Michel Fourniret, tried at the moment in France for the rape and the murder of several girls. His last victim had managed to free herself and to escape from him and thanks to her the policemen arrested him.
Her testimony is very inspiring, because by praying Our Mother, by Her Grace she was able to escape.
“By Thierry Lévêque
CHARLEVILLE-MEZIERES, Ardennes (Reuters)
Facing an accused who showed his indifference, the Belgian girl, who has made the presumed mass killer Michel Fourniret be arrested, claimed on Monday in the Court of Assizes that she escaped him after praying aloud and invoked the Holy Virgin.
In the third day of the hearing, Marie, 13 years old at that time, has described at the bar how the accused, pretending to search for his route and introducing himself as a drawing teacher and a family’s father, had gained her trust before forcing her, by pulling her, to go up into his small pick up.
“Before going up, I have confided my road to the Holy Virgin”. I have said: “Mary, go in front of me so that nothing happens to me, I have begun to pray in my heart”, said the young girl.
That June the 26th 2003, in Ciney in Belgium, Fourniret takes the road, while she prays aloud. “I have asked him if he believed in God, he did not answer me”. The pick up takes a road aside and stops. The presumed killer, under the threat, ties his victim hand and foot, takes her to the back of the vehicle, before driving off.
“I asked him, ‘why do you do that?’ He said ‘you have to give me pleasure, otherwise you will not come back’. “I was surprised, I did not know what he wanted to do of me”, Marie told.
She screams, he begins to strangle her and says her: “If you scream, I will kill you”. Marie asks him if he belonged to Marc Dutroux’s group. “I am worse than Marc Dutroux”, he answers. The car drives off.
In the back, Marie prays “at the top of her voice”. She perceived a road map of the Netherlands, Belgium and France. “I said myself, this is the end. I have seen all my life passing through, I felt as in a movie”.
Fourniret’s letter to his son
Suddenly, the laces of legs loosen, she frees herself and then with the teeth succeeds in freeing the hands. To a car stop, she opens the sliding side door and runs away, without Fourniret realizing it.
Farther on, a woman takes her in her car and, along the way, crosses the small pick up of the kidnapper who has done a U-turn. The registration number noted will allow the Belgian police to arrest Michel Fourniret.
Marie tells she needs not a psychologist to manage her kidnapping memory invoking “the grace”. The prosecuting attorney Francis Nachbar congratulated and thanked the girl. During the hearing; “You have saved your life and many other girls’ ones”.
During all the deposition, the defendant Fourniret kept still, the eyes closed. Before the testimony, at the bar he specified to have drafted during the weekend a text and even made a drawing for Marie.
In 2005 his son asked him in a letter the fate he had reserved to Marie. The answer of the defendant was read to the audience, in a petrified silence.
“It is obvious that I would have pulled her eyes and the living limbs out with an infinite enjoyment. Marie embodies a sober purity, I seize it (…) I would have obviously preferred to inflict her heavy moral and physical sufferings”, the defendant said.
The prosecuting attorney asked him how he could write such “abominations” to his own son. “I am convinced you have the answer to this question, you, who seems to know me well”, he answered.
Monique Olivier “gave evidence against” her husband, considering doubtful his assertions according to whom he had not prepared Marie’s kidnapping.
For the first time, the court questioned him about the supposed “criminal pact” made in 1987 in letters, Fourniret committing himself to kill Monique Olivier’s two former companions in exchange for help in hunting the girls.
“It was only correspondence, fantasy, it was not feasible”, she said. The trial continues on Tuesday.
Via Reuters or L’express
