Four days of vain research: despite the deployment of an important technical and human device, the excavations carried out in two former properties of the serial killer Michel Fourniret ended on Thursday without having allowed to find the body of Estelle Mouzin, disappeared in 2003 .
“All scheduled checks have been completed“But nothing has been discovered, the gendarmes told AFP, adding that the”assumptions and doors“were now”closed“.
“L’Ogre des Ardennes” had confessed in March to the murder of the 9-year-old girl, kidnapped in January 2003 in Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne), declaring to justice “pertinent“that his body, which has never been found, may be in one of his former properties in the Ardennes.
I think we can’t go any further
At the beginning of the morning, soldiers and gendarmes, accompanied by the Parisian examining magistrate Sabine Kheris, had taken the road to Château du Sautou, a huge 15 hectare property located in the town of Donchery and isolated in the middle of the woods. Excavators, divers, drone, experts in criminal identification …: an important system had been mobilized.
“Everything was done by all the police and military services (…) and I think we cannot go any further“, declared to the press, at the end of the afternoon, Me Richard Delgenes, lawyer of Fourniret’s ex-wife, Monique Olivier.”At least we know that we could not find bodies in places that were scientifically potential caches.”
He also expressed the wish that Michel Fourniret be himself brought there, which would allow to be “more effective in the analysis of his words, because we do not know when he manipulates or when he does not manipulate“.
We can not say that there are advances (but) there were closed doors
Monday, the investigators had first gone to Ville-sur-Lumes, about ten kilometers away, unsuccessfully searching the cellar of a house that once belonged to the sister of the serial killer, who died in 2002. Michel Fourniret had been 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 in Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne) – and found during a search at Fourniret had guided investigators until ‘to this suburban neighborhood.
The research team, composed of fifty gendarmes and experts, including members of the Criminal Police Research Institute, the river brigade or sappers of the Army, then searched Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday the huge Sautou domain.
It was on this isolated property, accessible only by a forest road, that the bodies of Elisabeth Brichet, 12, and Jeanne-Marie Desramault, 22, two victims of Fourniret, were found in 2004.
“We cannot say that there are advancess “, more”there were closed doors, (…) places that we can dismiss today“Didier Seban, one of the Mouzin family’s lawyers, said on Tuesday evening. Investigations could continue in Belgium, he argued.
Michel Fourniret was convicted in 2008 of the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001 and sentenced to incompressible life, before being convicted again in 2018 for a heinous murder.
After years of denial, he recognized the murder of Estelle Mouzin in early March. “It is possible that this image upsets me (…) and I recognize there a being who is no longer there by my fault“he said to the judge. But”the circumstances, the continuation, the course, it is in the dungeons“.
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