Four days of searching in vain : despite the deployment of significant human and technical, excavations in the two former properties of the serial killer Michel Fourniret have ended Thursday without the chance to recover the body of Estelle Mouzin, who disappeared in 2003. “All the audits planned have been made” but nothing has been discovered, said the constables, to the Agency France-Presse, adding that the “assumptions and doors” were now “closed”.
Read also Estelle Mouzin : the shadows of the narrative of Michel Fourniret
“The Ogre of the Ardennes”, had admitted in march to the murder of the young girl of 9 years old, abducted in January 2003 at Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne), stating to the justice that is “appropriate” that his body, which has never been found, may be in one of his old properties in the Ardennes.
In the early morning, military personnel, and gendarmes, accompanied by the judge of instruction paris Sabine Kheris, had returned to the Castle of Sautou, a huge property of 15 hectares situated in the municipality of Donchery and isolated in the middle of the woods. Diggers, divers, drone, experts on forensic… a large device had been mobilized.
“Everything has been done by all services of police and military (…) and I think that one can not go further,” said to the press, in the late afternoon, Me Richard Delgenes, a lawyer of the ex-wife of Fourniret, Monique Olivier. “At least we know that we have not been able to find of body to places that were scientifically caches potential.” He also expressed the wish that Michel Fourniret is itself brought on-site, which would be “more effective in the analysis of his words, because we don’t know when he is manipulating or when he manipulates not”.
“We can’t say that there is progress”
on Monday, investigators were first headed to Ville-sur-Lumes, in a dozen of kilometers, searching without success the cellar of a house with a time belonged to the sister of the serial killer, who died in 2002. Michel Fourniret went there regularly until his arrest in 2003. A receipt, printed in a nearby supermarket on January 11, 2003 – two days after the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin at Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne) – and found during a police search at Fourniret had guided the investigators to this residential area.
The research team, composed of some fifty gendarmes and experts, including members of the Institute of criminal research of the gendarmerie, the brigade fluviale, or sappers of the army, was then searched Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the huge field of Sautou.
Read also the Confessions of Michel Fourniret : “You must now find Estelle”
It is in this secluded property, accessible only by a forest road, that had been found in 2004, the body of Elisabeth Brichet, 12 years old, and Jeanne-Marie Desramault, 22, two victims of Fourniret. “You can’t say that there is progress”, but “there have been doors closed, (…) places that we can do away with today”, had said on Tuesday evening, Didier Seban, one of the lawyers of the family Mouzin. Investigations might continue into Belgium, he posited.
“The Ogre of the Ardennes” was convicted in 2008 of the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001 and sentenced to life in prison without parole, before being sentenced in 2018 for an assassination rogue. After years of denials, he acknowledged at the beginning of march for the murder of Estelle Mouzin. “It is possible that this image me comfortable ( … ), and I recognize a being that is no longer there by my own fault”, he said to the judge. But “the circumstances, the result, the unfolding, it is in the moat.”
