crimes by wife Monique Olivier who lured girls as young as 12 into his clutches.

Fourniret ,66, was eventually informed on by Olivier, hoping she would would get a lighter sentence for her own crimes.

The couple will sit side by side in the dock in the northern French town of Charleville-Mezieres.

After his arrest he confessed the killings to police and he is also suspected of other murders including that of British student Joanna Parrish whose body was found in Auxerre in 1990.

Belgian police detained Fourniret in June 2003, after the bungled kidnapping of a 13-year-old girl. The girl gave police his number plate number after she managed to free her hands and escape from the back of Fourniret’s van.

Fourniret had bragged to her that he was “worse than” Belgium’s most notorious criminal, paedophile Marc Dutroux, sentenced to life in 2004 for a series of child kidnappings, rapes and murders.

Olivier then told Belgian investigators that Fourniret had committed nine murders, and acknowledged her part in several of them.

During searches of Fourniret’s home, in Sart-Custinne, Belgium, police discovered stolen revolvers, a hood and children’s clothing.

The bodies of two victims, 21-year-old Jeanne-Marie Desramault and 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet, both of whom went missing in 1989, were found in the wooded grounds of Fourniret’s former property in northern France.

Belgium extradited Olivier to France in 2005 and Fourniret in 2006. Judicial officials in both countries decided the case should be tried in France because six of the dead women were French citizens.

Fourniret, a former forest ranger, had a history of sex offences. He met Olivier, a mother of three, in 1987 after he was sentenced to five years in prison for a series of rapes and she wrote to him.

He promised to kill her ex-husband if she would help him with his rapes and murders.

The trial is expected to end in May.