Monique Olivierwho served his life to help him your husband is a serial killer Michel Fourniret, a suspect in the 1997 disappearance of a teenage girl in France, prosecutors on Tuesday.
Olivier was officially detained for the “kidnapping (and) illegal confinement” of 17-year-old Cecile Vallin and was questioned by a specialist cold case unit, the prosecutor in the Paris suburb of Nanterre told the AFP news agency.
Vallin was last seen around 6 p.m. on June 8, 1997, on a country road out of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, a small town in southern France less than 20 miles from the Italian border.
Investigators continue to question whether Fourniret could be responsible for the kidnapping after statements Olivier made in December last year, when he tried to help Fourniret kidnap and kill three other girls.
AP photo
The court heard that Olivier told Belgian investigators that Fourniret, nicknamed the “Ogre of the Ardennes”had killed a young “babysitter” around June 1997, while the girl was sleeping at the couple’s house in Sart-Custinne in Belgium. Fourniret “held him with his arms,” he said at the time.
But Olivier, whose evidence about the time with his late ex-husband was often doubtful and fragmentary, argued in court that Vallin could be the victim.
“We’ve never been in Savoie,” said an exasperated French woman about the area in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne.
Investigators have now officially placed Olivier – already convicted twice for his involvement in his wife’s murder – into custody in the Vallin case. He had previously been convicted for his role in it four murders and rapes done by her husband.
Widow punished for her role as “bait”
Olivier’s lawyer, Richard Delgenes, said he had been informed that he was being questioned but said he could not attend the interview and that he would not answer in his absence. The interview was “counter-productive for the Vallin family,” he told AFP.
A Vallin family representative, Cathy Richard, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Local prosecutors launched an abduction investigation after Vallin’s parents reported him missing in 1997, when a search failed to find any sign of the teenager and there was no evidence that he had run away.
Thomas SAMSON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Olivier, 75, was first sentenced to life in prison in 2008.
He received another life sentence last year for his role as “bait” in the Fourniret murders of British student Joanna Parrish, French teenager Marie-Angele Domece and 9-year-old Estelle Mouzin.
He met Fourniret through a classified ad that he posted when he was imprisoned for rape, wanting to have a child with a man and Aiding him in crime.
For 16 years, the pair worked together to kidnap and kill girls and young women, the BBC reported. They finally stopped in 2003, when a 13-year-old girl Fourniret tried to kidnap escaped, leading to her and Olivier’s arrest.
The BBC reports that Fourniret’s known victims – beyond Parrish, Domece and Mouzin – are Isabelle Laville, Fabienne Leroy, Jeanne-Marie Desramault, Elisabeth Brichet, Natacha Danais, Celine Saison, Mananya Thumphong and Farida Hammiche. Victims were shot, strangled or stabbed to death, the BBC reported. Most were killed in the Ardennes region of northern France and in Belgium.
Fourniret received a life sentence without parole for seven counts of rape and murder in 2008. He died in prison in 2021 at the age of 79.
