Michel Fourniret
The Ogre of the Ardennes

French serial killer and child rapist dubbed "the Ogre of the Ardennes" admitted two more murders, bringing to nine the number of victims he has confessed to killing, in a case that has horrified the nation.

Michel Fourniret, 62, a forestry worker, told French investigators in Belgium that he had killed Céline Saison, 18, who disappeared from Charleville-Mézières in May 2000, and Mananya Thumpong, 13, who disappeared from nearby Sedan a year later. The teenagers’ bodies were discovered in a wood across the nearby border with Belgium.

The serial killer was methodical in his confessions and showed no sign of emotional strain, Yves Charpenel, the public prosecutor in the northern French city of Reims, who is leading the French investigation, said: "He is not cracking. He thinks a lot about his statements and methodically chooses what he is going to say."

Officials said they might be able to link more crimes to him. "All cases are essentially open because we can obviously imagine that there were other crimes," a Belgian public prosecutor, Arnoud d’Aspremont Lynden, said.

Fourniret had already confessed to murdering five girls and a woman over a period of 15 years and killing an unnamed motorist in a robbery in a French layby with a rifle in the 1980s.

Mr Charpenel named the other victims yesterday as Isabelle Laville, 17, who disappeared in 1987 from the central town of Auxerre; Fabienne Leroy, 20, who vanished from Mourmelon in 1988; Jeanne-Marie Desramault, 22, who was last seen outside Charleville-Mézières station in June 1989; and Natacha Danais, 13, who disappeared in 1990 from Rezé in western France.

Fourniret also confessed to raping and strangling a Belgian girl, Elisabeth Brichet, 12, whom he abducted on 20 December, 1989, from the Belgian town of Namur. Investigators believe her body and that of Jeanne-Marie Desramault are buried in the grounds of a French château at Sautou, in the wooded Ardennes region near the Belgian border.

Fourniret bought the property with his wife upon his release after serving three years of a seven-year sentence for rape and sexually assaulting children. According to investigators, he bought the château with "kilos of gold" stolen from a former cell-mate, Jean-Pierre Hellegouarche, whose wife Fourniret has also admitted killing.

"Hellegouarche appears to have revealed the whereabouts of his stash to his wife, Farida, and to his cellmate. Once freed, Fourniret went to the appointed spot with Farida. They dug up the loot, but he killed Farida and kept all the money," one investigator told the French daily Libération. The couple then moved to the village of Sart-Custinne across the Belgian border.

Fourniret has been in custody in Belgium since his arrest last year for a separate attempted abduction, but only confessed to the killings this week after his estranged wife, Monique Olivier, denounced him to police, accusing him of nine murders, including that of the couple’s au pair, aged 16, who disappeared in 1993,

after it emerged she had apparently played a key role in the abduction of several victims.

In the case of Fabienne Leroy, "they pretended their baby was ill and persuaded her to get into their van to direct them to a doctor", said the Leroy family’s lawyer. After offering Isabelle Laville a lift, Olivier reportedly told investigators that she then picked up her husband, who was carrying a jerrycan and posing as a hitchhiker.

Belgium said yesterday it was willing to send Fourniret, 62, to France this weekend to help police there who are digging for bodies at his former château.

As France finds itself in the throes of a paedophile murder scandal to rival that of Marc Dutroux, the country is also reeling from yesterday’s verdicts in a controversial paedophile trial.

France had been stunned by the court case, with its lurid accounts of parents who loaned out their children for sex. But yesterday the trial ended in uproar after a court convicted ten of 17 accused, even though the main accuser had withdrawn her charges against most of them.

One of the convicted tried to commit suicide with a drug overdose shortly after hearing that he had been given an 18-month suspended sentence. He was rushed to hospital for treatment.

The two-month trial in the town of Saint-Omer, near Lille, rocked France’s justice system because the central figure of the trial, Myriam Delay-Badaoui, 37, withdrew her charges against 13 of the 17 accused.

Delay-Badaoui was sentenced to 15 years in prison for child rape. Her husband, an unemployed alcoholic, Thierry Delay, 40, and a couple who were their neighbours were also given hefty jail sentences after confessing to raping the four Delay children.

The court also sentenced a Catholic priest, Dominique Wiel, and another man to prison for rape and found four others guilty of abusing children. All six had pleaded not guilty.

Seven others were acquitted in the trial, in which the investigating magistrate, a powerful figure in the French legal system, was heavily criticised for basing cases mostly on testimony from children who claimed to have been abused. The confused course of the trial raised questions about whether the legal system had failed the accused.

"I want to understand what happened. I don’t want this to happen again," the justice minister, Dominique Perben, said yesterday as he announced that the government would study reforms of the legal system in light of the trial.