This 75-year-old woman is on trial from Tuesday in Nanterre for complicity in the Estelle Mouzin, Marie-Angèle Domèce and Joanna Parrish cases. For almost twenty years, the profile of the former wife of the “ogre of the Ardennes” has baffled specialists.
“My dear Sher Khan”, “you know that it is with pleasure that I will carry out your orders (no sir, it is not said lip service). You know that your Natouchka is ready to help you in many things, she wants to know that she is useful, (…) I want to work with my beast, to help him, that would make me so happy, do you understand what I mean?” In the mid-1980s, a criminal pact was being formed in the secrecy of a correspondence between a Fleury-Mérogis inmate and a woman. Monique Olivier, 37, writes to Michel Fourniret, six years her senior, convicted of rape. “Her tit”, as he calls it, agrees to come to terms with his obsession with young virgins. In exchange, “his favorite little convict” will avenge her ex-husband, whom she accuses of violence and who has custody of their two children.
Nearly thirty years later, twelve murders were attributed by the courts to the serial killer, including those of Estelle Mouzin, 9 years old, Marie-Angèle Domèce, 19 years old, and Joanna Parrish, 21 years old. Monique Olivier appears from Tuesday, November 28 before the Nanterre Assize Court for complicity in these three cases. Already sentenced to life in 2008 for her participation in four of the murders of “the ogre of the Ardennes”, this time she will be alone in the box. Michel Fourniret having died two years ago, it is his partner, who assisted him in his criminal itinerary, who will have to answer the court’s questions. From the first day of the trial, the accused will be questioned about her personality, which is the subject of fierce debate, as is her intelligence.
A “dependent” personality…
The first expert to meet Monique Olivier is a Belgian neuropsychiatrist. Xavier Bongaerts speaks with her in prison, in Namur, in July 2004, a year after the arrest of Michel Fourniret in Belgium for the attempted kidnapping of a teenage girl. He notes no intellectual deficiency in this wax-faced woman, who appears in all the press photos of the time with her head bowed, roots visible in the middle of a bob of raven black hair. The specialist identifies a “a dependent personality, characterized by a feeling of unworthiness, low self-esteem, decision-making incapacity and a narcissistic weakness”.
Born in Tours in 1948, Monique Olivier is the last of four children. She grew up in Nantes, between an artisan painter father, who was often absent, and a stay-at-home mother who was busy caring for her sick mother. In this modest family, the youngest grows quietly, hidden behind her older brothers. An average student, she did not take her school certificate due to health problems. At the insistence of her father, she took private secretarial lessons then took on a few odd jobs before meeting her first husband, a driving school manager and amateur painter, at the age of 22. Two boys will be born in 1980 and 1981.
The couple divorced after around ten years, due, according to Monique Olivier, to her husband’s violence and jealousy. She leaves him with custody of their children aged 4. To try to get them back, she remarries an American, in exchange for regularization of her situation. The barter fails after six months. A new market awaits her when she responds to a classified ad in the Catholic weekly Pilgrim : “Prisoner would like to correspond with anyone of any age to forget loneliness.”
…or a “perverse” accomplice?
After more than 200 letters exchanged, the insipid Monique Olivier moved in with the erudite Michel Fourniret upon his release from prison, on October 22, 1987. A month and a half later, she fulfilled her part of the bargain: she brought Isabelle up Laville, 17, aboard their vehicle in Auxerre (Yonne), then pretends to hitchhike to Michel Fourniret. He rapes and kills the young girl. As a thank you, he led a punitive expedition five days later to La Chapelle-sur-Erdre (Loire-Atlantique), with “his tit”, to burn her first husband’s paintings. The pact is consummated. A child was born nine months later and they formalized their union in front of the mayor in 1989. Michel Fourniret has already claimed four other victims.
Their life together is punctuated by his criminal impulses. As promised, Monique Olivier complies. She gives the victims confidence by her presence, and sometimes that of their baby, in the van. She approaches them, holds one at gunpoint while Michel Fourniret ties her hands, controls another with tape while she struggles, drives while her husband goes in the back to attack his prey, performs a toilet intimate before a rape, keeps them sequestered without being moved by their tears and is never very far away when her terrible spouse gets rid of the body. “When he gave me an order, I didn’t ask any questions”she will say during searches to find a missing person.
