Wife of French 'serial killer' denies murder pact 01/04/2008 00:00

"A pact was never signed between us, there was no agreement," Monique Olivier told the judge on the third day of Fourniret's trial for the kidnap, rape and murder.

   CHARLEVILLE-MEZIERES, France, April 1, 2008  - The wife of
self-confessed French serial killer Michel Fourniret on Tuesday denied in
court that she had entered into a pact to help him lure women to rape and
murder.
   "A pact was never signed between us, there was no agreement," Monique
Olivier told the judge on the third day of Fourniret's trial for the kidnap,
rape and murder of seven young women.
   Olivier, 59, has been charged with one count of murder and complicity in
several others during a killing spree that prosecutors said began in 1987 and
ended in 2003 when a girl managed to flee from Fourniret's vehicle.
   Investigators seized letters that Olivier wrote to Fourniret while he was in prison on sexual assault convictions that suggest she had agreed to help him entrap his victims if he, in turn, killed her abusive husband.
   "It was only words," Olivier told the court in Charleville-Mezieres, a town
near the Belgian border. "There is a difference between words and actions."
   Olivier had told Belgian police in June 2004 that a deal had been reached
between them, but she recanted during testimony on Monday.
   Fourniret is being tried for the rape and murder of six young women or
teenage girls in France and one in Belgium, aged between 12 and 21, who were strangled, stabbed with a screwdriver or shot.
   A Belgian teenager took the stand earlier and testified that her escape
from the clutches of Fourniret was like "being in a film."
   "He said to me: 'shut up or I'll kill you... you must give me pleasure, if
you don't give me pleasure you won't be going home'," she said as Fourniret
sat in the dock and listened to her testimony.
   The girl, identified in court only as Marie because at 17 years old she is
still a minor, said that in June 2003 she was walking along a road in her
Belgian hometown of Ciney when a Citroen van pulled up and its driver,
Fourniret, asked her for directions.
   He insisted she get in to show him the way, she said. When she did,
Fourniret pushed her into the back of the truck and tied up her hands and feet.
   "I felt like I was in a film," Marie told the court.
   Marie said that Fourniret's threat to kill her came after she started
screaming and tried to resist when he began touching her breasts.
   She managed to free her limbs and jump out of the van when it stopped at a
junction. A passing car picked her up and drove her to a police station, where
the car's driver gave police Fourniret's car number plate.
   That led to Fourniret's arrest.
   Fourniret, 65, listened impassively as Marie testified.
   Earlier Monday, the man dubbed the "Ogre of the Ardennes" repeated his
threat to "boycott" the trial if it was not held behind closed doors.
   When the presiding judge asked him if had anything to say about the events
of June 2003, when Marie was abducted, Fourniret replied: "I am burning to
talk about them but I cannot."
   "I will respond to you in private," he told the judge half a dozen times
during the day.
   In a letter sent to his son Selim, Fourniret reportedly furnished the
details of what he planned to do to Marie had she not fled. "It is obvious
that I would have torn out her eyes and her limbs with infinite pleasure," he
wrote in the missive, according to state prosecutor Francis Nachbar.
   The charges against the couple state that Olivier played a key part in many
of her husband's meticulously planned schemes to abduct young women.
   Fourniret was charged earlier this month in two other cases that do not
feature in the current trial -- the 1990 murder of British student Joanna
Parrish and the 1988 killing of Frenchwoman Marie-Angele Domece.

AFP 

photo VRT