Paris - A court in the northern French city of Charleville- Mezieres found confessed serial killer Michel Fourniret guilty of murdering seven young women and gave him the maximum allowable sentence of life in prison with no possibility of early release. The court also convicted his accomplice Monique Olivier of complicity in several of the killings and also sentenced her to life in prison, with a minimum term of 28 years.
Fourniret, 66, had admitted committing several of the killings, which took place in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2003, but police suspect him of having raped and murdered up to eight other young women.
He and the now 59-year-old Olivier met while he was in prison for sexual abuse, and they formed a partnership upon his release in October 1987. She helped him abduct and often rape and kill the victims, who were chosen because they seemed virginal.
According to letters the couple exchanged when Fourniret was in prison, the two made a pact in which Olivier vowed to aid Fourniret in his pursuit of young, virgin girls in exchange for his killing her first husband, whom she described as "jealous" and "violent."
That murder never happened, but less than two months after Foruniret left prison, the couple found their first victim, a 17- year-old girl named Isabelle Laville, who Fourniret raped, strangled and dumped into an abandoned well.
Police in central France found her remains in July 2006 thanks to indications given them by Fourniret.
The couple was finally arrested in June 2003, in Beauraing, Belgium, when a 13-year-old girl they had abducted managed to slip out of the van in which she was held, and alerted police.
When arrested, Fourniret boasted, "I'm worse than Dutroux," a reference to Marc Dutroux, a Belgian serial killer convicted of kidnapping, torturing and sexually abusing six girls ranging in age from 8 to 19, four of whom he murdered.
In his plea, the public prosecutor called Fourniret and Olivier "cold-blooded and gruesome serial killers of the kind our country has never before seen."
