WHERE'S ESTELLE? Diggers search woods for ‘French Madeleine McCann’ 18 years after girl, 9, snatched by virgin-obsessed Ogre of Ardennes

WHERE'S ESTELLE? Diggers search woods for ‘French Madeleine McCann’ 18 years after girl, 9, snatched by virgin-obsessed Ogre of Ardennes

   Olivia Burke

   9 Apr 2021, 16:48Updated: 9 Apr 2021, 17:08

A NEW search has been launched for the missing schoolgirl dubbed the "French Madeleine McCann", after the ex-wife of the country's most notorious serial killer revealed the possible location of her body.

Police have began excavations in the heart of a forest in the Ardennes after Monique Olivier, 73, the former partner of the virginity-obsessed murderer Michel Fourniret,79, offered up new information regarding the whereabouts of Estelle Mouzin.

The nine-year-old never returned home from school in 2003, marking one of France's most high-profile missing person cases that drew comparisons with the huge hunt launched for Madeleine McCann.

Fourniret, who earned himself the nickname Ogre of the Ardennes, had previously admitted that he had slaughtered the girl in March last year - a claim that was also corroborated by Olivier, who is also serving a life sentence for her role in procuring his victims.

Olivier has now sparked a fresh search for Estelle's undiscovered remains after telling investigators where she and her sick ex-husband allegedly dumped the body.

Her lawyer Richard Delgenes explained: "She gave places, a path on which she had accompanied him by car.

"He got off, it was he who was driving. He had taken Estelle Mouzin to the place she designated."

Fourniret was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of seven young women between 1987 and 2001. He is indicted in three other cases, including Estelle's, and is believed to be behind dozens more.

DNA evidence matching Estelle was found last year on a mattress in the home of the killer's sister, where the youngster is thought to have been taken.

"That means that Estelle Mouzin was on that mattress," Delgenes said at the time.

Both breakthroughs offered a glimmer of hope to the Mouzin family of finding their little girl - but they remained sceptical of Fourniret's confession, saying only "material evidence will bring certainty".

Her father Eric Mouzin told the Times in the wake of the fresh forensic evidence, "We set ourselves an objective, and the goal remains to find Estelle.

"As long as we have not found Estelle, we remain at the mercy of this couple. Of course, we now seem to know who did that to Estelle. But I have suspected that for a long time. It is only a first step."

Now a mammoth search team, made up of military officers and investigators from the Criminal Research Institute, have been sent into the forest to concentrate on an area of around 500 metres, after Olivier directed authorities there - 18 years on from Estelle's disappearance.

Armed with a ground-penetrating radar that can probe up to a depth of one metre and high-performance drones, it could be the crucial step in closing the mystery of what happened to Estelle.

Huge JCB's were seen breaking ground in the forest as detectives searched the dense surrounding area, but it is clear this is far from a simple operation.

"We will have to go there with an excavator to remove layers, one after the other, and bring in our anthropologist experts to find places that could have been manipulated at a given time, where there would have been a hole," said Colonel Franck Marescal, director of the Criminal Research Institute of the National Gendarmerie.

It comes after a series of unsuccessful searches on the outskirts of Issancourt-et-Rumel, just 2.5 miles from Ville-sur-Lumes where Olivier claims Estelle was snatched, raped, and killed by her monstrous former husband.

Despite the new lead, locals have described the search for Estelle as "a needle in a haystack" in the vast forest that is situated close to the Belgian border.

Fourniret was originally a person of interest in the case back in 2003 and was arrested in Belgium on suspicion of his involvement - but a phone call from his home at the time of Estelle's disappearance gave him an alibi.

Olivier admitted last year that she had been the one to make the phone call, eroding his cover.

Estelle's young age, circumstances, and the scale of the search launched in wake of her vanishing saw the cold-case compared to the infamous disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

The three-year-old went missing in Praia da Luz in 2003 from her bed, sparking an extraordinary international hunt.

A string of well-known local pedophiles were considered in the investigations, and last year, similarly to Estelle's case, a convicted child molester and rapist emerged as the prime suspect.

Christian Brueckner was supposedly staying near the resort and allegedly boasted to friends about "selling kids to sex rings" around the time Maddie vanished.

German prosecutors claim they have evidence he stole the toddler from the holiday home and killed her - claims vehemently denied by Brueckner's legal team.

Both heartbreaking cases of the missing children have been plagued by dead-ends and conspiracy theories, but also show the endless and extensive efforts to try and gain answers for the families.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/worldnews/14597941/diggers-search-woods-french-madeleine-mccann-ogre-of-ardennes/

There is no similarity between this case and that of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann whatsoever.

Of course, an anniversary is on the horizon - less than one month away.  What else can we expect but more of the same mawkish trash.

Heaven forbid the Duke of Edinburgh should have his day after 99 years of dedicated life and duty without the name McCann taking centre stage.

Begone!  You outplayed your part on the world stage fourteen years ago.

Time for justice in the name of Madeleine McCann. Meantime, bugger off with your tales of misogyny!

Why do all missing children have to be dubbed 'the [insert country here] Madeleine McCann'?

