A notorious French serial killer who last year confessed to murdering British student Joanna Parrish has been charged with another killing.
Twisted Michel Fourniret is accused of taking the life of killing a nine-year-old schoolgirl Estelle Mouzin, who disappeared 15 years ago.
Fourniret – known as the ‘Beast of the Ardennes’ – admitted kidnapping, raping and murdering nine girls and young women over a 14-year period from 1987.
They included Joanna, a Leeds University language student who was killed in Burgundy countryside in eastern France in 1990.
Now Fourniret has been removed from a high-security prison to travel to Paris where investigating magistrates charged him with the murder of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin late on Wednesday.
It followed Fourniret’s ex-wife, Monique Olivier, contradicting the killer’s alibi for January 9 2003 – the day Estelle disappeared from Guermantes, a village some 25 miles east of Paris, while walking home from school.
Estelle’s body was never found, but Fourniret became a suspect when her photo was found by police on his computer.
A white van similar to the one Fourniret drove around France and Belgium had also been spotted in the area.
Last week Olivier finally denied that Fourniret had been at their old home in Sart-Custinne, on the border between the two countries, at the time.
Confirming that Fourniret had been charged, a spokesman for Paris prosecutors said a trial would be held ‘in the coming year’.
Last year Fourniret told examining magistrates in Paris that he ended the lives of both Joanna, and Marie-Ange Domece, a mentally handicapped teenager who disappeared in 1988, aged 19.
Marie-Ange’s body has never been found, while Joanna’s was found naked in the River Yonne in Auxerre, the day after she was reported missing in May 1990.
Fourniret was the prime suspect in Joanna’s case for years, and was finally arrested in 2005 with his wife Monique Olivier in connection with the other deaths.
Olivier was also jailed for complicity after it was revealed she would sometimes pick up the victims for him as she drove in their car around the wooden Ardennes area with their baby son in the backseat.
It seemed as though the case would come to a close when Olivier made a statement suggesting she was present at the murder of a young woman in Auxerre in 1990.
But Olivier later withdrew her statement claiming it had been made under pressure, after it emerged a prosecutor had slapped her during an interview.
Fourniret is already serving life in prison, without the possibility of parole, and is unlikely ever to be let out.
