MACABRE
A Belgian teenage girl, whose escape from self-confessed French serial killer Michel Fourniret led to his arrest, took the witness stand on Monday at his trial for seven murders.
Her escape put an end to a killing spree that allegedly began in 1987 and ended in 2003 when the then 13-year-old girl managed to undo the ropes tied around her wrists, jump out of Fourniret's vehicle and alert the police.
She told Belgian investigators that Fourniret had boasted to her that he was "worse than" Marc Dutroux, Belgium's most notorious criminal sentenced to life in jail in 2004 for child kidnappings, rapes and murders.
The girl, identified only as Marie because she is still a minor, took the witness stand with her back to the courtroom to protect her identity.
Fourniret, dubbed the "Ogre of the Ardennes," on Monday repeated his threat to "boycott" the trial being held in the town of Charleville-Mezieres near the Belgian border, if it was not held behind closed doors.
When the presiding judge asked him if he had anything to say about the events of June 2003, when the girl was abducted, Fourniret replied: "I am burning to talk about them but I cannot."
The court heard last Thursday at the start of the trial how Fourniret's wife and co-accused, Monique Olivier, had agreed to find virgins for him if he killed her first husband.
Fourniret, 65, 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.
Olivier, 59, is on trial for one of the same murders and complicity in four of the others.
Fourniret, a former electrician, on Thursday admitted to being "devoid of human emotion" in a text he submitted to the presiding judge. In the meandering document, he said he would "boycott" the trial because it would be a media circus if it was not held behind closed doors.
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 would play a key part in her husband's meticulously-planned schemes to abduct young women.
Their first attack, barely two months after his release in 1987 after a prison term for sexual assault, set the tone for the others.
The couple allegedly drove up alongside 17-year-old Isabelle Laville and asked her for directions, and then persuaded her to get into their van and show them the way. She was abducted, raped and murdered.
They continued abducting women with similar ruses until 2003, authorities say.
Fourniret was charged earlier this month in two other cases which do not feature in the trial opening Thursday - 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.
Fourniret has admitted that he needed to go hunting for a virgin at least twice a year, prosecutors said, adding that he was obsessed with virginity.
source
0 comments:
Post a Comment