Was Madeleine McCann ever dubbed as anyone else? 

Was she ever dubbed the 'UK's Jon-Benet', for instance?

The mystery of missing 'French Madeleine McCann': Estelle Mouzin disappeared aged nine on her way to school amid fears she was snatched by 'Ogre of Ardennes' killer... but her body has never been found

By Chris Jewers

Published: 08:04, 25 November 2023 | Updated: 08:04, 25 November 2023

Over a span of more than 15 years, a series of killings of women and young girls haunted parts of France and Belgium, but perhaps none more than the murder of nine-year-old Estelle Mouzin - France's Madeline McCann.

Between 1987 and 2003, at least 11 people disappeared across the region, with several of the cases seeming - at least at first - to be unconnected.

The first woman disappeared in Auxerre, in December 1987. The second vanished 90 miles away in Vitry-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, in 1988.

Another woman went missing in Auxerre that same year, but then more vanished further north in Châlons-en-Champagne (1988) and Charleville-Mézières (1989. Then one in Saint-Servais in Belgium, then another in Rezé, over in the West of France.

After a flurry of eight disappearances from 1987 to 1990, there was a ten-year pause, but they restarted in 2000, in Charleville-Mézières again, then another in Sedan in 2001, and one more in Guermantes in 2003.

Of the places where the women went missing, only two appeared on the list more than once: Auxerre (three women) and Charleville-Mézières (two). When plotted on a map, the locations are spread across a vast area of 21,500 square miles.

It is easy to see, therefore, why authorities struggled to connect them to the culprit: dreaded serial killer Michel Fourniret, known as 'the Beast of Ardennes'.

Finally arrested in 2003 in Belgium, Fourniret was convicted to life in prison in 2008 for the murder and rape or attempted rape of seven teenagers and young women, after he admitted to killing several women and girls.

Fourniret would go on to be convicted again after confessing to more killings, and he confessed to three more he was never convicted of - including 20-year-old British tutor Joanna Parrish, who was killed in Auxerre in 1990.

But of all of Fourniret's horrific killings, one stood out in particular: That of nine-year-old Estelle, who went missing in 2003. The whereabouts of her body remain a mystery to this day, and is a secret that Fourniret took to his grave.

The youngest of Fourniret's victims, Estelle's disappearance has been likened to that of Madeleine McCann's, the three-year-old British girl who went missing in 2007.

As with McCann, who vanished in Portugal, Estelle disappeared without a trace, leaving investigators stumped while capturing the attention of the public and media.

The girl had been returning from school on January 9, 2003 in the commune of Guermantes, some 15 miles east from the centre of Paris.

The nine-year-old was last seen that winter's day in front of a bakery, en route to the house belonging to her mother, Suzanne Mouzin.

Suzanne, who was in the middle of a divorce from Estelle's father Eric, raised the alarm with the local police station at around 7pm that evening.

Little did she know, in going to the police she had lit the touch paper on an investigation that would span seventeen years, spark huge media coverage in France, and yet would never truly discover what had happened to her little girl.

It may come as a surprise then that within just five months of Estelle's disappearance, police had a suspect in the case, none other than Michel Fourniret.

He was arrested in Belgium in June 2003 by authorities as a suspect in the disappearance of other young women and girls.

The killer, who later admitted a fascination with virgins, was arrested after a 13-year-old girl escaped from his van and called the police.

He would go on to confess to several murders.

However, after detectives investigated him as a suspect in Estelle's case, the police discounted him because he seemed to have an alibi: a phone call was made from his home at the time of the nine-year-old's disappearance.

Despite his alibi and his denial of any involvement, Fourniret became a suspect again when police found a video recording and photos of Estelle on his computer.

This still wasn't seen as enough, and in 2007, the police abandoned their case against Frenchman, citing the phone call and insufficient evidence.

In hindsight, it may seem obvious to anyone reading about the case that police should not have given up on pursuing Fourniret as a suspect.

However, the scope of the investigation - led by Commissioner Jean-Marc Bloch - was unprecedented in its vastness.

More than 130 people were interrogated, and all their houses were searched, meaning that at the time the serial killer was one of many suspects.

Police went on to make further arrests in January 2008 - now five years on from when Estelle had last been seen.

A restaurant in Brie-Comte-Robert was searched after suspicion that human remains could be found there, but only animal remains were discovered.

In 2010, French authorities made a new call for witnesses by issuing a computer-generated composite of what Estelle could look like at the time, seven years on.

This also yielded no results.

In the meantime, Fourniret had been convicted in 2008 over the murders and the rape or attempted rape of seven female teenagers and young women, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Over the course of the trial, the sordid details of his crimes came to light.

The first killing he confessed to was that of Isabelle Laville in Auxerre.

Fourniret and his then-wife and accomplice Monique Pierrette Olivier had seen the 17-year-old a day or two before the killing on December 11, 1987.

Olivier was driving in a car. She stopped to ask the girl to get in and give her direction, which she agreed to do.

They passed Fourniret, who - as planned - was standing next to a separate car pretending to have broken down. Olivier offered him a lift.

