A French serial killer sentenced twice to life imprisonment for the murder of eight women has died aged 79, the Paris prosecutor said.
Michel Fourniret, one of France’s most notorious serial killers, died in a secure unit of a Paris hospital, prosecutor Remy Heitz said in a statement.
Arrested in 2003 in Belgium, Fourniret was sentenced to life in prison in 2008 for the murder and the rape or attempted rape of seven female teenagers and young women.
The crimes were committed in France and Belgium between 1987 and 2001.
Fourniret’s wife, Monique Olivier, received a life sentence as an accomplice in several of the cases.
Ten years later, he was sentenced again to life imprisonment for the murder of the companion of a former cellmate, who had disappeared in 1988.
The same year, he confessed to two other murders, including in 1990 of 20-year-old British citizen Joanna Parrish, who worked as a teacher in the Burgundy region.
In 2019, Fourniret was charged in the case of Estelle Mouzin, a nine-year-old girl who disappeared in 2003 as she was coming back from school in Guermantes, a small town east of Paris.
In March last year, Paris prosecutor said Fourniret confessed to the murder of Estelle.
Olivier, who divorced Fourniret in 2010, has accused him of several other murders of which he was suspected of being involved.
