Monique Olivier, who is serving life for aiding her serial killer husband Michel Fourniret, is a suspect in the 1997 disappearance of a teenage girl in France, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Olivier is formally in custody for the “kidnapping (and) illegal confinement” of 17-year-old Cecile Vallin and is being questioned by a specialist cold case unit, prosecutors 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 leading out of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, a small southern French town fewer than 20 miles from the Italian border.
Investigators resumed inquiries into whether Fourniret could have been responsible for the abduction after statements Olivier made in December last year, when 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, dubbed the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, had murdered a young “babysitter” around June 1997, while the girl was sleeping at the couple’s house in Sart-Custinne in Belgium. Fourniret “strangled her with his bare hands,” she said at the time.
But Olivier, whose evidence about her time with her late ex-husband has often been hesitant and fragmentary, denied in court that Vallin could have been the victim in question.
“We were never in Savoie,” the visibly irritated Frenchwoman said of the region where Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne is located.
Investigators have now formally placed Olivier — already sentenced twice for complicity in her husband’s murders — in custody in the Vallin case. She’d previously been convicted for her role in four murders and a rape committed by her husband.
Widow sentenced for her role as “bait”
Olivier’s lawyer, Richard Delgenes, said he had been informed she was being questioned but said he was unable to attend the interview and she would not answer without him present. The interview “is counter-productive for the Vallin family,” he told AFP.
The Vallin family’s representative, Cathy Richard, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Local prosecutors launched a kidnapping probe after Vallin’s parents reported her missing in 1997, when searches failed to spot any sign of the teenager and there was no evidence that she had run away.
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Olivier, 75, was first sentenced to life in jail in 2008.
She received another life sentence last year for her role as “bait” in Fourniret’s killings of British student Joanna Parrish, French teenager Marie-Angele Domece and 9-year-old Estelle Mouzin.
She met Fourniret through a classified ad he posted while serving jail time for rape, going on to have a child with him and aid him in his crimes.
For 16 years, the couple worked together to abduct and murder girls and young women, the BBC reported. They were finally stopped in 2003, when a 13-year-old girl Fourniret was trying to kidnap managed to escape, leading to his and Olivier’s arrest.
The BBC reported that Fourniret’s known victims — beyond Parrish, Domece and Mouzin — were Isabelle Laville, Fabienne Leroy, Jeanne-Marie Desramault, Elisabeth Brichet, Natacha Danais, Celine Saison, Mananya Thumphong and Farida Hammiche. The 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 with no possibility of parole for seven of the rapes and murders in 2008. He died in prison in 2021 aged 79.