Monique Olivierwho is serving a life sentence for helping her serial killer husband Michel Fourniret is suspected in the disappearance of a teenage girl in France in 1997, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Olivier was taken into custody for the “kidnapping (and) sequestration” of Cécile Vallin, 17, and is being questioned by a unit specializing in “cold cases”, the Nanterre prosecutor’s office told AFP.
Vallin was last seen around 6 p.m. on June 8, 1997, on a country road leading to Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, a small town in southern France less than 30 kilometers from the Italian border.
Investigators resumed the investigation to determine whether Fourniret could have been responsible for the kidnapping after Olivier made statements last December while she was on trial for helping Fourniret kidnap and murder three other girls.
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The court heard that Olivier told Belgian investigators that Fourniret, nicknamed the “Ogre of the Ardennes”had murdered a young “babysitter” around June 1997, while the little girl was sleeping in the couple’s house in Sart-Custinne in Belgium. Fourniret “had strangled her with his bare hands,” she said at the time.
But Olivier, whose testimony about his time with his late ex-husband has often been halting and fragmentary, denied in court that Vallin could have been the victim in question.
“We have never been to Savoie,” said the Frenchwoman, visibly irritated, about the region where Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne is located.
Investigators have now formally remanded Olivier, who has already been convicted twice for complicity in her husband’s murders in the Vallin case, into pretrial detention. She had already been convicted for her role in four murders and one rape committed by her husband.
Widow sentenced for role as ‘bait’
The young woman’s lawyer, Richard Delgenes, said he had been informed of the young woman’s hearing but that he could not attend the hearing and that she would not respond without his presence. This interview “is counterproductive for the Vallin family,” he told AFP.
Vallin family representative Cathy Richard could not immediately be reached for comment.
Local prosecutors launched a kidnapping investigation after Vallin’s parents reported her missing in 1997, when searches turned up no sign of the teenager and there was no evidence she had run away.
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Olivier, 75, was first sentenced to life in prison in 2008.
She was sentenced to life in prison again last year for her role as “bait” in Fourniret’s murders of British student Joanna Parrish, French teenager Marie-Angèle Domece and nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin.
She met Fourniret through a classified ad he posted while he was serving a prison sentence for rape, and had a child with him and helped him in his crimes.
For 16 years, the pair worked together to abduct and murder young girls and women, the BBC reported. They were finally caught in 2003, when a 13-year-old girl Fourniret was trying to abduct managed to escape, leading to her and Olivier’s arrest.
According to the BBC, Fourniret’s known victims, in addition to Parrish, Domece and Mouzin, are Isabelle Laville, Fabienne Leroy, Jeanne-Marie Desramault, Elisabeth Brichet, Natacha Danais, Céline Saison, Mananya Thumphong and Farida Hammiche. The victims were shot, strangled or stabbed, the BBC reported. Most were killed in the Ardennes region of northern France and in Belgium.
Fourniret was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for seven of the rapes and murders committed in 2008. He died in prison in 2021 at the age of 79.
