Michel Fourniret

Michel Fourniret (born 4 April 1942) is a convicted French serial killer who confessed in June and July 2004 to kidnapping, raping and murdering nine girls in a span of 14 years, from 1987 to 2001. He was also accused of 10 additional murders, nine in France and one in Belgium, and was found guilty of seven of these charges. The trials started on 27 March 2008, and ended on 28 May. He is sometimes referred to as the "Ogre/Beast of the Ardennes".

Fourniret was arrested after a failed attempt to kidnap a Belgian girl in June 2003. His wife, Monique Olivier, exposed him after hearing the news of another child murderer's wife (Michelle Martin, wife of Marc Dutroux) being convicted. Fourniret was charged with the abduction of minors and sexual misconduct, and has been in detention since June 2003 for the attempted kidnapping of a 14-year-old girl in 2000. Olivier was charged with one murder and for helping him with a further six.

Fourniret buried at least two of his victims at his Sautou chateau near Donchery in the French Ardennes in the late 1980s. On 3 July 2004, a team of French and Belgian police recovered the bodies of two of Fourniret's victims near the chateau. Fourniret was sentenced to life in prison; Olivier was sentenced to life with no possibility of parole for 28 years.

He was named as a suspect in connection with the murder of 20-year-old Englishwoman Joanna Parrish, whose body was found in an Auxerre river on 17 May 1990. She had been raped and strangled. However, he has never been charged with her murder and 25 years on the murder remains unsolved.