Ex-wife of rapist and serial killer Michel Fourniret, Monique Olivier is back in court as of Tuesday. To this day, his personality divides professionals.
Submissive woman or gifted manipulator? The case of Monique Olivier has raised questions for two decades now. The ex-wife of the rapist and serial killer Michel Fourniret, who died in May 2021, is on trial from this Tuesday, November 28, 2023 for several cases: that of Estelle Mouzin, as well as those of Joanna Parrish and Marie -Angèle Domèce. In detail, Monique Olivier will have to answer for her complicity in kidnapping and sequestration followed by death to the detriment of a child, Estelle Mouzin, before the Hauts-de-Seine Assize Court. She is also on trial for kidnapping, forcible confinement, rape or attempted rape, and murder of the two other young women. As a reminder, the bodies of these three victims could never be found.
Divorced since 2010 from Michel Fourniret, Monique Olivier today represents the last chance for the victims’ families to obtain answers. So, will she deliver the truth? All the truth ? “She has always told the truth about the murders. She manipulates details if it implicates her, but she does not lie,” says the lawyer for Marie-Angèle Domèce’s relatives, Me Corinne Herrmann, including Sud-Ouest echoes. Likewise, it appears that if the revelations of Monique Olivier allowed the arrest of her husband, but also to attribute other affairs to him over the years, the one who has already been convicted twice for complicity in the murders committed by Michel Fourniret only reveals himself in fragments. “She does not tell us where the body is [of Estelle Mouzin, editor’s note], does not admit to all the affairs,” notes Mr. Didier Seban, lawyer for the father of the young girl who disappeared in 2003, of which Sud-Ouest reports also the words.
The ogre of the Ardennes, as he is nicknamed, Monique Olivier met him more than thirty-five years ago, in 1987. She had just come out of a complicated marriage, with a daily life punctuated by jealousy and violence from her first husband and father of her first two sons, born in 1980 and 1981. So, when in 1987 she came across this small ad published by Michel Fourniret in the Catholic weekly Le Pèlerin which states “Prisoner would like to correspond with anyone of all ages to forget loneliness”, Monique Olivier begins a correspondence with this stranger who is serving a prison sentence for rape in Fleury-Mérogis. Little by little, the “wildcat” and the “tit” form a romantic relationship, despite Michel Fourniret’s obsession with young virgins in his letters.
“I was so alone at the time,” Monique Olivier confided in 2008, during her first trial at the assizes. And to add: “I was clinging to someone.” At the microphone of BFM TV, Monday, November 27 in the morning, her lawyer, Mr. Richard Delgenès, who said he requested a panel of experts to answer the question “submissive or manipulative?”, spoke about the personality of his client . “We arrive at an intelligence quotient of 91 and they describe her as a submissive person.” According to him, one should even be careful when questioning him, because Monique Olivier would, according to him, “have such a need to exist for someone because she has no self-esteem- even, that if you bring her an existence, whether you are an investigating judge or a serial killer, she will try to satisfy you. For him, Monique Olivier would even be capable of false confessions to please someone who asked her for one. “She is very manipulatable,” he insisted this Monday, on the eve of the trial.
However, the experts’ conclusions are diverse on this subject, notes Sud-Ouest. If some agree on a limited IQ, others point out that “crime is not a question of IQ”, as Mr. Corinne Herrmann puts forward, or even as Monique Olivier, who has, in the past, been capable , among other things, to trap young women to serve them to her husband, not hesitating to go so far as to sexually stimulate him so that he commits rape, as was the case in the Laville affair, would be in reality capable of manipulation. So, the only certainty, at the dawn of this new trial, is that the mystery of Monique Olivier, now 75 years old, remains intact.