Fourniret got into the car, and soon after, choked Laville with a piece of rope, before Olivier sedated her. The took her to their home in Saint-Cyr-les-Colons, where the serial killer raped and strangled her, before throwing her body into a disused well.

Her remains wouldn't be excavated for another 18 years, in 2006.

As it turned out, Fourniret and Olivier had become pen pals during a spell in prison, where he was thrown in 1984 for sexually assaulting another five young girls.

He wrote to Olivier about his fantasies of raping and murdering virginal girls, something she said she would 'help' him with once he was out of prison - so long as he killed her husband. This murder never took place.

He was released from prison in 1987, and they began a relationship, and soon after Fourniret set about his killing spree, with Olivier as his accomplice.

After Laville, their second victim was 30-year-old Farida Hammiche.

Hammiche had contacted Fourniret about retrieving a haul of treasure buried in a cemetery belonging to bank robber Jean-Pierre Hellegouarch - who was Hammiche's husband and Fourniret's former cellmate.

They were able to retrieve the haul of gold ingots and coins, and for his help, Fourniret was given a share worth 500,000 francs.

This wasn't enough for him, though, so Fourniret and Olivier strangled Hammiche in Vitry-sur-Seine in 1988, buried her body, and stole her half.

After Hammiche's death, the murderous couple went back to hunting down young girls, even when Olivier was pregnant with Fourniret's baby that same year.

Their next known victim was Fabienne Leroy, 20, who was killed in August 1988. They also lured her into a car, before Fourniret raped and shot in the chest.

Jeanne-Marie Desramault, 19, was killed in Charleville-Mézières, northern France, the following year, as was 12-year-old Elisabeth Brichet in Saint-Servais, Belgium.

Even though they were killed nine months apart, their bodies were both found on July 3, 2004 in the gardens of Château du Sautou in Donchery, which Fourniret and Olivier had bought using the stolen money.

In 1990, Natacha Danais was killed in Reze, near France's western coast. Hers is believed to be the final murder Fourniret committed with Olivier's help, and there was then a decades-long pause in the horrific killings.

That was until 2000, when Fourniret killed 18-year-old Céline Saison. She was also on her way home from school, and was strangled by Fourniret.

Then, a year later in Sedan, Mananya Thumpong - a 13-year-old Thai girl - was killed by Fourniret after he picked her up outside a local library.

Her remains were found a year later in May 2002 - having been eaten by wild animals - and a few months before Estelle went missing in January 2003.

In 2008, Fourniret would admit to murdering eight women and girls: Isabelle Laville, Farida Hammiche, Fabienne Leroy, Jeanne-Marie Desramault, Elisabeth Brichet, Natacha Danais, Céline Saison and Mananya Thumpong.

He was convicted of seven of them.

Then, in February 2018, he confessed to the killing of two more young women in Auxerre: Marie-Angèle Domèce, 18, and British tutor Joanna Parrish, 20.

Marie-Angèle's remains have never been found.

As for the Estelle case, another ten years passed with no significant development, until finally - after more than 17 years - Fourniret admitted to her murder as well.

According to French media reports at the time, Fourniret's confession came after his now-ex wife Olivier had brought down his alibi, saying that the call which came from inside their house on the day she disappeared had actually been made by her.

She is reported to have told a judge she made the call at her husband's request.

In January 2020, she reiterated her comments to the investigating judge, telling them that she was convinced Fourniret had killed Estelle.

She had her reasons for this, according to reports. The first, was because the girl 'had the typical profile of the subjects that Michel Fourniret was looking for'.

Second, she told the judge that she believed Fourniret 'carried out scouting, or an attempted scouting, in the weeks or days preceding the kidnapping.'

Another reason she gave was that one evening he had returned home and told her that he had spotted a 'beautiful little target.'

Excavations were planned in 2020 at two sites in the Ardennes to search for signs of Estelle's remains, and in front of a judge, Fourniret claimed his memory 'got the better of him' and urged that the court 'treats me as guilty'.

Further investigations were carried out, and partial DNA traces were found of Estelle on a mattress in the house of Fourniret's sister.

Finally, it appeared to all the world that justice would be done for Estelle's murder.

These hopes were dashed when, on 10 May 2021 at the age of 79, France's most notorious killer died after being admitted to a hospital, taking to his grave the secret of where the remains of Estelle and Marie-Angèle Domèce are hidden.

Even after all the time, though, a glimmer of hope remains that the mystery could finally be solved.

Fourniret's wife, Monique Olivier, who received a life sentence as an accomplice in several of the murder cases, is still alive today.

In May this year, French authorities sought her on charges of being involved in Estelle's kidnapping, as well as the murders of Joanna Parrish and Marie-Angele Domece - over which no one has officially been charged.

Next week, on Tuesday November 28, she will go on trial accused of being complicit in Fourniret's murder of Estelle. Estelle's family will be hoping - and praying - that she will finally reveal what happened to their little girl.

France
Madeleine McCann

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12774319/The-mystery-missing-French-Madeleine-McCann-Estelle-Mouzin-disappeared-aged-nine-way-school-amid-fears-snatched-Ogre-Ardennes-killer-body-never-found.html