If French psychologist and psychiatrist experts agree with their Belgian colleague on the gaping narcissistic flaw in this crime associate, some found her to have an IQ higher than her husband (131 against 124). “The muse” of the serial killer then becomes the one who pulls the strings in the shadows. “We can think that she found in him something to satisfy by proxy the most archaic desires or fantasies”, wrote the psychoanalyst Philippe Herbelot in 2005. For his fellow psychiatrist Jean-Luc Ployé, Monique Olivier is neither dependent nor suggestible and very far from an easily influenced woman. Experts Michel Dubec and Daniel Zagury confirm above-normal intelligence and describe behavior “pervert”.
“Despite the monotonous tone she adopts and her position of supposed constraint, we cannot conceive of her participation as she describes it without considering that she took pleasure or enjoyment at the time of carrying out such acts .”
Michel Dubec and Daniel Zagury, expert psychiatristsin their report on Monique Olivier
According to these two psychiatrists, this criminal complementarity between Michel Fourniret and Monique Olivier, in turn “instrument and instrumentalist”, is revealed from their epistolary exchanges. In a final expertise carried out this year, three specialists believe on the contrary that it is in these letters that the future assassin set up his “coercive control” on his correspondent, “like a chess player” placing “his pawns”.
“Mutual respect” within the tandem
Sweeping away the intelligence test carried out in 2005, on the grounds that it was obsolete, the expert psychologist Mickaël Morlet-Rivelli and his experts evaluated Monique Olivier’s IQ in “the lower zone of the average”. At the of “38 hours” interviews, they saw the traits of a personality clearly emerge “dependent” And “avoidant”. The resulting disorders, including “an excessive need to be taken care of”can “lead to submissive behavior” and to the “difficulty expressing disagreement, for fear of losing the support or approval of the other”. “I have always lacked self-confidence, I am not going to impose myself, assert myself and say that I want this and that, I have never been like that”Monique Olivier told them, situating the context in which she responded to Michel Fourniret’s classified ad.
“I needed to exist for someone. And I found this ad… What I needed was to exist. What I wanted was to hold on for someone and to exist for someone.
Monique Olivierduring his interviews with an expert psychologist in 2023
The lawyer for the relatives of Estelle Mouzin, Marie-Angèle Domèce and Joanna Parrish does not subscribe to this thesis of “the mussel clinging to its rock”. “I think I encountered absolute darkness and I don’t differentiate between the two”, believes Didier Seban. The criminal lawyer, alongside the families of victims for years, observed “a balance of power” and an “kind of mutual respect” within the tandem. Despite their divorce in 2010, “we saw the couple reconstitute themselves during the confrontations and reconstitutions”, he testifies. The lawyer unflinchingly portrays Monique Olivier as a “monster of selfishness, insensitive to the pain of others and quite happy with Michel Fourniret”.
“He gave him a form of adventure, an extraordinary life.”
Didier Seban, lawyerat franceinfo
On the opposing side, Richard Delgenes believes that “vision” of his client Monique Olivier and “of his role”inherited from a “unfortunate conflation of high IQ and manipulation”has been “completely called into question” since the resumption of investigations by judge Sabine Khéris, who obtained confessions in the three cases tried and requested this new expertise. “It is also because they started from a bad premise that the investigators had difficulty questioning him”argues the lawyer.
For the defense, the complicity of Monique Olivier, “responsible for his actions”, is not up for debate. But it is the fruit of“a total impossibility of opposing others” and not of a “desire or need to do harm”. “This woman is so non-existent (…) that we can do with her what we want”argues Richard Delgenes, recalling the pedigree of Michel Fourniret, “an extraordinary manipulator”. The experts will deliver their respective conclusions to the bar at the end of the trial, scheduled to last three weeks. Until then, Monique Olivier will perhaps lift part of the veil on her personality herself.