The excavation operations to try to find the body of Estelle Mouzin ended Thursday evening in the Ardennes, after four days of unsuccessful searches in two former properties of the serial killer Michel Fourniret, gendarmes told AFP. "All the planned checks have been made" but nothing has been discovered, they said.
Confessed murder in March
Thursday morning, the soldiers and gendarmes, including a truck of experts in criminal identification, had again gone to the outskirts of the Château du Sautou, a huge 15 hectare property, located in the commune of Donchery and isolated in the middle of the woods .
Parisian examining magistrate Sabine Kheris, who left the site at the end of Thursday afternoon, is at the head of these search operations, which had started on Monday in Ville-sur-Lumes, about ten kilometers away. Investigators had then unsuccessfully searched the basement of a house that once belonged to the sister of the serial killer, who died in 2002. Michel Fourniret, who confessed in March to the kidnapping and murder of Estelle Mouzin, Was there regularly until his arrest in 2003.
No major discoveries
A receipt, printed in a nearby supermarket on January 11, 2003 - two days after the disappearance of the nine-year-old girl in Guermantes, in Seine-et-Marne, and found during a search at "l'Ogre des Ardennes ", had guided the investigators to this suburban neighborhood.
The research team, made up of fifty gendarmes and experts, including members of the Criminal Research Institute of the Gendarmerie, the river brigade or sappers of the Army, then searched Tuesday and Wednesday the immense Sautou estate, its forest areas and lakes, reporting no major discoveries.
Fourniret was convicted in 2008 of the murders of seven young women or adolescent girls between 1987 and 2001 and sentenced to life imprisonment, before being convicted again in 2018 for a heinous murder. In February 2018, he confessed to having killed two other young women in the Yonne, Marie-Angèle Domece and Joanna Parrish.