Girl who escaped confronts French ‘serial killer’

   CHARLEVILLE-MEZIERES, France, April 1, 2008 – A Belgian teenager
told a court here Monday that her escape from the clutches of self-confessed
French serial killer Michel 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, was testifying on the third day of Fourniret’s trial for the
kidnap, rape and murder of seven girls and women.
   Marie, who is of Burundian origin, 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 in the northeastern
town of Charleville-Mezieres near the Belgian border. Fourniret’s wife,
Monique Olivier, is also on trial here for one of the murders and complicity
in four of the others.
   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.
   Her escape put an end to a killing spree that allegedly began in 1987.
   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."
   The court heard last week at the start of the trial how Fourniret, 65, and
Olivier, 59, had made a pact that she would find virgins for him if he killed
her first husband.
   Fourniret is being tried for the rape and murder of six young women or
teenage girls in France and one in Belgium, who were aged between 12 and 21
and who were either strangled, stabbed with a screwdriver or shot.
   The former electrician on Thursday admitted to being "devoid of human
emotion" in a text he submitted to the judge.
   He played down Olivier’s role in his crimes, saying she "fell into the
odious nets of a manipulator" without any scruples, who led her into "a
perverse game."
   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 which do not
feature in the current trial — the 1990 murder of British student Joanna
Parrish and the 1988 killing of Frenchwoman Marie-Angele Domece.
   Olivier was charged with complicity in these kidnappings and murders.

AFP