The hope to elucidate the disappearance, seventeen years after : the operations of excavations started on Monday afternoon in the Ardennes to attempt to find the body of Estelle Mouzin on a former estate of serial killer Michel Fourniret, who has recently confessed to the murder.
>> Read also : Affaire Estelle Mouzin : how Fourniret went to confession
The excavation could take up to “one full week”, said the lawyer of Monique Olivier, his ex-wife, noting that the justice had put “all means”. “Today, we have not found the body of Estelle Mouzin. The earthworks are still in progress. A full week of excavation is planned at different locations,” said ms. Richard Delgenes to the press after attending a time operations Monday afternoon at Ville-sur-Lumes, in a house that belonged to the serial killer.
Fifty gendarmes and experts
Under the direction of the judge of instruction paris Sabine Kheris, a fifty gendarmes and experts “multidisciplinary”, in which the investigators of the research section (SR) of Dijon, experts from the gendarmerie, a scientist, an archeologist or even the engineers of the Army are mobilized to participate in the excavations and secure the edge of this white house, which at one time was occupied by the sister of the criminal, who died in 2002.
“The investigating judge of Paris to put all the means at its disposal”, according to the lawyer of the ex-wife of Fourniret. The gendarmes used “a drone is extremely particular, it is one of the first in France”, he said. This drone flew over the garden of the house on Monday afternoon.
According to a source at the gendarmerie, it is “either a drone, part of the team securing” the site, “a drone equipped with a camera hyperspectral” student “the irregularities of the ground”. “For investigators, it allows you to delineate specific areas”. Thus, “if an area is smooth, you will not…”, explained the source.
In the cellar, “luminol” has been spent in the “excavations to try to see if there was something, the operations are still ongoing,” said the lawyer, adding that “core samples” had been made on “the field”. Regularly visited by Michel Fourniret until his arrest in 2003, the property, sold it, and today inhabited, has not yet been excavated.
>> Read also : the Disappearance of Estelle Mouzin : looking back on 17 years of investigation
Ticket-caisse
According to the elements of the investigations, the justice operates the track of a receipt, with four cans of split peas, found in search in the Michel Fourniret. From a supermarket in the vicinity of Ville-sur-Lumes, it is dated January 11, 2003, two days after the disappearance of Estelle Mouzin.
Questioned, during his last interrogation, on the possibility that he has now led the girl in this house had remained empty since the death of her sister, “the Ogre of the Ardennes” had answered : “It is quite relevant”. “Not at all unlikely, only it would be necessary to put images on it and it’s not obvious, I’m clueless”, added the man, now 78-year-old, who suffers from memory problems.
The excavations could continue to the Castle of Sautou, to Donchéry, where the military and gendarmes have made a first pass at mid-day. It is in this secluded property of fifteen acres that had been found in 2004, the body of a young girl of 12 years and a young woman of 22 years, on indication of the killer.
“Fourniret track number 1
Described by the expert-psychiatrist Daniel Zagury as a “serial killer in French the most successful”, Michel Fourniret was jailed for the first time in 1984 for sexual assaults on a dozen young women.
“Poacher” obsessed with the young virgins he was convicted in 2008 of the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001, and sentenced to life in prison without parole, before being sentenced in 2018 for an assassination rogue.
In February 2018, he confessed to having killed two other young women in the Yonne: Marie-Angèle Domece, who disappeared in 1988 at the age of 19, and Joanna Parrish, 20, found dead two years later. After years of denials, he acknowledged at the beginning of march for the murder of Estelle Mouzin, 9 years old, abducted on 9 January 2003 when she was returning home from school at Guermantes (Seine-et-Marne).
“It is possible that this image me comfortable ( … ), and I recognize a being that is no longer there by my own fault”, he said to the judge, responsible for the appraisal of the three folders. But “the circumstances, the result, the unfolding, it is in the moat,” he continued, without revealing the location of the body.
“Track number 1” for the lawyers of the family Mouzin, Fourniret has several times been suspected, and then put out of the question. But his alibi was contradicted in November 2019 by his ex-wife, Monique Olivier, yet another rebound of a criminal record is not up to standard.
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